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3. On the Coherence of
Hermeneutics and Ethics

An Essay on Gadamer and Levinas

GERALD L. BRUNS

Does not philosophy consist in treating mad ideas with wisdom?

EMMANUEL LEVINAS

HABITATION

My purpose in what follows is to take up the relation of hermeneutics and ethics as it emerges in a post-Heideggerian philosophical context. In terms of proper names this means giving an account of the conceptual symmetries and differences between Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics and Emmanuel Levinas's ethical theory, which is sometimes called an ethics of al-terity or of responsibility, in order to contrast it with subject-centered theories that emphasize thinking and acting in accord with rules, principles, duties, codes, beliefs, teachings, communities, theories of the right and the good, and so on, where to be in accord with such things, however we figure them, is what justifies us, or anyhow puts us above reproach. Levinasian ethics is concerned with the claims other people have on us in advance of how right we are with respect to rules and beliefs or how in tune we are with a just and rational order of things. For Levinas, ethics is not possible from a starting point of self-interest.^[1]

Being under claims of history and tradition rather than claims of concepts and rules is central to Gadamer's thinking, which is critical of sub-jectivist accounts of human understanding in ways that coincide with Levinas's project. As Gadamer puts it, understanding is so permeated by “the historicity of existence” that it is “not suitably conceived as a consciousness of something” (GW3: 18/PH125). Better to say: understanding something comes from dwelling with it. Likewise Levinas: “Humanity … must not be first understood as consciousness” (AE132/0X683). Consciousness is always separate from its objects, impervious and indifferent to them (which is all that objectivity means). “What affects a consciousness,” Levinas says,

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“presents itself at a distance” (AEiGi/OTBioi). My neighbor, by contrast, is closer to me than any object of consciousness; indeed, the other is closer to me than I am to myself (AE 137-38/0x1586-87). As Levinas puts it, human subjectivity “is structured as the other in the same” (AE46/OTB25).

Foundational for both Gadamer and Levinas is Heidegger's “herme-neutics of facticity,” with its characterization of our relation to the world (and to others in it) in terms of habitation rather than intuition or representation. In Being and Time Heidegger regards our practical involvement with the things of everyday life as ontologically prior to the theoretical attitude that determines the formation of concepts and propositions (SZi49/BTi8g). How the world touches us matters as much as how we grasp it conceptually. Heidegger's idea is that the theoretical attitude, whatever its philosophical importance with respect to how knowledge is possible, is oblivious to the world we inhabit. Theory is indifferent to what is singular and irreplaceable. Whereas by contrast our being-in-the-world is a relation of concern or care (Sorge) rather than one of disinterested regard (SZigi-96/6X235-41). It is an (arguably ethical) relation of being-with and at-tunement rather than a logical relation highlighted by the prepositional attitude. “The world of Dasein,” Heidegger says, “is a with-world [Mitwelt]. Being-in is Being-with Others” (SZi 18/6X155). However we describe it, our relation to the world and to others is closer and more intimate than is suggested by any philosophical culture whose ideal is the self-certainty of an objectifying consciousness (SZi58/BTaoo-2Oi).

This proximity of the world and of others in it is a matter of central importance to both Gadamer and Levinas—but each thinks through this issue much differently from the way Heidegger introduced it. Levinas, for example, sharply criticizes Heidegger for repressing the ethical dimension of our being-in-the-world in favor of ontology, where ontology means a concern with the unity of being or totality of all that is.^[2] If Heidegger situates us in the world as inhabitants rather than disengaged punctual observers, he is nevertheless still asking the disengaged subject's question: What is our relation to the being (that is, the totality) of things? If the answer is “care,” Heidegger's interest is nevertheless in the ontological rather than ethical meaning of care, and Dasein's care is always ultimately for itself, not for others (SZ317-23/6X364-70: “Care and Selfhood”). In his analysis of dwelling and habitation in Totality and Infinity Levinas points out that “In Being and Time the home does not appear apart from a system of implements,” and there is no one in the house but me (TeIi84/TIi7o). I dwell among implements designed to domesticate the world for me, and it is one from which others have to be excluded if I am to come into my own, working out my ownmost possibilities or my destiny. To be sure, as Heidegger says, “As being-with, Dasein ‘is’ essentially for the sake of Others” (SZi23/BTi6o), but it is just this condition of being-for-others that must be overcome if the

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existence of Dasein is to be authentic. Inauthenticity simply means: “Dasein stands in subjection [Botmassigkeit, subservience] to the others. It itself is not; its being has been taken away by the Others. The everyday possibilities of being of Dasein are at the disposal of the whims of the Others.” Moreover, these Others “are not definite Others. On the contrary, any Other can represent them”: they are faceless in the manner of an urban crowd. The question of who they are invites a shrug: “The ‘who’ is not this one and not that one, not oneself and not some and not the sum of them all. The ‘who’ is the neuter, the they [dasMan]” (SZia6/BTi64).

Levinas reverses completely this interpretation of being-for-the-sake-of-others in order to replace fundamental ontology with a fundamental ethics, where the relation of one-for-the-other is no longer an ontological defect. For Levinas, it is not that I am a self aiming for freedom and authenticity but tragically find myself blocked and absorbed by a faceless otherness. On the contrary, it is the face of the other that singles me out and makes me what I am (defines what it is to be human). For Levinas, being human starts out from a position of responsibility to and for others rather than from one of consciousness and self-reflexive freedom. Being-for-others is the adventure—“the fine risk to be run” (AEigi/OTBiao)—that gives human existence its meaning and transcendence (or, more exactly, as we shall see, its meaning as transcendence).

Meanwhile Gadamer's hermeneutics starts out from section 32 of Being and Time, with its idea that interpretation is never a presuppositionless grasping of something given but always proceeds according to a forestruc-ture of prejudices (SZ150/BT191-92). The question for Gadamer is what happens to these prejudices in our encounter with whatever calls for understanding. Gadamer follows Heidegger's insistence on historicity: our understanding of texts (or of tradition, or of other people) is always local and contingent; it is always an event circumscribed and conditioned by the historical and cultural situation in which it occurs. In a word, understanding is always finite. However, this finitude entails the fact that what we try to understand is irreducible to the concepts and categories that our situation makes available to us. Tradition, for example, is always in excess of our capacity to appropriate it. So we can never understand the other purely and simply in terms of ourselves or by remaining fixed in what seem to us self-evident determinations of how things are (WM265-6g/TM28i-85). The example of the classical text shows that understanding the other always entails a critical demand for a change (in us), whether in terms of a revision of prior understanding (prejudices) or, more radically, in terms of a conversion of our habitual modes of thought and feeling to other ways of being that are opened up to us in our encounter with others (WM273-75/ TM28g-go). This means (whatever else it means) that our relation to the other is not simply one of cognition, nor is it even simply a relation of

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being-with or cohabitation (sharing beliefs and whatnot). Nor, indeed, is it a reciprocal interaction along a logically level plane, because we are always in a condition of exposure to what we want to understand; that is, in the understanding of anything—whether of a text or the world or of other people—we always find ourselves under a claim. In Gadamer's language, in the understanding of anything we are always in the position of being addressed (WM283/TM299). So understanding is not just an executive project. It is an event in which we always find ourselves situated in the accusative mode or mode of responsibility. Hence understanding always entails a call for action.

The symmetry between Gadamerian hermeneutics and Levinasian ethics begins with the recognition of human finitude clarified in the accusative case rather than in terms of whatever might limit the nominative, declarative, or imperative sovereignty of a consciousness presiding over a domain of objects. Levinas expresses this by remarking how philosophical modernity is structured on the model of Homer's Odyssey (DEHHigi/TTO348). That is, its hero is a consciousness capable of self-reflection, a movement of departure and return that defines subjectivity as knowledge and action against opposing forces. I go out into the world in order to take it in, and if I suffer, it is in a struggle for self-possession and possession of the world as if it were my household.^[3] Likewise my every action presupposes a redemptive economy of commensurate rewards and punishments. Even gift giving is structured on the model of eventual return. Against Odysseus, however, Levinas places the figure of Abraham, who is called out of his homeland by an absolute other for the sake of a time and a world to come that he will never experience; and there is no turning back (HAH46/CPP93). It is this “departure without return” and without reward that defines the ethical subject (DEHHigi/TTO349). On the model of Abraham, the “I” is for-the-other: a pure gift outside every possibility of exchange or compensation. As Levinas puts it, “the/or of the-one-for-the-other … is a/or of total gratuity, breaking with interest” (AEi54/OTBg6). Levinasian ethics is an ethics of “radical generosity” (DEHHigi/TTO349).

For example, what happens when I encounter another person? Sartre in his famous account of the look treats this encounter as an event of cognition in which, being seen, I become another's representation, a piece of furniture in another's world of intentional objects.^[4] Levinas maps onto this encounter another model—not the Greek or philosophical model of knowing and being known but the Jewish or Biblical model of election, of being summoned out of one's house or place of security and comfort. This is the prophetic experience of being called into the wilderness, of being inspired, exposed to the world, offered as a sacrifice, turned inside out like a cloak and put under a claim that cannot be redeemed. For Levinas, the ethical subject is defined by a responsibility that is prior to any rational deliberation

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and executive decision; it is an anarchic responsibility prior to the kind of commitments that rational subjects (as Kant envisioned them) know how to contract or refuse or hedge with loopholes and provisos. The Kantian subject can always find the freedom to go back on its word. In the Levinasian encounter with the other, I can no longer comport myself as a cogito, a self-contained rational subject, a Hegelian consciousness conceived as a pour soi, that is, a power of representation or intentionality in pursuit of its own sovereignty. I now exist in the accusative, no longer an “I” but a “me,” someone now at the disposal of—answerable to and for—another. I am my responsibility prior to any freedom of choice. As Levinas likes to express it, the good “has chosen me before I have chosen it. No one is good voluntarily” (AEa5/OTBi i). (In the last section of this essay I will return to the question of the good in Levinas and Gadamer, for both of whom the good is internal to proximity. Briefly, for Levinas, the good is simply “a non-allergic relation with alterity” [Tel38/Tl47]; and likewise Gadamer's concern is not with the good in its purity but with “the good in human life” [GWy 1144 /1030].)

TOWARD THE STRANGER

It follows that neither hermeneutical understanding nor the ethical relation of myself and another is an action or movement capable of being brought under the description of rules or principles. On the contrary, openness or responsiveness to one's situation and to others in it replaces the figure of an autonomous agent acting upon what is given from a position justified in advance. Unlike Habermas, for example, neither Gadamer nor Levinas conceives the ethical in terms of the justification of norms.^[5] Gadamer, for example, thinks of understanding on the model of Aristotle's concept of cpgovrjaic;, or practical wisdom, which is a ground-level or dialectical mode of thinking different both from theoretical consciousness (s7uaTr||j,r|), or knowing what things are, and from technical know-how (TS%VT|), or knowing how things are made or how they work. cpgovrjaic; involves responsiveness to what particular situations call for in the way of action, where knowing how to act cannot be determined in advance by an appeal to rules, principles, or general theories (WM3O4-5/TM321-22). Knowledge here cannot be conceptualized or codified in general terms because it has to do with singular and unprecedented states of affairs, particularly as these involve us with other people (cpgovrjaic;” is in fact the name of “the arete proper to human dealings”) (GWy: 148/1037).^[6] At the level of everyday life we are beneath the reach of universals. The classic example is knowing what friendship calls for in our being with others.^[7] Knowledge in this event cannot be separated out from experience; it is, so to speak, embedded in situations that we live through and which shape us in very particular ways. It

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can be learned but cannot be taught. So stories are better than theories. Hence Aristotle's remark that “while young men become geometricians and mathematicians and wise in matters like these, it is thought that a young man of practical wisdom cannot be found. The cause is that such wisdom is concerned not with universals but with particulars, which become familiar from experience, but a young man has no experience, for it is length of time that gives experience” (Nicomachean Ethics, i i42a).

Indeed, cpgovrjatc;” (and Aristotelian ethics generally) presupposes the condition of familiarity that comes with being with others and learning one's way around in a shared and settled environment, and the same can be said of hermeneutics, where understanding is never a process that starts from scratch but, as in Heidegger's analysis, is a condition of belonging to the world, a mode of being that one enlarges by integrating what is alien into what is at hand. Thus to understand is to contextualize, to arrange and assemble into a unity in which nothing is foreign or out of place. Levinasian ethics, however, takes us onto radically different ground. In his “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity” (1957), Levinas distinguishes between two kinds of truth. On the one hand, there is the truth of identity that characterizes propositions (s is p). Truth here is the truth of representation and cognition. It is what governs the integration of differences into an order of things, as when one makes sense of what is strange by finding a place for it within one's conceptual scheme, a movement that Levinas calls “the reduction of the other to the same” (DEHHi65-66/CPP48). Here everything follows the logic of identity. On the other hand, however, there is the truth of experience that is essentially a reversal of this reduction to identity:

For experience deserves its name only if it transports us beyond what constitutes our nature. Genuine experience must even lead us beyond the nature that surrounds us…. Truth would thus designate the outcome of a movement that leaves a world that is intimate and familiar, even if we have not yet explored it completely, and goes toward the stranger, toward a beyond, as Plato puts it. Truth would imply more than exteriority: transcendence. (DEHHi65/CPP47)

For Levinas, transcendence means departure from “the immanence of the known,” that is, from a world defined by consciousness and its representations.^[8] The ethical relation—the encounter with another—is a movement toward the stranger, that is, toward the nonidentical, rather than a movement of recognition in which I take the other into my world, gathering up the other as a component of my self-possession or as part of my domestication or familiarization of my world. Indeed, it is not too much to say that for Levinas the dispossession of the self is the condition of the ethical as such.

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This comes out very starkly in an essay on “Substitution” (1968), which Lev-inas calls the “germ” of Otherwise than Being (1974), of which it forms the central chapter.^[9] The essay begins with a sharp contrast between consciousness as the grasping of objects through the mediation of concepts, and sensibility as the unmediated condition of being touched. The adventure of consciousness, Levinas says, is in reality “no adventure. It is never dangerous; it is self-possession, sovereignty, ag%r|. Anything unknown that can occur to it is in advance disclosed, open, manifest, is cast in the mould of the known, and cannot be a complete surprise” (AE 157/OTBg9). Sensibility, by contrast, is “a relation not of knowing but of proximity” (AEi57/OTBioo), where proximity is defined as an “anarchic relationship with a singularity without the mediation of any principle, any ideality” (AEi58/OTBioo). Singularity means: the other—the human being—is refractory to catego-ies, not any kind of anything and just to that extent not belonging to any conceptual order. The other is outside every form of mediation or reference.^[10] However, the anarchy of this relationship is the crucial note. Like Plato's desire for the good, responsibility is “without why.” The Levinasian world is not a Leibnizian world in which nothing is without reason. Quite the contrary, it is a world in which before anything else I am someone to whom things happen, that is, someone to whom others happen, and these happenings cannot be traced back to any order of causes, reasons, or explanations. My relation to the other is not one that I enter into as into a contract; it is “a responsibility that is justified by no prior commitment” (AE 162 /OTB 102).^[11] It is not a movement of consciousness but a reversal of consciousness that Levinas characterizes with a vocabulary that is perpendicular to the philosophical tradition that comes down to us from Descartes and Kant, Hobbes and Hegel. Ethical responsibility, he says, is “an assignation by others I do not even know” (AEi5g/OTBioo); it is an obsession that “traverses consciousness countercurrentwise, is inscribed in consciousness as something foreign, a disequilibrium, a delirium” (AEi5g/OTBioi); it is a. persecution, “where the persecution does not make up the content of a consciousness gone mad; it designates the form in which the ego is effected, a form which is a defecting from consciousness. This inversion of consciousness is … a passivity beneath all passivity. It cannot be defined in terms of intentionality, where undergoing is always also an assuming, that is, an experience always anticipated and consented to, an origin and ag%r| (AEiGo/ OTBioi).^[12] So responsibility cannot mean moral responsibility in any traditional philosophical sense. “The ethical situation of responsibility is not comprehensible on the basis of an ethics” (La situation ethique de la respons-abilite ne se comprehend pas dpartir de I'ethique: Levinas distinguishes I'ethique, a moral system, from ethique, the ethical) (AEigi/OTBiao). On the contrary, as Levinas says, “[responsibility] means concretely: accused of what others do or suffer, or responsible for what others do or suffer. The uniqueness

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of the self is the very fact of bearing the fault of another” OTB 112). The ethical subject bears all the marks of the scapegoat.

As if the ethical were, philosophically, a world upside-down-as, in crucial ways, it is — Levinasian ethics derives from a historical world in which the Holocaust is not unthinkable but is, in fact, a premise that cannot be evaded, part of an ineradicable background memory that must inform all future reflection on what it is to be human. Indeed, Levinas is deeply critical of a philosophical anthropology that starts out with — in order to justify — an autonomous ego acting in its own interests. Such an idea presupposes a Hobbesian/Hegelian world in which my relationship with others is always a struggle for domination in which I either subsume or eliminate what is not myself. In such a world the Holocaust is horrifying but not surprising. By contrast Levinas proposes a world in which being human means being a gift or offering for others. Since our imaginations and, indeed, our historical experiences are Hobbesian/Hegelian, such an anthropology is more than a little frightening — and Levinas's language makes no attempt to disguise the extremity of his thought, where persecution, for example, is not a metaphor but defines ethical responsibility as existence despite oneself.^[13] Not surprisingly, it is in his commentaries on the Talmud that Levinas is most explicit on this point: “To bear responsibility for everything and everyone is to be responsible despite oneself. To be responsible despite oneself is to be persecuted. Only the persecuted must answer for everyone, even for his persecutor” (SS46/NTRi 14-15). As Robert Bernasconi says in glossing this line, Levinasian ethics is not derived from the philosophical tradition. “Levinas's achievement is that he has developed a philosophy that arises from the non-philosophical experience of being persecuted.”^[14] It is a philosophy marked by historical realism rather than by the formal realism of a thinking that aims at the logical justification of its concepts and assertions.

Persecution defines a condition of radical passivity in which I am no longer an “I” but a who or a me. The who or the me, Levinas says, is a “term in recurrence,” a oneself (soi) who exists “on the hither side of consciousness and its play, beyond or on the hither side of being which it thematizes, outside of being, and thus in itself in exile” (AE 163 /OTB 103). Levinas characterizes this condition as a hypostasis, that is, a condition of exposure in which I no longer exist as afor-oneself (pour soi) according to the traditional philosophical definition but am entirely for-another — no longer the autonomous agent of Kantian ethics but instead one who exists in the accusative. This is how I am constituted as an ethical subject.^[15] “In obsession,” Levinas says, “the accusation effected by [grammatical] categories turns into an absolute accusative in which the ego proper to free consciousness is caught up. It is an accusation without foundation, prior to any movement of the will, an obsessional and persecuting accusation. It strips the ego of its pride

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and the dominating imperialism characteristic of it” (AE 174-75/0x15110). It is worth repeating that this being-for-another “is subjectivity itself” (AE175 /OTB111). It is not part of any economy of salvation in which I play out a redemptive role of suffering. Justice (justification) is always for others, not for myself (AE32-33/OTBi6).

“To give his cheek to the smiter and to be filled with insults” [Lamentations 3:30], to demand suffering in the suffering undergone … is not to draw from suffering some kind of magical redemptive virtue. In the trauma of persecution it is to pass from the outrage undergone to the responsibility for the persecutor, and, in this sense, from suffering to expiation for the other. Persecution is not something added to the subjectivity of the subject and his vulnerability; it is … subjectivity as the other in the same. (AEi yG/OTBi 11)

As Levinas likes to say, the other “slips into me like a thief” (Job 4:12).

Subjectivity structured as “the other in the same” is what Levinas means by “substitution”: “The word I means here I am [me void: literally, see me here], answering for everything and for everyone” (AEi8o-8i/OTBi 14). I am no longer self-identical but am one-for-the-other. It is important to stress, however, that Levinas does not regard this as a condition of alienation. On the contrary, the other is now internal to my identity, “because the other in the same is my substitution for the other through responsibility, for which I am summoned as someone irreplaceable. I exist through the other and for the other, but without this being alienation: I am inspired. This inspiration is the psyche. The psyche can signify this alterity in the same without alienation in the form of incarnation, as being-in-one's-skin, having-the-other-in-one's-skin” (AEi8i/OTBii4). If my relation to the other is a movement outside self-possession toward the stranger, it is nevertheless not a pathological event. For Levinas, the ethical relation of one-for-the-other is what makes being human possible. It is why a humanism that simply emphasizes the autonomy and self-transparency of the ego is, as Levinas says, “not sufficiently human” (AEao3/OTBi 29). For Levinas, as Adriaan Peper-zak says, “the self in the accusative [se, soi-meme] is the core of human significance.”^[16]

ETHICS AS HERMENEUTICAL EXPERIENCE

Levinasian ethics is not easily translatable into Gadamer's language, but it is not outside his philosophical horizon. On the contrary, philosophical hermeneutics presupposes something like an ethics of alterity and respon-sibilityjust to the extent that it characterizes the hermeneutical situation on the model of dialogue in which I am not a subject surveying a field but am caught up in a ground-level movement of question and answer that alters me as it unfolds. My openness to this event is the condition of its possibility,

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and the condition is as much ethical as it is logical precisely because what is called for is my capacity for listening to what is said (WM343/TM36i). The dialogical subject is porous and exposed to what is said in the nature of the case; this is what it means to be historical or, more exactly, this is what human historicity means. To be sure, the ethical relation for Levinas is a relation of face-to-face in which the other (not what the other says) addresses me.^[17] Moreover, being face-to-face is not a reciprocal relation, that is, in the ethical relation I am responsible for everything and everyone but no one is responsible for me. I am irreplaceable; the burden of the other's distress is mine and cannot be shifted elsewhere. This is what responsibility means: “No one can substitute himself for me, who substitutes myself for all” (AEsoo/OTBisG). In the ethical relation, I am unique, and my uniqueness means that “no one else could be substituted [for me] without transforming responsibility into a theatrical role” (AEai4/OTBi36). Responsibility is not an office or a function. The face of the other faces me with an exigency that cannot be worked off like a debt. The face of the other in this respect is transcendent, outside every system of exchange including the give-and-take of dialogue (it faces me, Levinas likes to say, from a “height”).^[18] “Responsibility is prior to dialogue, to the exchange of question and answer, the thematization of [what is] said” (AEiyG/OTBi 11).

Of course, this looks very much like what Gadamer means when he insists upon openness as a condition that makes not only dialogue but all human relations possible (WM343-44/TM36i-64). The difference is perhaps that Gadamer runs together openness to tradition, openness to the claim of truth in what is said, openness as the “logical structure” of the question, and openness to other persons, whereas a Levinasian would insist on discriminating between openness in these various senses, including the sense of Heidegger's “Gelassenheit” (openness to things, or to the “mystery”), and the more radical openness of hypostasis, “the risky uncovering of oneself … abandoning all shelter, exposure to traumas, vulnerability” (AE8a/OTB48). The point of such discrimination would be to underscore a subtle but fundamental difference between hermeneutical and ethical conceptions of subjectivity. However, it is possible to think through these different conceptions in ways that intertwine them.^[19]

For example, a useful distinction can be drawn between being-with (or being-alongside-of) and being face-to-face as alternative modes of relationship with the other. The first is predominantly hermeneutical, as Gadamer clarifies this term; that is, it implies a relationship of mutual understanding, participation, attunement, being on the same track, being in the swing of the game, having words and interests (not to say a world) in common.^[20] Ethically it is a relation whose culmination is friendship or at least solidarity. My relation to the other in any case aims at a “we” and implies the possibility of community. The face-to-face relation as Levinas understands it is different

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from this. It is not an I-Thou relation but a relation to a “he,” that is, an itte-ity (il, elle) who is outside every horizon and who calls me into question, that is, summons me out of my house, situating me in my ethical condition as hostage (being one-for-the-other) (AEi74-75/OTBno). This is very close to what Gadamer describes as a hermeneutical experience, which is an encounter with what cannot be contained within my conceptual capacity to make sense of things.^[21] Experience, as Hegel said, is a “reversal of consciousness [Umkehrung des Bewujltein]” (WM357/TM354). Experience has the structure of a question, that is, it is an event that calls consciousness into question as an agent that presides over its knowledge and holds reality in its grasp. In experience truth is not our correspondence to reality but our exposure to it as to a fate or a nemesis. Reality here is not an object but a limit and a magnitude beyond cognition (WM338-44/TM354-59).

Similarly, Levinas calls the face-to-face encounter “an experience in the strongest sense of the term: a contact with a reality that does not fit into any a priori idea, which overflows all of them…. A face is pure experience, con-ceptless experience” (DEHHi77/CPP5g): it is conceptkss because experience is not a mode of cognition but the opening up of subjectivity, exposing it to alterity. “Consciousness,” Levinas says, “is called into question by a face. … A face confounds the intentionality that aims at it. … The I loses its sovereign self-coincidence, its identification, in which consciousness returns triumphantly to itself to rest on itself. Before the exigency of the other the I is expelled from this rest” (HAH53/CPP97). Experience is “a reversal of subjectivity” (DEHHa25/CPi 16), so that now subjectivity is that of

a man of flesh and blood, more passive in its extradition to the other than the passivity of effects in a causal chain, for it is beyond the unity of apperception of the / think, which is actuality itself. It is a being torn up from oneself for another in the giving to the other of the bread out of one's own mouth. This is not an anodyne formal relation, but all the gravity of the body extirpated from its conatus essendi in the possibility of giving. The identity of the subject is brought out, not by a rest on itself, but by a restlessness that drives me outside of the nucleus of my substantiality. (AE222/OTBi42)^[22]

Still, the crucial difference between Gadamer and Levinas is that ultimately Gadamer will want to understand this event as redounding to oneself in the way of self-knowledge. “In the last analysis,” he says, “all understanding is self-understanding” (GWa: 13O/PH55).^[23] To be sure, for Gadamer hermeneutical experience is not just an experience of limits or an “experience of one's own historicity” (WM34O/TM357). “Hermeneutical experience is concerned with tradition,” where tradition is not simply an archive or treasure-house of culture; rather, “it is language—it expresses itself like a Thou” (WM34O/TM358). This means that tradition can never be reduced to an object of cognition, no more than a person can (WM34O-41/TM358-59).

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But this also means that my relation to tradition is not a Hobbesian-Hegelian relation of struggle for ownership or mastery (WM341-427 TM3 59). It is a human relation that calls upon me to respond otherwise than through the exercise of conceptualization and control.

In human relations the important thing is … to experience the Thou truly as a Thou—i.e., not to overlook his claim but to let him really say something to us. Here is where openness belongs. But ultimately this openness does not exist only for the person who speaks; rather, anyone who listens is fundamentally open. Without such openness to one another there is no genuine human bond. Belonging together always also means being able to listen to one another. (WM343/TM36i)

But for Gadamer listening-to is always ultimately a listening-for: our relation to the other or to tradition is always a relation to what is said, that is, to a Sache: the claim of the other is a truth claim as well as an ethical claim, and our responsibility takes the form of understanding and acknowledgment rather than the radical form of generosity envisaged by Levinas as substitution or being “one-for-the-other” to the point of being “a hostage” (AEiSG/OTBuy). Moreover, truth here is not simply adequatio in re; it is rather that what is said bears upon me in my situation with the force of law, and my task is to see and understand myself in the light of what is said. My understanding of the other is for me; its goal is, among other things, the enlargement of my horizon. From a Levinasian point of view, hermeneutics is thus faithful to a philosophical tradition that remains recognizably Greek in its fundamental outlook. Departure is balanced by return. Gadamer would not disagree. The first hermeneut was Odysseus, who turned himself into the other—and back again.^[24]

LEVINASIAN HERMENEUTICS

Indeed the relation between Gadamer and Levinas is not so much one of disagreement as one of mutually illuminating differences—differences that are paradoxically coherent with one another. This is the more true since Levinas does not oppose Jewish and Greek traditions in any exclusionary way but seeks something very like a fusion of prophetic and Platonic horizons. For example, from a Gadamerian standpoint what is remarkable and instructive about Levinasian ethics is its constant recourse to hermeneutical categories of speaking and signifying, expression and communication, enigma and sense, as a way of clarifying the ethical relation of responsibility. Thus the face for Levinas is not a phenomenon—not something given to perception like a mask; rather, the face is a language without words, a primordial language that signifies of itself. “The face speaks” (TeI6i/TI66), but not in the sense that discourse emanates from its mouth. “The primordial

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essence of language is to be sought not in the corporeal operation that discloses it to me and to others and, in the recourse to language, builds up a thought, but in the presentation of meaning.” The question is how this “presentation of meaning” is to be understood. It is important to mark that Levinas's word for meaning here is sens—in contrast to signification (the distinction is not always preserved in the English translations of Levinas). Meaning as signification is the product of discourse, where discourse is simply conceptual determination, intentionality, the predication of this as that. But the presentation of meaning as sens is not a function of semantics or of discursive reason. “Meaning [sens] is the face of the Other, and all recourse to words takes place already within the primordial face to face of language” (Tel226-27/Tl2o6). The face “is the meaning [sens] of language before language scatters into words” (AE236/OTBi5i), as if the face were foun-dational for language and reason.

As Levinas elucidates it, the distinction between signification and sens entails a corresponding distinction between different dimensions of herme-neutics, an exegetical or historical-cultural dimension and a dimension of transcendence, that is, an ethical dimension that cuts across the limits of historical and cultural significations and therefore stands apart from the vast heterogeneous array of moral systems, each with its own logic and capacity for self-justification. Exactly how the difference between historical and ethical dimensions of hermeneutics is to be understood is perhaps most fully articulated in Levinas's 1964 essay “Meaning and Sense” (Signification etsens). Like Gadamer's hermeneutics, “Meaning and Sense” starts out from section 32 of Heidegger's Being and Time, with its idea that the intelligibility of things is not a given but is essentially a hermeneutical construction: namely, taking “something as something,” that is, understanding things in the context of our involvement with them or in our belonging-together within the world (SZ149/BT189). So Levinas: “There is no given already possessing identity. … To be given to consciousness [is to] be placed in an illuminated horizon—like a word, which gets the gift of being understood from the context to which it refers. The meaning [signification] would be the very illumination of this horizon” (HAH2O/CPP77). That is, the signification of a thing—and, ultimately, of being—is a relation of part and whole, a movement within a hermeneutical circle whose circumference is at once onto-logical and linguistic (or at all events semantic).

The given is present from the first qua this or that, that is, as a meaning [signification]. Experience is a reading, the understanding of meaning an exegesis, a hermeneutics, and not an intuition. This taken qua that—meaning is not a modification that effects a content existing outside of all language. Everything remains in a language or in a world, for the structure of the world resembles the order of language, with possibilities no dictionary can arrest. (HAH22/CPP78)^[25]

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This is roughly what Gadamer means by saying, “Being that can be understood is language” (WM450/TM474). “In the this qua that,” Levinas says, “neither the this nor the that are first given outside of discourse…. There never was a moment meaning came to birth out of a meaningless being, outside of a historical position where language is spoken. And that is doubtless what is meant when we were taught that language is the house of being” (HAH23/CPP78-79).

This is to say (with Heidegger) that being is internal to time and history and so is distributed across multiple and heterogeneous cultures as a plurality of meanings. Being is epochal. Accordingly, as Levinas says, “Culture and artistic creation are part of the ontological order itself. They are onto-logical par excellence: they make the understanding of being possible” (HAHsS/CPPSs). Hence the universal—but also endlessly historical—scope of hermeneutics. “There exists no meaning in itself [signification en soi], which a thought would have been able to reach by jumping over the deforming or faithful but sensory reflections that lead to it. One has to traverse history or relive duration or start from concrete perception and the language established in it in order to arrive at the intelligible” (HAH31/ CPP83). In other words, being—“the intelligible”—is given in tradition: “All the picturesqueness of history, all cultures, are no longer obstacles separating us from the essential and the intelligible but ways that give us access to it. Even more! They are the only ways, the only possible ways, irreplaceable, and consequently implicated in the intelligible itself” (HAH31/ CPP83-84).

Unlike Gadamer, however, Levinas is no historicist. He is a moral realist for whom the absence of a meaning in itself—“the pure indifference of a multiplicity” distributed along a horizontal plane of historical and cultural differences (HAH4O/CPP89)—is an absurdity, a reduction of the ethical to the anthropological. To be sure, there is nothing outside of time and history, but for Levinas there is more to time and history than the epochal history of being. Granted that human cultures are multiple, heterogeneous, and entirely relative to one another (the others of each other but not of any One). What matters is that these cultures are porous and penetrable, thus allowing “the possibility of a Frenchman learning Chinese and passing from one culture into another.” But what about this passage? It is not just a lateral movement that would eventually assemble human cultures into an anthropological totality of cultural differences; rather, it discloses a deeper orientation. What is it, after all, that leads “a Frenchman to take up learning Chinese instead of declaring it to be barbarian (that is, bereft of the real virtues of language), to prefer speech to war?” (HAH39/CPP88). What is it to translate oneself into the other? Levinas sees in this translation the ethical movement of substitution or generosity, the essential movement of the one-for-the-other that gives the multiplicity of cultural meanings “a unique

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sense [sens]” (HAH39/CPP88)—an intelligibility that, like Plato's One (like the other, like me as an ethical subject), is “beyond being.” The movement of the one-for-the-other is a movement toward transcendence, but a transcendence that cannot be conceptualized in the language of ontology. Its temporality is older than the history of being, as if belonging to “a past that was never present” (HAH64-65/CPPio3; DEHHig8/TTC>355).^[26] This is the temporality in which the other confronts me; it is the temporality in which I am exposed to the other, without the shelter of cultural mediations that enable me to cope with the other and its claim on me. Put it that traditional hermeneutics (which is as old as philology itself) construes understanding as contextualization, where meaning is a two-way relation between part and whole, and where parts are infinitely portable from one whole to another. Here, as Levinas says, the other “is present in a cultural whole and is illuminated by this whole, as a text by its context. The manifestation of the whole ensures his presence; it is illuminated by the light of the world. The understanding of the other is thus a hermeneutics, an exegesis” (HAH5O/ CPPg5). In addition, Gadamer's hermeneutics emphasizes understanding as participation and praxis, the solidarity of belonging-together in work and play, the collaboration of one with the other in a dialogue on what matters to both. Here, as Levinas puts it, the other is “the collaborator and the neighbor of our cultural work of expression” (HAH5o/CPPg5). For Gada-mer, hermeneutics embraces the whole of the human life-world as its practical understanding of itself in all of its dimensions (art, scientific reason, the ethical, law, philosophy, the social and political relations of everyday life). But beyond the hermeneutical life-world there is for Levinas the relation to the other as such, without reference to anything else, outside of every context of signification (the other is, in Maurice Blanchot's stark phrase, “man without horizon”).^[27] Here is Levinas's ethical hermeneutics of sens: “The other who faces me is not included in the totality of being expressed. He arises behind every assembling of being as he to whom I express what I express. I find myself again facing another. He is neither a cultural signification nor a simple given. He is sense [sens] primordially” (HAH5o/CPPg5). And here “primordially” simply means: prior to (beyond or, better, on the hither side of or otherwise than) any epoch of meaning or of being. Imagine this as a Levinasian extension of the universal scope of hermeneutics to include what we might think of as a transcendence of tradition.

One is reminded of the prophets who addressed the world from outside the city and its priestly codes. The other's address to me occupies this kind of transcendental position (exteriority with respect to the world as so many cultural structures): “the epiphany of the other involves a signifyingness [signifiance] of its own independent of [any] meaning received from the world. The other comes to us not only out of a context, but also without mediation; he signifies by himself” (HAH5O-5 i/CPPg5). Indeed, the idiom of

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prophecy in Levinas's articulation of transcendence is explicit: “the epiphany of the face is a visitation” (HAHtji/GPPgtj). It is not an appearance or phenomenon whose expression discloses an order of intentions; it is an intervention from the outside, an interruption of every context: “The face enters into our world from an absolutely foreign sphere, that is, precisely from an absolute, that which in fact is the very name for ultimate strangeness. The signifyingness of a face [la signifiance du visage] in its abstractness is in the literal sense of the term extraordinary, outside of every order, every world” (HAH52/CPPg6). The abstractness of the face means precisely that the face is not any sort of medium, that is, it is not the face of this or that, not a face intimating this or that. It is a face stripped bare of every signification but what it signifies of itself: “Stripped of every form, a face is paralyzed in its nudity. It is a distress. The denuding of a face is a denuding and already a supplication in the straightforwardness that aims at me” (HAH52/ CPPgG). In its distress, it is a face that occupies me like an obsession, which is to say it is not before me like an image or phenomenon but is under my skin like a demonic invasion. So there is no chance I can shake it.

However, there is more: the epiphany of the face has a Platonic as well as a prophetic character. If “the ethical situation of responsibility is not comprehensible on the basis of an ethics” in the sense of moral system (I'ethique: AEigi/OTBiso), that is because the “unique sense” of the face is itself the basis of ethics; it is a transcendental condition of ethical judgment:

The saraband of innumerable and equivalent cultures, each justifying itself in its own context, creates a world which is, to be sure, de-occidentalized, but also disoriented. To catch sight, in meaning [signification], of a situation that precedes culture, to envision language out of the revelation of the other (which is at the same time the birth of morality) in the gaze of a man aiming at a man precisely as abstract man, disengaged from all culture, in the nakedness of his face, is to return to Platonism in a new way. It is also to find oneself able to judge civilizations in a new way. Meaning [signification], the intelligible, consists in a being showing itself in its nonhistorical simplicity, in its absolutely unqualifiable and irreducible nakedness, existing “prior to” history and culture. (HAH6o/CPPioi)

A “return to Platonism in a new way”? The point is that the face of the other is a supplication aimed at me (and no one else); it “imposes itself upon me without my being able to be deaf to its call or to forget it, that is, without my being able to stop holding myself responsible for its distress” (AE52-53 /OTBgG-gy). It is, Levinas says, “as though the whole edification of creation rested on my shoulders” (AE53/OTBg7). However, this burden also has a foundational meaning. If my responsibility disengages me “from all culture,” it also (and therefore) enables me “to judge civilizations” from a nonrelativist position, the way Levinas himself judges Kantian and utilitarian

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ethics—indeed, all modern and contemporary moral philosophy—as indifferent to the other and, therefore, as failed philosophy. The good is not relative to civilizations and their theories. It is

otherwise than being. It no longer keeps accounts. … It destroys without leaving souvenirs, without transporting into museums the altars raised to the idols of the past for blood sacrifices, it burns the sacred groves in which the echoes of the past reverberate. The exceptional, extra-ordinary, transcendent character of the good is due to just this break with being and history. To reduce the good to being, to its calculations and its history, is to nullify goodness. (AE₃₅-₃₆/OTBi8)

As if what Levinas were proposing were a hermeneutics beyond tradition.

For Gadamer, of course, breaking with “being and history”—breaking with tradition—cannot be made intelligible and defensible for the very reason of human finitude. Grant all that Levinas says, my encounter with the other will always be within the horizon I inhabit; otherwise it will simply be unreal. The point is that my horizon is not a conceptual order in which the other would merely appear as an intelligible component. I do not inhabit my horizon simply as a cognitive agent grasping whatever is placed before me. Horizons are not reducible to perspectives or worldviews, which are essentially overdrawn metaphors of spectatorship. Neither are they totalities in the way Levinas imagines totality, namely as the world objectified by consciousness, a world whose components are integrated one with another according to a logic of identity or “the reduction of the other to the same.” For Gadamer, horizon is a concept of finitude, not of totality.

Part of what needs to be sorted out here is the difference between the ways Levinas and Gadamer think of history. In “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” Levinas speaks of “the conquest of being by man over the course of history” as if history were the history of consciousness expressing itself in ever-widening processes of rationalization and control (DEHHiGG/ CPP48). Not that this idea doesn't capture something, as readers of Max Weber and Adorno will quickly recognize. But for Gadamer history is incompatible with totality. History is precisely what resists rational ordering of every sort. This resistance, moreover, is not a defect to be overcome but a limit of reason, a fact of human finitude that exposes the (by turns comic and tragic) absurdity of modernity's ideal of “smooth functioning as a good in itself.”^[28] This conception of the historicity of history explains why Gada-mer's famous notion of the “fusion of horizons,” contrary to many quick summaries of it, has nothing to do with any logic of integration or unification of perspectives, but rather presupposes the ethical character of existence in which one's horizon—one's finitude—is defined by the proximity of others whose presence cannot be objectified: this is what the dialogical

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character of the life-world comes down to.^[29] This conception of finitude is not incompatible with Levinas's notion of transcendence, else how could Levinas say that “it is only man who could be absolutely foreign to me — refractory to every typology, to every genus, to every characterology, to every classification” (Tely 1/1173)’ Why is the other not more infinitely alien still, otherwise than human?^[30] Moreover, in my encounter with the other it is not just me who is called into question; my whole world is touched and altered (indeed, made what it is) by this encounter, precisely because I am not detachable from my horizon but am a portion of its reality. I would be unreal otherwise: this is what historicity means. Finally, there is ample space for Gadamer to agree that “the good is not relative to civilizations and their theories,” because for Gadamer the good is not an idea. On the contrary, it is part of the definition of our finitude.

ON THE PROXIMITY OF THE GOOD

Gadamer is a classicist who follows Plato in conceiving the ethical as the desire for the good, but his classicism is (like Levinas's) a return to Plato rather than a continuation of a certain reception of Plato within the history of philosophy. (Tradition is not repetition.) Thus in The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy Gadamer reads Plato against Aristotle's charge that Plato's conception of the good is a supreme but empty Gsropia divorced from human life. It is true that in the Republic (5086) the good is the sun that radiates throughout the world but is inaccessible in itself. But in the later dialogues Plato's concern shifts away from the good as such. What matters to Plato in the Phikbus, Gadamer says, “is not the idea of the good but the good in human life” (GW7:144/1630). The desire for the good is not meant to take us out of the world but to enable us to inhabit it in the right way. The good is not a “supreme mathema” indifferent to human concerns; on the contrary, it is the human “turning away from the realm of the ideal to what is best in reality” (GW7:144/1630). The good is thus not an object of |j,a6s|j,a. “In the Philebus,” Gadamer says, “the good has precisely the function of providing practical orientation for the right and just life as this life is a mixture of pleasure and knowing” (GW7:145/1631). “Knowledge of the good,” Gadamer says, “is always with us in our practical life” (GW7:159/1657). In this respect the good as Plato (and Gadamer with him) conceives it is very close to Levinas's notion of a sens beyond being, which is likewise an orientation or movement rather than an idea.

For Levinas the good is also always with us, but it is so specifically and exclusively in the face of the other, which inspires in us the movement of one-for-the-other, that Levinas, citing the Philebus (506), characterizes as a desire “that is conditioned by no prior lack” (HAH48/CPPg5). In other

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words, Levinas translates Plato's ethical desire for the good into the gratuitous desire for the other—gratuitous because it is not an expression of need but a transcendence of self-interest, a disinterestedness, a generosity, and, pointedly, not an appetite (HAH49/CPPg4/Tel21-237x132-35). For Levinas, as for Gadamer, the good is not inhuman; on the contrary, to be human, says Levinas, is to be “elected by the good,” that is, summoned to a responsibility beyond being, that is, a responsibility prior to (and founda-tional for) every norm of conduct (AE 194-95/0x15122). Levinas thus thinks of himself as reversing the “antiplatonism”—that is, the histori—cism-of Heideggerian phenomenology and of much of poststructuralist thinking, with its Nietzschean emphasis on the social construction of the subject and the corresponding discovery of local interests underlying objective norms. Ethics as “non-indifference to the other” (AEi42/OTB89), Levinas says, “marks a return to Greek wisdom” (AE6o/OTBioi). The other who confronts me is “beyond being” (STTSXSWCI i&C, ouaiac;), that is, irreducible to representation, on the hither side of the history of being and the dissemination of moralities: “the beyond [au-deld] … is not ‘another world’ behind the world…. The beyond is precisely beyond the ‘world,’ that is, beyond every disclosure, like the One of the first hypothesis of the Par-menides, transcending all cognition, be it symbolic or signified” (HAH62/ CPPiO2). But now the One is no longer remote, supersensible, or inaccessible to the human; on the contrary, the One—the Good—is that which touches me at the level of sensibility, that is, as “an event of proximity rather than of knowledge” (DEHH225/CPPi 16). The “beyond” is, for Levinas, beneath or on the “hither side” of the world as a theme of disclosure. This is what the phrase “otherwise than being” means.

Would Gadamer think this good? I think in the end he might fault Levinas for setting the ethical relation too sharply against hermeneutics—for having, finally, too abstract a conception of the ethical or, indeed, what amounts to the same thing, for having an impoverished conception of hermeneutics, reducing hermeneutics to the purely logical procedure of con-textualization. For Gadamer, understanding constitutes the historical and practical condition for all human relations, social and political as well as ethical. The universal scope of hermeneutics moves from the ground up (rather the way, for Levinas, the ethical relation of proximity and singularity constitutes “the condition for all solidarity” and provides, moreover, for the possibility of justice that makes human life livable after all, even in the aftermath of the Holocaust and in the midst of modernity as “the era of “man-made mass death” (AEiSG/OTBuy).^[31] However, an account that would clarify the ethical as the condition of solidarity would, a Gadamerian might argue, require something very like a detour into hermeneutics.

For example, one might say that from Gadamer's perspective Levinas's conception of the ethical is too purely ethical, not sufficiently social (not

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sufficiently historicized)—a possibility, in fact, to which Levinas himself is clearly responding in those sections of his work where he emphasizes that the ethical relation of one-for-another is not an exclusive or exclusionary “I-Thou” relation (a relation of love, for example). Rather, in the face of the other I always encounter what Levinas calls “the third party,” that is, all the others in the world whose nakedness and destitution constitute a call for justice:

Language as the presence of the face does not invite complicity with the preferred being, the self-sufficient ‘I-Thou’ forgetful of the universe; in its frankness it refuses the clandestinity of love, where it loses its frankness and meaning and turns into laughter and cooing. The third party looks at me in the eyes of the Other—language is justice. It is not that there first would be the face, and then the being it manifests or expresses would concern himself with justice; the epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity.” (Tel234/ TI213)^[32]

So (this would be Gadamer's point) the ethical does not and cannot stand by itself, outside of every context, because my responsibility to and for the other cannot stop with the other but opens onto (among other things) politics, where responsibility entails responsiveness to the here-and-now exigencies of social action.

At all events Gadamer glosses the formula “beyond being” (en&x&iva i&C, ouaiac;) by locating it precisely within the here and now. For Gadamer (in contrast to Levinas), “The good is no longer the one” (GW'j: iga/IGi 15). The good belongs to the hermeneutical domain of the “between” where ethics and aesthetics (or, for all of that, cognition and action, theory and practice, the transcendent and the everyday, and so on through whatever list of oppositions one might devise) constitute a mixture that cannot be distilled into distinct orders of reality, much less into separate categories of experience. Here is where Gadamer differs most completely from Habermas, who divides the human life-world into separate cultural districts of science, social practice, and art, over which philosophy is then installed as a quasi-transcendental “guardian of rationality.”^[33] In the context of the Philebus, Gadamer says, ‘“the good,’ which is at the same time ‘the beautiful,’ does not exist somewhere apart for itself and in itself, somewhere ‘beyond.’ Rather, it exists in everything that we recognize as a beautiful mixture. What is viewed from the perspective of the Republic (or the Symposium) is here determined to be the structure of the ‘mixed’ itself. In each case it would seem to be found only in what is concretely good and beautiful” (GW'j: 192-937 IGi 15). This means that the good cannot be conceptualized apart from the question of how one should live within the contingencies in which one finds oneself. Or, in other words, at the end of the day, the question of the good is the question of cpgovrjatc;”.

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NOTES