Gadamer's Repercussions "ss2.15"

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

― 42 ―

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]

― 43 ―

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

― 44 ―

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

― 45 ―

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

― 46 ―

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

― 47 ―

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.