Gadamer's Repercussions "ss2.17"

NOTES

1. For example, self-respect and the need to be free of self-reproach (the goals of “a rational plan of life”) are the main features of John Rawls's ethical theory. See A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), esp. 433-46. Much of contemporary moral philosophy sees ethics as a function of rational choice, where my concern is always with what will help me to achieve my goals, which comes down to the question of what comes back to me in the way of profit for my right conduct. In the long run decency toward others pays. The writings of Martin Hollis on this matter are very instructive. See, for example, The Cunning of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Levinas's philosophy can be read as a thoroughgoing critique of rational-choice theory. [BACK]

2. See Adriaan T. Peperzak, “On Levinas's Criticism of Heidegger,” in Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 204-17. For a discussion of the ethical in Heidegger's thinking—where the ethical includes the relation to a nonhuman as well as human alterity—see Joanna Hodge, Heidegger and Ethics (London: Routledge, 1995). [BACK]

3. In “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” Levinas writes: “Cognition consists in grasping the individual, which alone exists, not in its singularity … but in its generality, of which alone there is science.” To which he adds:

And here every power begins. The surrender of exterior things to human freedom through their generality does not only mean … their comprehension, but also their being taken in hand, their domestication, their possession. Only in possession does the I complete the identification of the diverse. To possess is, to be sure, to maintain the reality of the one possessed, but to do so while suspending its independence. In a civilization which the philosophy of the same reflects, freedom is realized as a wealth. Reason, which reduces the other [to the same], is appropriation and power. (DEHHiGS/CPPso)

Likewise in “Ethics as First Philosophy,” Levinas writes:

In knowledge there … appears the notion of an intellectual activity or of a reasoning will—a way of doing something which consists … of seizing something and making it one's own, of reducing to presence and representing the difference of being, an activity which appropriates and grasps the otherness of the known. A certain grasp: as an entity, being becomes the characteristic property of thought, as it is grasped by it and becomes known. Knowledge as perception, concept [Begriff, from greifen, to grasp], comprehension, refers back to an act of grasping. The metaphor should be taken literally: even before any technical application of knowledge, it expresses the principle rather than the result of the future technological and industrial order of which every civilisation bears the seed. The immanence of the known to the act of knowing is already the embodiment of seizure. (LRy6) [BACK]

4. Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 344-58. [BACK]

5. See Habermas, “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,” in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 43-115. [BACK]

6. On the social character of cppovrian;” see P. Christopher Smith, “The I-Thou Encounter (Begegnung) in Gadamer's Reception of Heidegger” (PHGG5i4-ig). See also Joseph Dunne, Bach to the Rough Ground: ‘Phronesis’ and ‘Techne’ in Modern Philosophy

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and Aristotle (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), esp. 104-67 (on Gadamer). It is worth contrasting Gadamer's notion of fronesi” with the concept of communicative praxis in Habermas's “discourse ethics.” Discourse ethics does not concern human beings in concrete situations where action is required; rather it concerns “participants” in “moral argumentation” about the ethical norms of a particular human life-world—or, in other words, people who are no longer participants in a life-world but have become moral spectators, under whose “unrelenting moralizing gaze” the life-world has lost the normative power it has for its inhabitants. See Habermas, “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,” 107-8. See Dunne, Bach to the Rough Ground, 193-226, on the shift from “praxis” to “technique” in Habermas's thought. [BACK]

7. See Gadamer, “Freundschaft und Selbsterkenntnis Zur Rolle der Freund-schaft in der grieschen Ethik” (GW7:3g6-4o6). [BACK]

8. See Adriaan Peperzak, “Transcendence,” in Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, 162-70. For Levinas, ontology and epistemology run together, so that “transcendence,” “beyond,” and “otherwise than being” refer to a dimension of existence outside the grasp of cognition, or beyond subjectivity conceived as spirit, consciousness, intentionality, or conceptual determination. This dimension of exteriority (on the hither side of being) is the dimension of ethical reality. [BACK]

9. A translation of the 1968 version of “Substitution” appears in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 79-95. [BACK]

10. The singular is, in other words, outside the relation of universal and particular, that is, it is an infinity outside every totality. As Plato puts it in the Parmenides (i64c), we are the others of each other, not of any one, “for there is no one.” See Totality and Infinity (Tel21-45/33-52), and “Transcendence and Height,” in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, 10-31, esp. 12: “The Other [I'Autre] thus presents itself as human Other [Autrui]; it shows a face and opens the dimension of height, that is to say, it infinitely overflows the bounds of knowledge.” [BACK]

11. That is—against Kant—responsibility is prior to freedom; it is not an exercise of autonomy. Levinas writes, “To be without a choice can seem to be violence only to an abusive or hasty and imprudent reflection, for it precedes the freedom non-freedom couple, but thereby sets up a vocation that goes beyond the limited and egoist fate of him who is only for-himself, and washes his hands of the faults and misfortunes that do not begin in his own freedom or in his present” (AEi83-84/OTBn6). [BACK]

12. Levinas scholars have still not come to terms with these concepts of obsession, persecution, and hostage as descriptions of the structure and condition of the ethical subject. What seems generally recognized is that these terms are meant to define the radical character of a passivity that situates the subject outside the alternatives of the active or passive voice. Passivity, as Levinas understands it, is absolute, that is, outside (for example) the master-slave relation, where submission is still a position that one occupies as a consequence of one's decision (not to risk death, for example), whereas “the passivity more passive than all passivity” refers to a passion in which one is gripped or possessed before one realizes it. Passivity means being porous, subject to the passage whereby the other is inside my skin. [BACK]

13. In Otherwise than Being Levinas characterizes the condition of despite oneself in

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terms of patience and aging “The despite is here not opposed to a wish, a will, a nature, a subsistence in a subject, which a foreign power would contrary. The passivity of the ‘for-another’ expresses a sense in it in which no reference, positive or negative, to a prior will enters. It is the living human corporeality, as a possibility of pain, a sensibility which of itself is the susceptibility to being hurt, a self-uncovered, exposed and suffering in its skin” (AE86/OTB51). In this condition of corporeality one belongs to a different temporality from that of the active agent of intentional-ity, representation, objectification, and freedom of the will. Here “what is a subject is the inverse of a thematizing subject: a subjectivity in aging [whose] effort is an undergoing, a passive form of the self in ‘that comes to pass’ [cela se passe]” (AEgo/ OTB53). In the temporality of patience, the self is “a goodness despite oneself” (AEg2/OTB54). [BACK]

14. See Bernasconi, “‘Only the Persecuted’: Language of the Oppressor, Language of the Oppressed,” in Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Lev-inas for Philosophy, Literature and Religion, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak (London: Rout-ledge, 1995), 85. [BACK]

15. In an essay “Response and Responsibility in Levinas” in Ethics as First Philosophy, Bernhard Waldenfels emphasizes the face-to-face relation of responsibility as constitutive of human subjectivity:

Behind somebody who “gives himself” when giving an answer, there is no person in the form of the nominative. There is neither a sovereign speaker or actor preceding the responding nor a judge considering both sides; the respondent who does not merely transform existing sense becomes what he is by and in the very process of responding. He or she is not a subject in the traditional sense, “underlying” certain acts, but a respondent through and through, who in a certain sense remains unknown to him-or herself. If we want to continue calling him a “subject,” then we do so in the sense of his “subjection” to the demands of the Other. (42) [BACK]

16. Peperzak, Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, 104. [BACK]

17. Levinas distinguishes between Saying (leDire) and the Said (leDit), where Saying is a movement toward the other, “the risky uncovering of oneself, in sincerity, the breaking up of inwardness and the abandon of all shelter, exposure to traumas, vulnerability” (AE82/OTB48), whereas the Said is the product of a logical movement in which I take a position toward something, thematize it propositionally, fix it as an object (AE65/OTB37). [BACK]

18. The “height” of the Other is not a position of strength but, paradoxically, one of destitution and weakness. In Totality and Infinity Levinas writes: “The being that presents himself in the face comes from a dimension of height, a dimension of transcendence whereby he can present himself as a stranger without opposing me as an obstacle or enemy. More, for my position as / [moi] consists in being able to respond to the essential destitution of the Other, finding resources for myself. The Other who dominates me in his transcendence is thus the stranger, the widow, the orphan, to whom I am obligated” (Tel237/Tl2i5). [BACK]

19. See James Risser, Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other: Re-reading Gadamer's PhilosophicalHermeneutics (Albany, NY: SUNYPress, 1997), 172-82. Risser points out that, in contrast to Paul Ricoeur's “hermeneutics of the text,” Gadamer's is “a her-meneutics of the voice,” and that the concept of voice entails conditions of proximity, even intimacy, such that I am never in a position in which I can simply take over

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or appropriate what the other says but am exposed to the other in my ownmost being. Risser does not hesitate to characterize this exposure by reconceptualizing Gadamer's notion of good will as desire, where “desire is the condition of dialogue,” meaning that “dialogue is dependent upon being able to turn toward the other and to be open in order to be addressed by the other.” Desire as a turn toward the other clearly matches the Levinasian structure of generosity. As Risser says:

every speaking is a speaking to the other as a desire for the other. There is always in the communicative situation the voice of the other as the desired voice. In this context it is difficult to understand how the event of understanding can be construed as appropriation, as making something one's own, turning the event of understanding into a unity of understanding …. [For] Gadamer it is precisely the voice of the other that breaks open what is one's own, and remains there—a desired voice that cannot be suspended—as the partner in every conversation. (181) [BACK]

20. See Gadamer's remarks on participation in “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” in Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 64. In Truth and Method Gadamer writes, “Understanding is to be thought of less as a subjective act than as participating in an event of tradition” (WM274-75/TM2go). [BACK]

21. See Gerald L. Bruns, “On the Tragedy of Hermeneutical Experience,” in Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 179-94, esp. 183-84. [BACK]

22. The section “Substitution” in Otherwise than Beingputs it more extravagantly: the encounter with the other “is an accusation without foundation, prior to any movement of the will, an obsessional and persecuting accusation. It strips the ego of its pride and the dominating imperialism characteristic of it. The subject is in the accusative, without recourse in being, expelled from being, outside of being, like the one in the first hypothesis of Parmenides, without a foundation, reduced to itself, and thus without condition. In its own skin” (AEi74-75/OTBi 10). [BACK]

23. It should be noticed, however, that Gadamer goes on to say that self-understanding should not be construed as self-possession [Selbstbesitzes]: “For the self-understanding only realizes itself in the understanding of a subject-matter and does not have the character of a free self-realization The self that we are does not possess itself; one could say that it ‘happens’” (GW2:13O/PH55). Here Gadamer and Levinas are very close. Self-understanding is an event in which the self journeys out of itself. Gadamer cites the example of Augustine, for whom the self is inaccessible except in its exposure to God. [BACK]

24. Speaking of Gadamer's hermeneutics in terms of a desire for the other, James Risser writes, “The voice of the other, as desired, draws one beyond oneself, to think with the other, ‘and to come back to oneself as if to another’” (Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other, 182). See Gadamer's essay “Destruhtion and Deconstruction” [DDno/GW2:26g]). [BACK]

25. Possibly Levinas blurs Heidegger's distinction between the “hermeneutical ‘as,’” in which the structure of something-as-something concerns whatever is ready-at-hand within our everyday practical concern, and the “apophantical ‘as,’” in which something is objectified by means of an assertion and so stands before us “as a ‘what’” (SZi587BT200). [BACK]

26. A “past that was never present” is Levinas's way of figuring the concept of the

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trace, which is a non-phenomenological event, a passing that leaves traces but not anything like evidence on which a reconstruction could be raised. See Adriaan Peperzak, Beyond, 105-6. [BACK]

27. One of Blanchot's essays on Levinas is entitled “The Relation of the Third Kind: Man without Horizon,” in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 66-74. For Blanchot the other is outside every world; he (if he is the word) belongs to the outside as such, which one might describe in terms of space as surface rather than as volume, so that the other is always in a condition of exile, traversing the surface of the earth in endless restlessness since he is incapable of experiencing space except as radical exteriority. [BACK]

28. See “Notes on Planning for the Future” (EPHi6g). [BACK]

29. See Gerald L. Bruns, “What is Tradition?” in Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern, 208-11. [BACK]

30. Maurice Blanchot poses just this question in “The Relation of the Third Kind.” Blanchot's argument is that if one is to pursue Levinas's own thought rigorously, and to situate the other in an absolute transcendence, radical alterity must be thought of as neutral, that is, neither human nor nonhuman but in excess of every category or name, even beyond the unnameable name of negative theology (God): “autrui [Blanchot insists on the lower case] is a name that is essentially neutral and that, far from relieving us of all responsibility of attending to the neutral, it reminds us that we must, in the presence of the other who comes to us as Autrui, respond to the depth of strangeness, of inertia, of irregularity and idleness [desceuvremmt] to which we open when we seek to receive the speech of the Outside” (TheInfinite Conversation, 71-72). The “depth of strangeness” would therefore be a region more transcendent than that of the ethical relation of myself and another: for Blanchot it would be the region of poetry or writing (the region of exile or absolute noniden-tity). See Gerald L. Bruns, Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). [BACK]

31. See Edith Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger, and the Era of Man-Made Mass Death (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989). [BACK]

32. See also Levinas, “The Ego and Totality” (EN3o-38/CPP2g-35). [BACK]

33. See Habermas, “Philosophy as Stand-in and Interpreter,” Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, esp. 14-20. [BACK]