Book Review: Levinas: An Introduction

It has been said that Emmanuel Levinas, the Jewish thinker from Lithuania, has done more than anyone to introduce phenomenology into French philosophy. He was born in Kaumas in 1906 to orthodox parents. His father owned a bookshop, and the future creator of an ethics of relation and commentator of the Talmud was early on a passionate reader of the great Russian novelists and the Bible.

In 1923 Levinas went to France to study philosophy in Strassburg. His interest in phenomenology took him to Freiburg University for a short spell of studying with Husserl and Heidegger. His first book was devoted to an exploration of Husserlian phenomenology, and it was this book, published in 1930, that inspired Sartre to spend a year in Berlin to study the work of Husserl.

Levinas earlier works all show the influence of Husserl and Heidegger. But they are always critical and show differences in emphasis and disagreement though they are written from a phenomenological point of view. The last of these appeared in 1949 ('Discovering existence with Husserl'), and then there was a gap of 12 years. In 1961 there appeared Totality and Infinity, generally thought of as Levinas' most important work - and here we find a radical critique of ontology and phenomenology. This critique is complex and often difficult to comprehend, not least because Levinas feels compelled to use a paradoxical way of expressing what he wants to say.

This complexity is handled with outstanding lucidity by this new introduction to Levinas by Colin Davis. I have rarely read a book equally successful in shedding light on the darker aspects of the thinking of a deeply original thinker. But his exposition is detailed and closely argued, and any attempt to reflect it in the context of a review is bound to be a crude oversimplification.

It is Levinas' central contention that Western thinking has not paid attention to the other. Just as Heidegger reminds us that we have forgotten Being, so Levinas stresses our negle (of 'otherness'. Being is what all human beings have in common, it is a 'totality' - but otherness is unsharable. Thus the other is absolutely 'other' and points beyond Being, transcends it towards 'infinity'.

At first it may have seemed as if phenomenology by moving from Descartes' extreme subjectivity to an intersubjectivity had given the other his/her due. But intersubjectivity, in spite of the difference of the subjects interacting, assumes the possibility of mutuality - and this Levinas denies. In his talk with Richard Kearney (In Dialogue with contemporary continental thinkers: Manchester University 1986), Levinas criticises Buber's description of the I-Thou relationship because it is presented 'as symmetrical', and there cannot be a symmetrical relationship with the other. Levinas calls it a 'relation without relation'.

There cannot be a symmetrical relationship between me and the other for two reasons: first of all the other is so completely 'other' that I cannot know anything about him/her. But more importantly, I am responsible for the other. This responsibility for the other is absolute and does not depend on mutuality. This is what Levinas means by 'ethics', and he wishes to put 'ethics' in place of 'metaphysics'. (Ethics needs to be distinguished from morality which is a set of rules dependent on time and place.)

The most extreme formulation of Levinas' ethical demand for responsibility we find in a later book ('Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence' 1974): "The persecuted one is liable to answer for the persecutor". The centre of gravity in the relation between me and the other is not the 'ego' (as it is in Husserl even when the ego becomes transcendental) or in 'mineness' (which Heidegger ascribes to each Dasein) but always in 'the other'.

It is, of course, not the first time that existential philosophers have been accused of neglecting human relationships. Binswanger, for instance, introduced an existential mode of 'loving' in order to correct what he considered Heidegger's omission.

But Levinas goes clearly beyond this. He is not concerned with relationship as we generally understand it. The presence of the other becomes manifest in 'the face'. But the face 'is an epiphany or revelation rather than an object of perception of knowledge' (Davis,p.46). Davis quotes Levinas as saying that 'the best way of encountering the Other is not even to notice the colour of his eyes' (Davis,p.133). For Levinas the face is 'before all else the channel through which alterity presents itself to me, and as such it lies outside and beyond what can be seen or experienced'(Davis,p.135). Clearly we are here no longer in the realm of personal relationship.

The understanding of this definition of our relation to the other is helped by the realization that it is a reflection of Levinas' thinking about God. Davis emphasizes and shows that Levinas religious and philosophical writings cannot be separated. Levinas concept of God "excludes all knowledge of God, be it rational or intuitive, and all theology, be it positive or negative, which speculates on the nature of God' (Davis,p.96). Our relation to God is thus seen as an extreme form of our relation to the other.

While Levinas' passionate demand for an absolute responsibility for an unknowable and unknowable other seems to burst the seams of any phenomenological framework, he remains a phenomenologist in his interpretation of texts. Colin Davis illustrates this by a discussion of Levinas' approach to the Talmud. Levinas believes that 'the text inevitably and always exceeds the intention of any given author' (Davis,p.ll6). 'There is a constant exchange between text and reader' (Davis,p.ll5), and each interpretation is thus unique. There are here clear parallels with aspects of contemporary hermeneutic thinking.

A considerable part of his book Colin Davis devotes to a meticulous scrutiny of the difficulty, and at times obscurity, of Levinas' language. Levinas opposition to the 'totality' of ontology which refuses to acknowledge what is beyond it, the absolutely 'other', makes it difficult for him to use the accepted concepts and definitions of Western philosophy. Levinas puts the emphasis on 'saying' rather than what is being said'. The possibility of understanding assumes the existence of a common ground which turns 'the other' into 'the same'. Thus for Levinas writing is inevitably paradoxical.

I am painfully aware of falling short of the lucidity with which Davis presents Levinas' difficult and contradictory thinking. In his conclusion Davis remains uncertain whether Levinas is "lacking in rigor so that the most careful and sophisticated readers are frequently left mystified", or whether he creates a new role for philosophy, destabilizing its fictions of mastery, making a space receptive to the 'as yet unheard language of the Other' (David,p.143).

For me, the mystery in our meeting the other is the experience that in spite of the other's undeniable otherness time and again the potentiality of meeting each other becomes reality, though this reality is frail and uncertain. This potentiality I believe to be rooted in those aspects of existing as human beings which we share.

Hans W. Cohn