Levinas and Analytic Philosophy: Second-Person Normativity and the Moral Life (original) (raw)
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An existing debate in metaethics is on the issue of moral motivation: what forces us to act morally? The competing positions include the first-person motivation grounded on the Kantian concept of autonomy where we ourselves motivate moral action, and the second-person
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In contrast to the prevailing modernist conception of ethics, wherein responsibility toward others is seen as the necessary cost one has to bear in exchange for the right to pursue individual self-interest, Levinas calls into question the claim to a natural drive toward selfinterest and individual freedom. He argues instead that our basic condition, or "ethical nature," is a commitment to the rights of the other person. However, in order to understand Levinas's inversion of the traditional model, it is important to understand the backdrop against which it stands. In this chapter, we begin by unpacking the traditional Western view of rights and responsibility, drawing especially on the social contract theories of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. We then discuss Levinas's approach to rights and responsibility, and, finally, we explore the implications of such a conception for moral education.
Levinas: Ethics as First Philosophy
University of the Philippines
According to Levinas, this “face to face” encounter with “the Other” awakens a person from his ontological sleep and brings him into a new level of consciousness where he realizes his own narcissism, tyranny, and violence. Such discourse with “the face” moves him into a level of being that seeks intimacy and love --- “the face” appeals, invites, and commands him to enter into fraternity with him --- a separation away from his own alterity, towards a response and participation to the infinity of “the face” of “the Other.” This mutual experience of awakening changes his attitude of supremacy and replaces it with an attitude of humility--- he is now willing to let go of control and be subordinated to “the Other” or “one to another.” From this desire to be connected with “the Other” comes a mutual dialogue between the two faces. Within this dialogue “the Other” reveals his weakness and appeals for his needs. Then, the subject relates to “the Other,” and is obligated to fulfill the commands of “the face.”
Levinas and Analytic Philosophy: Towards an Ethical Metaphysics of Reasons
Analytic philosophy has seen a surge of interest in the relationship between reasons and responsibility. Against the bulk of this literature Emmanuel Levinas raises a cutting and comprehensive critique: The orthodox explanatory order, which explains our responsibility to one another in terms of normative reasons, is backwards. For while such such reasons may explain what we are responsible for in a given case, they do not explain why we are responsible to begin with. Worse: we seem to have a standing responsibility to have reasons with which to justify our acts and attitudes. But the general responsibility to have justificatory reasons isn’t itself something reasons could justify. Levinas’s suggestion: Stop trying to explain interpersonal responsibility in terms of reasons. Start explaining reasons-giving as an expression of a responsibility-relation. We will then see we are not, first, responsible to others because of reason, or because there are we have reasons we ought to be. On the contrary: we are first responsible to others one another, and only this explains why and how we have reasons. Levinas’s insistence on the primacy of responsibility with respect to reasons is clear. Less clear is his argument for this primacy. I will here attempt to re-construct Levinas’s argument, such that it is at once plausible in its own right and also plausibly his. The heart of the argument is a Strawson-inspired analysis of reasoning, consistent with the idea that, before and beneath the particular reasons we give, there is a prior responsibility-relation Levinas calls facing. I will conclude that it is plausible to suppose our responsiveness to reasons is what Levinas says it is: a disguised and derivative form of responsibility to persons-- and that Levinas’s unusual account of reasoning recommends an equally unusual answer to the question “What is a reason?”
The Experience of Obligation: The Enduring Promise of Levinas for Theological Ethics
Emmanuel Levinas has proven a major figure in twentieth-century phenomenology and ethics, and his work has influenced not only Jewish but also Christian ethical thought. However, Levinas has recently been the subject of trenchant critique by his fellow French philosopher, Jean-Yves Lacoste. Lacoste objects to Levinas's construal of intersubjectivity as fundamentally ethical: essentially, that we only instantiate our humanity when we take responsibility for the Other. This smacks for Lacoste of 'unworldliness', and is thus phenomenologically inadequate, since it extirpates from the domain of elementary experiences everything that does not constitute morality. This raises key questions: (1) how best to interpret Lacoste's challenge; (2) how successful that challenge is, i.e. whether anything in Levinas's project survive it; (3) and, if so, how best to understand Levinas's relevance for Christian ethics. I will address all these issues, contending that, contra Lacoste, Levinas's position does stand up to inspection at one key juncture. I claim, on phenomenological grounds, that it tells us something of vital importance about some special experiences of obligation, some range of moral encounters: that which arises when the subject, as moral agent, finds himself in an immediate, unbidden, dyadic encounter with the other person.
Lévinas as a perspective: Ethics and responsibility - symmetric or asymmetric relations?
Professional relations in the field of pedagogy, education and care are often described as symmetric or asymmetric having in mind that the professional has an advantage of being the professional. Using the perspective from the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas this is not just a matter of course that the professional has the advantage. In Denmark we have a tradition of referring to the Danish philosopher K.E.Løgstrup or the German philosopher Martin Buber when investigating the professional encounter or meeting and often stating the asymmetry without any further considerations... Løgstrup makes us aware that we cannot refuse to take the responsibility in a situation with an ethical demand and these situations occur to us without any intention. We end up having parts of the other person’s life in our hands, he says. And it is up to us, whether this life will succeed or not. Buber, known as the “Philosopher of the meeting” tells us that we are not to make the other person an “it” and thus objectify him. We are responsible and stand at both ends of the professional relation, he says. With Lévinas you get more perspectives on these ethical questions. In this paper I am going to introduce some of Lévinas thinking and use them together with authentic examples. The examples are all from professional work with people with very severe acquired brain damages. They all live in a protected setting, constantly and permanently depending on different kinds of support. The professionals can be rooted in care or pedagogy or both, and the examples are to be seen in a Danish context. On this background I will reflect on a modern understanding of being a professional in areas of care, pedagogy and education. Even if Lévinas seems utopian, his work can contribute to new reflections related to tendencies in a modern world – tendencies related to power, to individualization, and to a lack of presence. Keywords: applied ethics, symmetry and asymmetry, power, professionals, responsibility, hostage, education
Is the Other radically 'other'? A critical reconstruction of Levinas' ethics
Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2012
Many Levinasians are prone to merely assert or presuppose that the Other is 'radically Other', and that such Otherness is of patent ethical significance. But building ethics into the very concept of 'the Other' seems question-begging. What then, if not mere Otherness, might motivate Levinasian responsibility? In the following discussion I argue that this can best be answered by reading Levinas as a post-Holocaust thinker, preoccupied with how one's simply being-here constitutes a 'usurpation of spaces belonging to the other'. Then, drawing on Schutz's phenomenology, I explain how the resultant usurpatory bad conscience presupposes the embodied 'interchangeability' of self and Other. As such, one can be said to 'usurp' the Other's place only insofar as self and Other are not radically different.