Summary of Ethics as First Philosophy by Levinas

Ethics as First Philosophy by Levinas

 "This is the question of the meaning of being: not the ontology of the understanding of that extraordinary verb, but the ethics of its justice. The question ‘par excellence’ or the question of philosophy. Not ‘Why being rather than nothing?’, but how being justifies itself." (86)

             This quote summarizes Levinas’ break from first philosophy as an ontological question of being to an ethical inquiry occupying justification of being. In ‘Ethics as first philosophy’, Emanuel Levinas establishes an entirely new framework, going beyond Heidegger’s notion of Being and borrowing from Sartre’s’ conception of Others. Levinas parts with the phenomenological legacy of Heidegger in Section I by ruling out intentionality as the requisite for knowledge and examining the non-intentionality that passively subsists beneath our cogito.

    

       Being is intelligibility. Being and knowledge correlate in that knowing is freed from otherness qua being. Man grasps around his world and makes Otherness his own. This Otherness, objects throughout the world, provides a satisfaction. Knowledge is only unique in that it has a dependent relation to I and is separated from Others through the creation of this relation. It gains independence as a result of a uniqueness derived from this creation.

            In Section I Levinas refers to the idea of grasping for things as a metaphor for acquiring knowledge. This activity of grasping for things involves a desire for the satisfaction that they provide. The whole of human lived experience has been expressed in terms of experience– relationally.  Intentionality is linked to the lived experience which contributes to the identification of being and knowledge.

            In Section II Levinas explores the possibility of going beyond the notion of thought understood as knowledge in an effort to attain something greater: wisdom. Drawing from Husserl, Levinas examines his theory of representation, or the objectivizing act. This act contains a relation. Levinas says “within consciousness… knowledge is, by the same token, a relation to an other of consciousness and almost the aim or the will of that other which is an object (78).”  Here, intentionality is introduced and establishes the I that is in relation to all other differences. This self consciousness establishes an itself as an absolute being through its identification of nature and the powers of knowledge acquisition.

            However, this intentionality of consciousness that acts to sharpen and hone its powers of illumination and science are diminished by its reflection upon itself. As a result, the powers of intentionality and the ego are retained but now are aimless and indirect as it operates a “non-objectivizing knowledge” (79). This non-intentional consciousness passively subsists beneath all reflection.

“The question is what exactly happens, then, in this non-reflective consciousness considered merely to be pre-reflective and the implicit partner of an intentional consciousness which, in reflection, intentionally aims for the thinking self, as if the thinking ego appeared in the world and belonged to it?” (81)

            In Section III Levinas addresses the question of whether the knowledge of the non-intentional, non-reflective, consciousness can possibly know. Because non-intentionality contains no willful aim, it is not an act, according to Levinas, but pure passivity and therefore exists and endures implicitly outside of time. 

            Where intentionality is accompanied by the ego, non-intentionality is accompanied by the pre-reflective consciousness and produces the passive bad conscience (mauvaise conscience), restless and devoid of any willfulness. Anterior to the ego resides this timid bad conscience, unable to sufficiently assert itself, which the self affirming ego hates.

“However, it is in the passivity of the non-intentional, the way it is spontaneous and precedes the formulation of any metaphysical ideas on the subject, that the very justice of the position within being is questioned, a position which asserts itself with intentional thought, knowledge, and a grasp of the here and now.” (82)

             Levinas says that the non-intentionality produces the restless and passive bad conscience that creates the need to assert itself with intentional thought.  This assertion of intentional thought questions and therefore begs a response, forcing the responsibility of language in a response to one’s right to be.

            In Sec IV Levinas introduces Sartre’s’ notion of the Other. The Other produces a response for the right to be, due to fear of the Other—not an arbitrary law or principle. This fear is a result of occupying another’s space with ones presence, or being. (82)

            Our space is a utopia where I exists and is devoid of conflict. When the Other comes into view and disrupts ones space, the initial reaction is to kill the Other. Here Levinas talks of the awareness of the mortality of the other that is recognized before any knowledge of death (83). The invasion of space creates a face to face relation that is incongruent with the sameness that one sees in oneself and the world. This face to face relation with the Other calls upon my responsibility and my being into question. This relation, or relationship, with the Other is archaic and existed a prior responsibility ‘to which nothing in the rigorously ontological order binds me’. 

            In Sec V, Levinas expounds upon the reversal that takes place in the face of the Other man. In the face of the Other I am charged with responsibility to my humanity in me and therefore unique and chosen. Creating freedom signifies anteriority and uniqueness of the non substitutive truth value. By encountering the subjectivity, the relation to the Other replaces the ego and creates suffering due to a disruption in sameness. Strong feelings of suffering and desire resonate throughout the essay. The fear of the Other and death of the Other create an ethical awareness within one which supersedes the ego. When the ego ‘lays down’ an ethical appeal for justification takes place. (85)

“The first philosophy shows through the ambiguity of the identical, an identical which declares itself to be I at the height of its unconditional and even logically indiscernible identity, an autonomy above all criteria, but which precisely at the height of this unconditional identity confesses that it is hateful.” (85)

             Levinas states that the “ego is the very crisis of being of the being in the human domain”.  “Humans prefer that which justifies being to that which assures it.” Levinas believes that to ask the question ‘To be or not to be?’ asks the wrong question by forcing oneself into being and understanding the meaning of being. Rather, the first philosophy takes place with the bad conscience, and the “instability which is different from that threatened by my death and my suffering…” referring to Heidegger’s being-towards-death (86).   Levinas insists that our right to justify being—as a result of encountering the Other—and the legitimacy of this right is our first and last question.

“Whether he regards me or not, he ‘regards’ me. In this question being and life are awakened to the human dimension.” (86)

             Ethics as first philosophy is a prime example of a ‘reversal’. Levinas successfully posits an explanation of first philosophy that goes beyond the ontological question of Being. Relying on Heidegger and Sartre, Levinas creates a new paradigm for understanding Being, not as a question of intentionality as it reveals knowledge through contact with concrete reality, but as the non-intentionality’s affirmation of being by a response to one’s right to be. Ethics as a starting point for first philosophy seems to echo similar aims as Nietzsche, but continues with the phenomenological tradition of Heidegger and Husserl.