Levinas and Analytic Philosophy: Second-Person Normativity and the Moral Life (Routledge Research in Phenomenology) [1 ed.] 1138615943, 9781138615946

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Levinas and Analytic Philosophy

“An innovative collection of essays written by an impressive group of scholars that demonstrates the important contribution that Levinas’s thought can make to discussions more commonly associated with the analytic philosophical tradition.” —Leslie MacAvoy, East Tennessee State University, USA “With the increasing need to build bridges among the different philosophical traditions and with the growing interest in Levinas’s work, this book will appeal to a significant number of scholars working in Levinas studies, moral philosophy, and philosophy of mind. Fagenblat and Erdur have assembled a first rate group of scholars whose essays will encourage discussions across intra-disciplinary boundaries.” —Claire Katz, Texas A&M University, USA This volume examines the relevance of Emmanuel Levinas’s work to recent developments in analytic philosophy. Contemporary analytic philosophers working in metaethics, the philosophy of mind, and the metaphysic of personal identity have argued for views similar to those espoused by Levinas. Often pursued in isolation, Levinas’s account of “ethics as first philosophy” affords a way of connecting these respective enterprises by showing how moral normativity enters into the structure of rationality and personal identity. The volume shows how Levinas’s moral phenomenology relates to recent work on the normativity of rationality and intentionality and how it can illuminate a wide range of moral concepts including accountability, moral intuition, respect, conscience, attention, blame, indignity, shame, hatred, gratitude, and guilt. The volume also tests Levinas’s innovative claim that ethical relations provide a way of accounting for the irreducibility of personal identity to psychological identity. The essays here contribute to ongoing discussions about the significance and sustainability of a naturalistic but nonreductive account of personhood. Finally, the volume connects Levinas’s second-person standpoint with analogous developments in moral philosophy. Michael Fagenblat is Senior Lecturer at the Open University of Israel. He is the author of “Levinas and Heidegger: The Elemental Confrontation,” Oxford Handbook of Levinas (2019); A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas’s Philosophy of Judaism (2010); and other work in phenomenology and the philosophy of religion. Melis Erdur received her PhD in philosophy from New York University in 2013. She has held several postdoctoral fellowships in Israel and published articles in the area of moral philosophy, including “A Moral Argument Against Moral Realism,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 19 (3), 591–602, 2016, and “Moral Realism and the Incompletability of Morality,” The Journal of Value Inquiry, 52 (2), 227–237, 2018.

Routledge Research in Phenomenology Edited by Søren Overgaard University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Komarine Romdenh-Romluc University of Sheffield, UK

David Cerbone

West Virginia University, USA

Phenomenology, Naturalism and Science A Hybrid and Heretical Proposal Jack Reynolds Imagination adn Social Perspectives Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology Edited by Michela Summa, Thomas Fuchs, and Luca Vanzago Wittgenstein and Phenomenology Edited by Oskari Kuusela, Mihai Ometiţă, and Timur Uçan Husserl’s Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity Historical Interpretations and Contemporary Applications Edited by Frode Kjosavik, Christian Beyer, and Christel Fricke Phenomenology of the Broken Body Edited by Espen Dahl, Cassandra Falke, and Thor Erik Eriksen Normativity, Meaning, and the Promise of Phenomenology Edited by Matthew Burch, Jack Marsh, and Irene McMullin Politcal Phenomenology Experience, Ontology, Episteme Edited by Thomas Bedorf and Steffen Herrmann Levinas and Analytic Philosophy Second-Person Normativity and the Moral Life Edited by Michael Fagenblat and Melis Erdur For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Research-in-Phenomenology/book-series/RRP

Levinas and Analytic Philosophy Second-Person Normativity and the Moral Life Edited by Michael Fagenblat and Melis Erdur

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-61594-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-46258-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Analyzing Levinasvii MICHAEL FAGENBLAT

PART I

Second-Person Normativity1   1 Second-Person Reasons: Darwall, Levinas, and the Phenomenology of Reason

3

STEVEN G. CROWELL

  2 The Second Source of Normativity and Its Implications for Reflective Endorsement: Levinas and Korsgaard

29

MICHAEL BARBER

  3 Grounding and Maintaining Answerability

55

MICHAEL FAGENBLAT

  4 Buber, Levinas, and the I-Thou Relation

80

PATRICIA MEINDL, FELIPE LEÓN AND DAN ZAHAVI

  5 Commanding, Giving, Vulnerable: What Is the Normative Standing of the Other in Levinas?

101

JAMES H. P. LEWIS AND ROBERT STERN

PART II

Ethical Metaphysics123   6 The Concept of Truth in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity MICHAEL ROUBACH

125

vi  Contents   7 Levinas and the Second-Personal Structure of Free Will

139

KEVIN HOUSER

  8 Personal Knowledge

166

SOPHIE-GRACE CHAPPELL

PART III

Ethics and Moral Philosophy191   9 Desire for the Good

193

FIONA ELLIS

10 On Sociality and Morality: Reflections on Levinas, Tomasello, Strawson, Wallace

210

MICHAEL L. MORGAN

11 Rethinking Vulnerability in a Levinasian Context

234

DIANE PERPICH

12 Between Virtue and the Theory of Subjectivity: Noddings’s Care, Levinas’s Responsibility, and Slote’s Receptivity

253

GUOPING ZHAO

13 Levinasian “Ethics as First Philosophy”: In Analytic Moral Philosophy

269

MELIS ERDUR

14 Against a Clear Conscience: A Levinasian Response to Williams’s Challenge

279

SØREN OVERGAARD

Contributors292 Index295

Analyzing Levinas

One would like to think that the “analytic/Continental” divide in philosophy is a thing of the past. Philosophers are increasingly overcoming the entrenched division, and much good work is coming out of this. Yet there has been almost no commerce between Emmanuel Levinas’s oh-so-Continental “ethics” and analytic philosophers working in moral philosophy.1 It would be unfair to ascribe this merely to disciplinary prejudice. Heidegger is Levinas’s most important influence, Merleau-Ponty is his most admired contemporary, and both develop substantive positions that his work rivals. Their work, however, is exemplary of the ways and whys of crossing the analytic/Continental divide and have proven to be immensely valuable in approaching fundamental problems in the philosophies of mind and action. Why then has Levinas’s thought failed to make the passage from “ethics” to moral philosophy? Two explanations stand out, one concerning the style of Levinas’s writings, the other their substance. Dermot Moran suggests that the “impressionistic style of prose with allusions to religious experience” is the reason why “Levinas’s work is largely ignored among analytic philosophers.”2 Michael Slote, a leading exponent of virtue ethics, concurs. Introducing his own account of how “the virtue of receptivity, preceding reason and knowledge” is “a touchstone for other values,” Slote acknowledges, in a footnote, that the idea is close to Levinas’s—but the French philosopher “does so in a metaphorical, evocative, highly abstract fashion.” Like Levinas, Slote wants to retrieve moral receptivity from the sway of excessive reasoning in ethics and thus aims “for a general critique of Western philosophical thinking,” but he wants to do so unlike Levinas: that is, “in ways that don’t rely on exaggeration or metaphor.”3 When Christine Korsgaard argued that the source of morality is the reflective endorsement of one’s practical identity, Bernard Williams took the liberty of recommending that “Korsgaard may want to consider someone who has tried to work out similar ideas in a different style, Levinas.”4 But she didn’t. It is not surprising then that when Korsgaard expanded her notion of “moral identity” in Self-Constitution and offered a rejoinder to Williams, she overlooked the alternative that Levinas offers

viii  Analyzing Levinas to Williams’s objection. The objection holds that theoretical and practical reasoning are so thoroughly unlike each other that it is impossible to derive conclusions about what one ought to do by reflecting on what one, including oneself, ought to think about the nature of the world. Korsgaard’s response is to argue that reasoning about what I ought to do on the basis of my practical identity is “committed to deliberating together with others” and, since “both kinds of reasons are public,” they are not so unlike after all. But Levinas emphasizes an alternative Kantianism: it is not that practical reasoning is in the final analysis public but that theoretical reasoning is in the final analysis moral, and not because it is public but because it is personal, addressed to some hypothetical other person.5 Williams himself, however, might have noted that his distinction between “ethics” and “the peculiar institution of morality” is one that Levinas’s thought tracks. “The presentation of being in the face does not have the status of a value,” he writes, thus clearly marking the distinction between “ethics” and the domain of values. As he says later: “Responsibility is what first enables one to catch sight of and conceive of value.”6 One suspects that it is also Levinas’s style, though it may just be prudence, that confines Stephen Darwall to a footnote indicating the proximity between his analysis of “the second-person standpoint” and Levinas’s account of the moral authority of the face. “A similar idea seems at work in the writings of Emmanuel Levinas about encountering the ‘other,’ ” Darwall diffidently suggests, before deferring to Hilary Putnam’s account of how “encountering an other ‘face to face’ involves a second-personal demand for respect.”7 Darwall’s sustained deployment of the history of moral philosophy, including outliers who are proximate to Levinas such as Fichte and Buber, suggests that it is not bias toward “Continental philosophy” that inhibits his engagement with Levinas. A similar reluctance is displayed by Samuel Scheffler, who makes do, again in a footnote, with third-hand reports of “related themes” in Levinas’s writings to his idea that valuing in the present is conceptually dependent on strangers who will live after one dies.8 Whether because of its style or for some other reason, Levinas’s thought has been confined to a footnote at the forefront of contemporary moral philosophy. The aim of this volume is to explore these and other roads not taken in order to begin to determine if Levinas’s thought and contemporary philosophy can engage in reciprocal critical appraisal. One way this is done, as the titles and abstracts to this volume make clear, is by engaging Levinas’s thought with the work of the thinkers mentioned so far, all of whom are considered in detail in chapters in this volume, as are the moral philosophies of others such as Simon Blackburn, Ronald Dworkin, Martha Fineman, John Gardner, Catriona Mackenzie, John McDowell, P. F. Strawson, Michael Tomasello, and R. Jay Wallace. Another approach applied in this volume consists in conceptual analysis of Levinas’s lush language. While its “impressionistic style,” as Moran

Analyzing Levinas ix called it, has clearly repelled philosophers chary of its “incantatory force” and “unrestrained metaphorical rhetoric,” there is often a bias in such an appraisal.9 Consideration of Levinas’s fine attention to etymology, to say nothing of the substantive reasons for his choice of words, deployment of metaphor and allusion, and use of a style that emulates a direct firstperson approach to the Other, can justly lead to an appreciation of his language as “admirable and most often—if not always—beyond rhetorical abuse,” as Derrida deemed it.10 Commendation of style by Derrida will surely not help the cause of Levinas’s philosophy. But conceptual analysis of his language can contribute to deciding between the two appraisals. The challenge of Levinas’s writings is in any case not only a matter of style. The substance of Levinas’s thought is also “counter-intuitive” to philosophers specializing in established sub-disciplines. For if it is clear that Levinas offers something close to but substantively different from notable positions in contemporary moral philosophy, it is not often understood that Levinas’s argument extends well beyond the domain of moral philosophy. Indeed, it is arguable that what Levinas calls “ethics” does not belong to the field of moral philosophy at all but to a more fundamental level of analysis that we might call the metaphysics of meaning. The complex idea of “ethics as first philosophy” proposes that secondpersonal moral normativity is constitutive of the normativity of intentional content in general. It stands in the Kantian tradition according to which the objective measure of objects is enabled and constrained by formal conditions for the possibility of experience, modifying that tradition by locating the transcendental conditions for intelligibility in the normative claim of an “Other” who makes it possible for me to subject objects to their various measures. One can therefore distinguish “ethics” from moral philosophy, even broadly conceived. Levinas is clearly not addressing himself to first-order moral problems or offering a normative moral theory. But nor is “ethics” a type of “metaethics,” since metaethics supposes that the terms of moral experience are legitimate objects of analysis, whereas “ethics” seeks to show how they become so. On this view, the normativity demanded by “the Other” is constitutive of all intentional acts. Levinas’s thought has failed to make the passage from “ethics” to moral philosophy, then, not because it is moral philosophy à la mode française but because it is something else entirely, a groundwork for the metaphysics of meaning, not morals. If this is right, then the risk of talking at cross-purposes is undeniable, even considerable. It is also a risk worth taking, however. For Levinas’s substantive views about “ethics” include innovative contributions to the philosophy of mind, since he has a distinctive, even unique, conception of the grounds of meaning and truth, and to the metaphysics of personal identity, since he has a novel conception of the nature of free will and selfhood. Accordingly, in addition to relevant positions in moral philosophy, chapters in this volume engage Levinas’s work with philosophies of

x  Analyzing Levinas truth and meaning as expounded by thinkers such as Donald Davidson, Michael Lynch, Gila Sher, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. It remains to note that the distinctive, even if expansive, style and substance of “ethics” poses a risk for Levinas’s work itself. For two generations, the cool because seemingly confounded reception of Levinas’s thought in the Anglophone philosophical world was compensated by uptake among scholars and students of comparative literature and cultural studies. The deep philosophical claims Levinas sought to advance were thus inevitably left in the background, even as they were explicitly motivated by problems that only come to light through a profound understanding of the European philosophical tradition from Descartes to Heidegger. This is surely one reason why, upon the 50th anniversary of the publication of Totality and Infinity, Scott Davidson and Diane Perpich suggested that “stagnation seems to have set in, both in the kinds of questions readers are asking of the text and in the general tenor of the interpretations being offered” and so called for a “rescue operation” in order to “save Levinas and his readers from a relationship that seems to have fallen into a dull routine.”11 The publication of three volumes of Nachlass has gone some way to rejuvenating our understanding of Levinas’s thought.12 Approaching this thought with attention to its philosophical ambition and scope, as this volume does, aims to do so further.13

Notes 1. A notable early exception was Dwight Furrow, Against Theory: Continental and Analytic Challenges in Moral Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995); a recent one is William Hosmer Smith, The Phenomenology of Moral Normativity (New York: Routledge, 2011). 2. Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (New York: Routledge, 2000), 352–53. 3. Michael Slote, From Enlightenment to Receptivity: Rethinking Our Values (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 4. Bernard Williams, “History, Morality, and the Test of Reflection,” in The Sources of Normativity, ed. Christine Korsgaard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 216 (emphasis added). 5. Emmanuel Levinas, “The Primacy of Pure Practical Reason,” Man and World 27 (1994). This relatively unfamiliar text is consistent with other remarks on Kant that Levinas makes in Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, e.g. 58. 6. Respectively, Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 202; Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Springer, 1991), 123. 7. Stephen Darwall, The Second Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 22n44 (emphasis added). 8. Samuel Scheffler, Why Worry About Future Generations? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 41n1. 9. Respectively, Dominique Janicaud et al., Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’ (Fordham: Fordham University Press, 2000); David Woodruff

Analyzing Levinas xi Smith, “Phenomenology,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 ed.), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ sum2018/entries/phenomenology/. 10. Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (New York: Routledge, 2001, 1967), 124. 11. Scott Davidson and Diane Perpich, eds., Totality and Infinity at 50 (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2012), 4. 12. Emmanuel Levinas, Oeuvres completes, 3 vols. (Paris: Grasset, 2009, 2011, 2013). 13. Work for this volume has been generously supported by Israel Science Foundation grant 698/16.

References Darwall, Stephen. The Second Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Davidson, Scott, and Diane Perpich, eds. Totality and Infinity at 50. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2012. Derrida, Jacques. “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas.” In Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, 97–192. New York: Routledge, 2001, 1967. Furrow, Dwight. Against Theory: Continental and Analytic Challenges in Moral Philosophy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995. Hosmer Smith, William. The Phenomenology of Moral Normativity. New York: Routledge, 2011. Janicaud, Dominique et al. Phenomenology and the Theological Turn. Fordham: Fordham University Press, 2000. Levinas, Emmanuel. Oeuvres Complètes, 3 vols. Paris: Grasset, 2009, 2011, 2013. ———. Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Springer, 1991. ———. “The Primacy of Pure Practical Reason.” Man and World 27 (1994): 445–53. ———. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Moran, Dermot. Introduction to Phenomenology. New York: Routledge, 2000. Scheffler, Samuel. Why Worry About Future Generations? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Slote, Michael. From Enlightenment to Receptivity: Rethinking Our Values. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Williams, Bernard. “History, Morality, and the Test of Reflection.” In The Sources of Normativity, edited by Christine Korsgaard, 210–18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Smith, David Woodruff. “Phenomenology.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2018 ed., edited by Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stan ford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/phenomenology/.

Part I

Second-Person Normativity

1 Second-Person Reasons Darwall, Levinas, and the Phenomenology of Reason Steven G. Crowell

§1 What Are Second-Person Reasons? According to Stephen Darwall, second-person reasons are valid normative claims that we make on “one another’s conduct and will.”1 Though such claims can be embedded in attitudes like resentment or codified in particular laws or prescriptions, their pragmatic force is that of a command. But not every command makes a normative claim in Darwall’s sense. When you tell me to “open the window,” this command purports to give me a reason and can be formulated as the prescription “You ought to open the window.” But such a command works on my conduct and will only by means of side-considerations: I “ought” to open the window because I, too, feel that the room is too warm or because you desire to be cooler, and I desire to satisfy your desire. In short, my reasons for acting are what Darwall calls “state of the world regarding” and “agentneutral”:2 I have reason to obey because it will make the world a better place. The command itself does not provide the reason, as is clear from the case in which I think the room is too cold already or when I have no desire to satisfy your desire, and so the command is really a request: “Please, open the window.” Such commands, then, make no claims on me; that is, they are not normative. A command that addresses a normative claim—one that can be expressed as an obligation—addresses itself “directly to [another’s] will” and, if the claim is “successful,” it provides the other with a secondpersonal reason for acting. Such a reason is “agent-relative”; it “simply wouldn’t exist” were it not for a specific sort of “relation to one another” in which you and I stand.3 If you step on my toe and I say “Get off my toe!” I have addressed a claim to you that is meant to determine your will directly, apart from any of your desires or evaluative beliefs. It can be formulated as “You (normatively) must get off my toe,” and this normative “must” is a putative second-personal reason. Darwall’s question is this: What conditions must be in place with respect to our relations to one another in order for second-person reasons to exist? As a first

4  Steven G. Crowell approximation, he writes: “What makes a reason second-personal is that it is grounded in (de jure) authority relations that an addresser takes to hold between him and his addressee.”4 Second-person reasons thus depend on the “presupposition” that you have the authority to order me to get off your toe. What can give you that authority? Darwall’s analysis of the second-person standpoint is meant to answer this question. Quite generally: addressing a claim to another can give the other a “valid” second-person reason only if the addresser and addressee “share a common second-personal authority, competence, and responsibility simply as free and rational agents.”5 The normative authority to issue binding commands, then, and to hold someone accountable for carrying them out, must be shared. A command issued by someone who possesses an authority that the other does not possess—such as a sergeant’s order to a private—has no validity unless it rests upon a deeper normative ground where authority is shared: “However hierarchical, . . . any address of a second-personal reason also implicitly presupposes a common second-personal authority as free and rational.”6 Asymmetrical authority relations have the power to constitute second-person reasons only because they rest upon symmetrical authority relations in which we stand toward one another as free and rational agents. The demand for symmetrical authority arises from Darwall’s focus on the validity of second-person reasons. If second-person reasons exist (i.e., are valid), then a whole set of conditions must obtain—which Darwall, following J. L. Austin, calls “normative felicity conditions” for the success of a second-person address or claim7—without which a command lacks the power to constitute a valid agent-relative reason for me to act here and now. But even if this is true, it does not rule out that a command addressed to me could have other kinds of power, other ways of binding me, that do not depend on what I want or need. Darwall considers such a situation in the case of coercion, i.e., a command that rests upon some non-normative power. But are all asymmetrical commands instances of coercion? And if not, might such a command itself be a condition for being able to entertain second-person reasons? These questions lie at the heart of Levinas’s phenomenology of the face, which I will take up in the second half of this essay. I do so not to challenge Darwall’s account of second-person reasons itself, his Kantian picture of moral normativity. Rather, I want to show that Levinas’s phenomenology uncovers a command that is both normative and asymmetrical, one that addresses an important point only touched on by Darwall: namely, how it is possible to enter the second-person standpoint, how we become sensitive to the normative force of reasons as such, secondperson or otherwise.8 Before we can appreciate the consequences of this point for the question of validity, however, we must explore Darwall’s picture in somewhat more detail. How should we think of the normative felicity conditions that must be presupposed if second-person reasons are

Second-Person Reasons 5 to be valid? Such conditions make up what Darwall calls the “secondperson standpoint.”

§2 The Second-Person Standpoint: Performative and Objective Attitudes Here I want to focus on two main points: the holism of the second-person standpoint and its character as a performative attitude of persons. Let us begin with the latter. Since second-person reasons are agent relative in the sense of being practical prescriptions that guide the will directly, they can appear only to one who occupies what Jürgen Habermas calls the “performative attitude of a person taking part in interaction.”9 This is contrasted with the “objectivating attitude” of a “nonparticipant observer” (which could be the agent herself, reflecting herself out of the interaction to consider things agent neutrally), a “third-person” attitude which “annuls the communicative roles of I and Thou, the first and second persons,” thereby causing “this realm of phenomena,” second-person reasons, “to vanish.”10 Both Darwall and Habermas appeal to the moral phenomenology of what P. F. Strawson calls “reactive attitudes” to illuminate this point. My indignation at being trod upon differs from anger at your being the cause of my pain because indignation includes the consciousness of “the violation of an underlying normative expectation that is valid,” not only for the two of us but, ultimately, “for all competent actors.”11 If one tries to account for the normative character of indignation with an approach that does not make reference to this second-person aspect—say, by appealing to the social desirability of such norms—one violates what Darwall calls “Strawson’s Point”: Desirability and the like are “reason[s] of the wrong kind to warrant the attitudes and actions in which holding someone responsible consists in their own terms.”12 The relevant moral “intuitions” are available only if one remains in the second-person standpoint, “the perspective one assumes in addressing practical thought or speech to, or acknowledging address from, another . . . and, in so doing, making or acknowledging a claim or demand on the will.”13 That this is a performative attitude is indicated by two things. First, “the second-person stance is a version of the first-person standpoint”— that is, a version of the “I” ’s performative character, which Darwall explicates in terms of Fichte’s notion of “self-positing.”14 Second, “what the second-person stance excludes is the third-person perspective” in which one regards oneself agent neutrally or objectively, rather than as the addresser or addressee of a normative claim.15 This point illuminates the matter of the second-person standpoint’s holism. The performance in question can best be thought of as belonging to a kind of game whose rules are already in place and to engage in which one must be “secondperson competent.”

6  Steven G. Crowell What makes the second-person standpoint game-like is the fact that it consists of an “interdefinable circle” of roles (addresser, addressee), skills (competence), standing (authority), and so on, each of which “implies all the rest,” a circle into which there is no way to “break” from “outside it”—that is, each of whose concepts “can be justified” only within the circle.16 An account of moral obligation (second-person reasons) thus cannot provide a ground for the game but can only identify the rules of the game, the “presuppositions” that make second-person reasons possible within it.17 The idea that second-person reasons entail symmetrical relations of authority thus arises within the circle of concepts that define the second-person standpoint. For Darwall, these concepts include “secondperson authority, valid claim or demand, second-personal reason, and responsibility [accountability] to,” and together they define the kind of entity who can play the game: the player must possess “second-person competence”—i.e., second-personal freedom as the ability to be moved by second-personal reasons—and dignity, i.e., the authority to make normative demands on, and require accountability of, others.18 In Darwall’s terms, the players must be free and rational agents, i.e., persons. Indeed, “the very concept of person is itself a second-personal concept.”19 We will return to this circle in a moment, but first we would do well to consider Darwall’s argument for the necessary symmetry of the authority possessed by players in such a game. Second-personal reasons exist only from the second-person standpoint—that is, only from the standpoint in which I am either the addresser or the addressee of a normative claim. The validity of such a claim, according to Darwall, depends on the addresser and the addressee sharing a certain “second-personal competence”—namely, “that those we address can guide themselves by a reciprocal recognition of the second-personal reasons we address and our authority to address them.”20 In this sense, autonomy is a presupposition of the second-person standpoint; indeed, “second-person competence is a ‘law to itself’ since it is the basis of second-person authority.”21 How so? The answer lies in what Darwall calls “Fichte’s Point”: “We can be held morally responsible only for what we can hold ourselves responsible for by making moral demands of ourselves from the perspective of one free and rational agent among others.”22 If that is so, the symmetrical authority of addresser and addressee of a normative claim arises within the game because these roles are interchangeable: a person cannot demand of another person anything that they could not demand of themselves, or rather, I am not accountable to another for anything that I cannot demand of myself. Now, if “the very concept of person is itself a second-personal concept”23—that is, if the players in this game are defined by the interlocking circle of concepts that comprise the game—the essential features of personhood are also so defined: “free” and “rational.” I cannot have a

Second-Person Reasons 7 second-person reason to do something if my will is responsive only to causes or to motives that have no normative force; that is, I must be free. Nor can I have such reasons (as opposed to there being reasons for me to do something) unless I can be moved by reasons as reasons; that is, I must be rational. Thus, whether I issue a claim or am the recipient of one, the capacities that matter are shared between addresser and addressee. The claim succeeds in providing a second-person reason only because the roles of addresser and addressee are subtended by a more general status or standing that we both share, the authority to address second-person claims.24 Darwall reinforces Fichte’s Point—that an address from another can be valid only if I can demand it of myself—by considering the case of “theological voluntarism” as interpreted by Samuel Pufendorf. Though on the voluntarist picture, “moral obligations are all ultimately owed to God,” Pufendorf’s Point is that an obligation can arise “only if God addresses us as rational agents.” God can hold us responsible only if God can assume that we can “hold [ourselves] responsible in [our] own reasoning and thought.” Otherwise, the command could move us only “by fear of sanctions that might coerce compliance.”25 Now Darwall acknowledges that the voluntarist picture “takes a moral hierarchy for granted and then derives the rest of morality (by fiat) from that.”26 Strangely, however, he interprets Pufendorf’s Point to entail that “holding ourselves responsible in our own reasoning and thought” requires that we “must be able to take up a second-person standpoint on [ourselves]” and hold ourselves accountable from that point of view.27 But why should this be? Why can I not hold myself accountable for something—say, acknowledge an obligation to help those in need— without seeing myself as belonging to a community of free and rational beings? If “being able to take up” a second-person standpoint on myself simply means that it is possible for me to do so, this does not mean that a normative command—say, God’s—can reach me only if I do take up such a standpoint. As Darwall acknowledges, for Pufendorf “each agent forms a [moral] community with God alone, with God being accountable to no one.”28 Pufendorf’s Point as Darwall construes it, then—the idea that God must address me as free and rational—leaves open the question of whether all normatively binding commands are second-personal in the sense of being grounded in symmetrical relations. It may be true that one can form such a community with God only if one can hold oneself accountable to oneself before God.29 And it may also be true that “one will have this capacity only if one is also capable of entering into a community of mutually accountable persons.”30 But it does not follow that entering into a moral community with God alone requires that one actually take a second-person standpoint on oneself. It could be that the “moral community with God” makes taking up the second-person standpoint on oneself possible. The alternative would be

8  Steven G. Crowell to say that for God to be able to obligate us by a command, we must stand in a second-person relation of symmetrical authority with God. Such a view does away with moral hierarchy, to be sure, but it also does away with God, which seems to be Darwall’s point, at least in terms of the presuppositional analysis of the game that establishes valid secondperson reasons: in the sphere of second-person reasons there can be no “gods,” i.e., persons with an asymmetrical authority to issue me a valid command. But this does not mean that there can be no “gods” at all, i.e., no source of a normatively binding command for which I hold myself responsible without, however, presupposing that I have the symmetrical authority to command such “gods” in turn.

§3 The Validity of Second-Person Reasons This last point provides the transition from an analysis of the presuppositions of valid second-person reasons to a phenomenology of obligation which, as I shall argue, addresses a lacuna in Darwall’s account. Throughout the text, Darwall’s analysis operates on two levels. The first level is presupposition analysis, the performative attitude of the players of the game. The second level acknowledges the limited scope of the game itself: it is something that we “assume” or “adopt” or “enter into.”31 The first level entails that the circle of concepts cannot be broken into from outside—that is, no rational ground for it can be offered. The second level, however, admits that this sui generis game (with all its concepts, including person as free and rational agent) is neither exhaustive of our lives (hence of our phenomenology) nor automatic. Somehow, out of a wider field of experience, it requires uptake; there is nothing necessary about the game—or rather, if there is a certain necessity to it, some other explanation must be given, something “outside” the game itself. Otherwise—to use Levinas’s term—we might well be “duped by morality”32—that is, the game might be no more than a game, “no more than rationally optional, or worse, illusory.”33 There would be second-person reasons within the game, but none of them would have validity. Despite its non-exhaustive character, Darwall notes that for us, as a matter of psychological fact, “there is no obvious way simply to refuse to see things second-personally.”34 We are, one might say, socialized into the game, but this, as Darwall notes, is of “only limited philosophical significance” since the question is whether we “should see things this way.”35 Darwall’s conclusion—that we should—follows from an argument that distinguishes theoretical from practical reason on the basis of the latter’s necessary self-reflexivity, suggesting that we have no more reason to doubt the validity of second-personal reasons than we do any other kind of practical reasons.36 We cannot explore these arguments in detail here, but nor need we. The main point is that morality is a practice into which we must in some sense be inaugurated, and such an entry move

Second-Person Reasons 9 can be approached from two angles. On the one hand, we can approach it in terms of developmental psychology and the history of moral enlightenment. Both Habermas and Darwall follow this path.37 On the other hand, we can approach it phenomenologically—that is, in terms of an analysis of those experiences that are something like “necessary presuppositions” for gaining entry into the moral universe of the second-person standpoint. In taking this second approach, I will argue that Levinas’s phenomenology of the face helps us to understand what those experiences, those “presuppositions,” might be. In doing so, I argue that, while Darwall’s Kantian-transcendental approach to the second-person standpoint does describe necessary conditions for valid second-person reasons, his phenomenology of obligation fails to do justice to the asymmetrical relation in which I and the Other encounter one another. There is a kind of obligation or claim that I acknowledge “before” I am a person, an uptake that makes me a moral agent in Darwall’s sense.38 Such a feeling of obligation requires that terms like “freedom,” “desire,” and “rationality” be given a different phenomenological analysis, one that suggests why the moral or second-person point of view is something other than a psychological necessity. With some caution, one might say that Levinas’s “ethics” as “first philosophy” is not an alternative to Darwall’s account of moral normativity because it is not a moral theory at all. Rather, it provides the phenomenological ground of the practice of morality in an experience of obligation that precedes the latter, an experience that constitutes a rational being as rational and so is presupposed in any developmental or historical account.

§4 Darwall’s Phenomenology Though the word “phenomenology” does not appear in his index, Darwall regularly appeals to phenomenological evidence—by which I understand description of what is essential to the meaning constituted in various kinds of experience. One such point is found in his recognition that the second-person standpoint is a performative attitude in which I experience claims as claims and do not merely “consider” them. The “presuppositions” of such an attitude are, when considered phenomenologically, the “intentional implications” embedded in second-person practices that make the meaning experienced in such practices what it is for the agent so engaged. And the agent, the person, is constituted by engaging in second-person practices. This means that, as a “person,” one is intelligible to oneself as the one whose life—be it otherwise as it may— is normatively at stake in what one is doing. Another phenomenological point becomes salient when Darwall rejects “recognitional” meta-ethical theories which reduce second-person reasons to “our desire for some outcome,” a desire that makes us feel as

10  Steven G. Crowell though there is “some reason to realize the outcome.”39 Surely, Darwall objects, “object-dependent desires and Moorean intuitions . . . do not exhaust the range of our ethical experiences and intuitive judgments.” And if such phenomenological evidence can be accepted, there is no reason to deny, for instance, the evidence of reactive attitudes, which acknowledge second-person reasons grounded in the second-person standpoint.40 They produce “powerful feelings” of “recognition respect,” based solely on the “free and rational” nature of the other in question. Such “recognitional realism,”41 inherent in our first-person performative experience, is thus a version of phenomenological realism, i.e., a metaphysically neutral acceptance of what, no less than the world itself, is constituted in experience as real. The primary phenomenological evidence in Darwall’s account of second-personal reasons, then, lies in his appeal to reactive attitudes. Such attitudes—for instance, indignation that someone has stepped on my toe or the resentment that arises if no apology is forthcoming—are constituted by the experience of the violation of a normative claim that I expect the other to acknowledge merely because I have the authority to make such a claim, an authority that the other must acknowledge because it is grounded in our shared status as free and rational agents. Persons are agents who can be moved by normative (second-person) reasons; therefore, they ought to be. Of course, reactive attitudes do not exhaust moral phenomenology,42 but by focusing on them, Darwall’s approach to the normativity involved in the second-person standpoint emphasizes the phenomenology of cases in which I make claims on another.43 In experiences where I am the addresser of a claim to the other—be it only in the noematic content of my feeling and not otherwise expressed—the philosophical question appears to be whether the validity of my claim can be justified. And for Darwall, this is possible only if I and the other can exchange places. No doubt this is an important philosophical point, but for Levinas, it can be approached only through the phenomenology of experiences that do not involve questions of validity directly. Such experiences come to the fore if we ask: Must reactive attitudes move in a self-to-other direction? Darwall’s notion of recognition respect, which is a kind of feeling, suggests that an other-to-self direction is possible, but this already presupposes the symmetry of roles constitutive of the game. Since the question that Levinas’s phenomenology seeks to answer is whether we are “duped by morality”—i.e., whether the game in which second-person reasons have validity is just a game—his approach does not merely describe the rules of the game but purports to uncover its “intentional implications,”44 experiences which provide evidence of its origin in the asymmetrical relation in which a command from the other calls me into personhood and so into a world of what Husserl calls “motivations of reason.” These are “motivations within the framework of evidence,” thanks to

Second-Person Reasons 11 which reasons of any kind, including second-person reasons, are available to us.45

§5 Levinas’s Phenomenology of Obligation The most distinctive feature of Levinas’s “moral” phenomenology is his insistence on the original asymmetry between the addresser and the addressee of a command. This asymmetry means that, while his phenomenology is second-personal—since I appear first of all as the You (accusative) of a command—it is not an instance of the second-person standpoint and so does not entail that the command gives me a secondperson reason in Darwall’s sense. I will deal later with how second-person reasons arise in Levinas’s account, but first a few words on the way he describes the asymmetry in question.46 The other is recognized as “other” (not part of my constituted world) because the one who faces me approaches from a “height.”47 The metaphor of height expresses the fact that this experience includes a normative aspect. The command delivered by the other is not like “Peel me a grape!”48 Rather, it involves an interdict on my freedom, a line I cannot cross. Nevertheless, the normativity involved here is not mediated by a presupposition of symmetry: the other and I “do not form a number”; indeed, “I, you—these are not individuals of a common concept.”49 If that is so, then I cannot initially claim an equal status to command the other based on a shared set of characteristics (being free and rational, being conspecifics, or the like).50 Rather, I am not “transcendent with regard to the other in the same sense that the other is transcendent with regard to me,”51 and so I cannot exchange places with the addresser. In my singularity, I do not have any resources for making normative claims. I learn what the normative is through the other’s command. As Levinas expresses it, the other’s command is “teaching,” i.e., the experience of something that could not, in principle, be “maieutically” drawn out from my own nature.52 Clearly, then, such teaching does not have the structure of a second-person reason, but it is not unconnected to reason either. It is time to explore this connection. The experience of being commanded, for Levinas, is the experience of an interdiction on a freedom I already possess, a freedom he describes in terms of the living being’s “power,” its ability to remain the “same” in the face of its environment by, for instance, assimilating that environment to itself in the form of “nourishment”—or, more generally, as the “enjoyment” of the “separated being.”53 Clearly, such freedom is not defined in terms of rational self-determination and includes nothing normative in its exercise. The interdiction on such freedom—the exemplar of which, for Levinas, is the command “Thou shalt not kill”—is the birth of the normative in the separated being, the feeling of obligation. Thus, we are returned to a version of theological voluntarism, but Levinas’s account

12  Steven G. Crowell does not conform to Pufendorf’s Point—namely, that for God’s command to constitute an obligation, it must be addressed to me as a free and rational being. Levinas argues that it is through the uptake of the command that I become a being whose freedom is rational, sensitive to reasons as reasons. But initially it might appear as though the asymmetry between the addresser and the addressee must entail that my uptake of the command could be based only on something like an asymmetry in power relations—that is, on coercion, “the fear of sanctions.” Levinas frequently describes the other as the “stranger, widow, and orphan,”54 suggesting that addresser-to-addressee power relations are far from his thoughts. At the same time, he can characterize my relation to the other as “hostage,” “obsession,” and “persecution.”55 How are we to untangle this matter? Levinas describes the interdictory command as the “end of powers.”56 If the freedom that characterizes life or separation is grounded in the experience of the “I can”57—my normatively heedless exercise of freedom in satisfying my wants and needs—then experiencing the interdict transforms my factual power into normative powerlessness. The interdict is not a violent imposition on my freedom but testimony to the impotence of violence.58 What I learn is the moral impossibility of murder. If I “hear” the command, experience the other as a “height,” then, while I can still kill the other, I cannot thereby eliminate the obligation not to kill. This is just what normative binding amounts to: even if I violate the command, I am still bound by it. The experience of this fact is what initiates me into normative space and so also into the subset of normative space that Wilfrid Sellars called the “space of reasons.”59 Before getting to that, however, it might still appear that I can only be coerced into acknowledging the binding character of the command. If my response doesn’t already include recognition respect for the addresser, what motive could I have to acknowledge the other’s authority? Here, Levinas’s second-person phenomenology diverges radically from Darwall’s account of the second-person standpoint. For, unlike Pufendorf’s God, the other has neither the authority to command nor sanctions to impose. The command rests on nothing but itself. It is the “first word,”60 the condition of possibility of language and so also of reason and so also of questions of authority, validity, and justification. How, then, is my uptake, or hearing, of the command to be described phenomenologically?

§6 Desire as a Reactive Attitude To understand Levinas’s answer, we must return to the question raised earlier: Is there a reactive attitude that does not consist in me being the addresser of a claim against the other but rather in my reaction to a claim I receive from the other? This is what Levinas calls “desire,” which is understood not as an intentional directedness toward the satisfaction of

Second-Person Reasons 13 a need, the fulfillment of a lack that I experience in myself, but rather as what arouses in me an awareness of goodness.61 Desire cannot be analyzed in terms of pro-attitudes toward things that will satisfy the various hungers that beset the living being. Such things are, of course, goods and give the living being reasons to pursue them. But the living being does not pursue them as its reasons. It “has” them but does not act on them as reasons. Desire, in contrast, cannot be satisfied by any achievement in the course of a life. It is “aroused” by the interdiction on life’s freedom, an interdiction that is not experienced as violence but as the “investiture” of that freedom by the “idea of infinity” which “liberates freedom from the arbitrary.”62 By “calling freedom into question,” the interdict does not “limit but promotes my freedom by arousing my goodness.”63 Desire gives freedom “another direction,” orients action toward what is better than being.64 By calling into question the freedom that ontologically seeks the satisfaction of needs and wants, “ethical resistance” opens another path that freedom can follow, another standard, beyond being, by which it can measure itself: the idea tou agathou. Henceforth, freedom recognizes its moral vocation since, as pointing (normatively) beyond being, nothing in being can satisfy it; the more my goodness is aroused in desire, the more desire increases. The Levinasian phenomenology of desire, then, is not a recognitional theory of moral normativity. Desire is a reactive attitude that acknowledges a command whose normativity does not rest on considerations of what is best; rather, the very orientation toward what is best is possible only through the desire aroused by the other’s command. The asymmetry of the command means that, in being addressed by it, I have not been given a valid second-personal reason in Darwall’s sense. The normative power or “ethical resistance” that awakens my desire for goodness moves me, in Levinas’s language, to “welcome” the other.65 Welcoming stands in opposition to appropriating the other into the same (relating to the other in terms of what I want and need), and so it is “principle-dependent” in something like Darwall’s sense.66 But for Levinas, “the principle [arche] is possible only as a command,”67 and so this principle cannot lie in myself. Instead, because “the first word is obligation,” my welcoming the other is a specific form of speaking to the other: apologia. “Justifying oneself” belongs to the “essence of conversation” and is the origin of reason-giving.68 The command “obliges [my] entering into discourse, the commencement of [the kind of] discourse rationalism prays for, a ‘force’ that convinces even ‘the people who do not wish to listen’ and thus founds the true universality of reason.”69 The phenomenological connection between welcoming the other (hearing the command) and language lies in the way that the interdict, which calls my freedom into question, transforms the rapacity and solipsism of freedom into “generosity.” In language, I freely give to the other what was heretofore my possession alone: “language” is “a primordial

14  Steven G. Crowell dispossession, a first donation,” and the “generality of the word institutes a common world.”70 The concept, reason, is the shape the world takes for a being who has heard the command and so has entered into normative space. As opposed to the faceless apeiron from which the living being scratches its enjoyment, the world that I share with the other in welcoming is something “given”—i.e., both perceptually and intellectually there for all of us. “To speak is to make the world common, to create commonplaces.”71 Thus, for Levinas, the second-person standpoint—the symmetry of persons as free and rational agents—depends on the prior welcoming of the other by a freedom not initially inclined toward rationality. For, according to Levinas, the language that arises between us “does not only serve reason, but is reason.”72 If there are second-person reasons—reasons that depend on the second-person standpoint constituted by symmetrical authority relations—then they should appear in the context of Levinas’s account of reason and reason-giving as a response to the investiture of my freedom by the other’s interdictory command and my welcoming of the other in my desire. But before we can understand Levinas’s account of second-person reasons, we must address the key question raised by his phenomenology of obligation: who is the other who commands?

§7 Conscience Though this question is the crux of Levinas’s phenomenology, there can be no thought of doing justice to it here. Instead, I will present a rather free construction of what I take to be a phenomenologically defensible answer, one which—no doubt controversially—will draw in part upon my understanding of a similar point made by Heidegger. The first step is to confront the “theological” language in which Levinas often presents his descriptions of the other. We have already alluded to this in our phenomenological take on Pufendorf’s Point: God’s command can reach me without any presupposition that God and I share a second-personal authority to command. It may be that it can reach me only if I am able to adopt the second-person standpoint, but actually adopting such a standpoint is not necessary in order to “hear” the command. This maps onto Levinas’s idea that the other approaches me from a height, and so it is tempting to hold that it is God who commands me through the other. But Levinas claims that his account of the difference between ontological “totality” and metaphysical “infinity” does not “limit a mind in a way inadmissible to a philosopher”73—that is, it is not the imposition of theological dogma. Rather, it belongs to the analysis of “horizons” inaugurated by Husserl: “What counts is the idea of the overflowing of objectifying thought by a forgotten experience from which it lives.”74 Further, Levinas insists that it “is our relations with men . . . that give to theological concepts the sole

Second-Person Reasons 15 signification they admit of.”75 Thus, the nature of the other’s command, and so of the other as such, is conceptually distinct from any theology. What the latter might involve becomes available to us only through the “primary frankness of revelation” found in the “expression” of the other, the “attendance” or presence of the other in its own manifestation.76 However, this presence, which Levinas terms the “face,” brings its own mysteries. For one thing, the face does not appear: “It is neither seen nor touched.”77 It is not “this plastic image” that belongs to the world of perception, the “façade” with which I can do what I will.78 At the same time, the face is not a “numinous” entity that would somehow be present in my perception without appearing in it.79 Despite Levinas’s insistence on the priority of the face-to-face encounter over relations with the other mediated by reason, this priority contains nothing of the ontological in its constitution. It is, as Levinas often says, beyond being,80 which means that it is normative through and through. It belongs to the order of the ought, not the is. The key to this structure, as I see it, lies in Levinas’s claim that “the Other cannot present himself as Other outside my conscience.”81 My original feeling of obligation is inseparable from what Levinas calls “shame”: “The welcoming of the Other is ipso facto the consciousness of my own injustice—the shame that freedom feels for itself,” and “if philosophy consists in knowing critically, that is, in seeking a foundation for its freedom, in justifying it, it begins with conscience.”82 Shame, as Sartre knew, is not a feeling that the “separated being” can experience on its own; shame presupposes the “look” of the other who objectifies me in a way that I cannot achieve by myself, giving me an “outside” that is for the other before it is for me, yet one that I must “claim as mine.”83 Conscience is this pre-reflective claiming or owning. Levinas further insists that the face of the other is not the locus of an objective view on myself that I cannot have from where I sit; it is a judgment on my freedom.84 The interdictory character of the command can give rise to the reactive attitude of desire for goodness only if hearing the command is, phenomenologically, conscience: freedom’s experience of its own usurpatory (a-normative) essence. Shame, then, is the condition for welcoming the other: while it is psychologically possible to react to shame in many ways,85 phenomenologically, it is essentially tied to desire in Levinas’s sense, i.e., the possibility of measuring my freedom against what is “better” than being—“a measure through the very impossibility of measure.”86 Conscience thereby introduces me to what Levinas calls the “dimension of the ideal,” how things (normatively) should be.87 This point allows us to differentiate between a psychological account of shame and a phenomenological one. On Darwall’s account of shame, for instance, one “feels as if one is rightly regarded or seen in a certain way. But the relevant regard is not second-personal; it is third-personal.”88 This means that, unlike guilt, in which one “feels oneself authoritatively

16  Steven G. Crowell addressed as free,” shame is an objective view of oneself in which the authority it accords to the other is “fundamentally epistemic.”89 In short, on this psychological view, shame makes no appeal to a shared norm and so is not properly a reactive attitude. Darwall points out that while Strawson treats it as one, he does not explain why it is one.90 On a phenomenological account, however, we can see why it might be. Sartre’s phenomenology is still ambiguous on this point. While he emphasizes that shame is a response to my being objectified by the look of the other, he does not explain why such objectification should yield precisely shame: that is, the consciousness of doing something that I ought not to be doing. Levinas’s phenomenology addresses this ambiguity: shame is not a reaction merely to being looked at, but a reaction to being judged; in it, as Darwall elsewhere notes, I must connect my behavior “to some ideal of a presentable or morally decent self.”91 And it is this ideal of a morally decent self that is at issue in the desire that, according to Levinas’s phenomenology of conscience, is aroused by the other’s judgment. Of course, the other’s judgment is not second-personal in Darwall’s sense, since it does not presuppose the symmetry he sees as necessary to the latter. But the point of turning to a phenomenology of conscience is to argue that there are second-personal forms of address that are normative without presupposing the sort of “competence” that the second-person standpoint requires. The capacity to respond to such an address is not a presupposition within the game but a possibility condition of the game, an entry move intentionally implied by the moral community that is thereby constituted. To understand what this means, we need to say more about the relation between Levinasian desire and our capacity, essential to the second-person standpoint, to respond to reasons as reasons. This requires a brief detour through Heidegger. On Heidegger’s analysis, the “call” of conscience addresses the self “detached from relationship to any law or ‘ought’ ”—and that means, prior to any “failing to comply” with such a law that would “load [the self] with guilt.”92 Nevertheless, what this “formalized” concept of conscience gives me to understand about myself is my “guilt” (Schuld) in an equally formalized sense: my being responsible or answerable, verantwortlich.93 In answer to the question “Who calls?” Heidegger says that the call “comes from me yet overcomes me” (“Der Ruf kommt aus mir und doch über mich”).94 I must leave this description unanalyzed here, but we shall return to something like it in a moment. The point is that to respond to the call is to recognize something about my being, not about something I have done. In the call, I understand that I am not a substance with properties or an autonomous freedom, but rather a being “in [whose] very being that being is an issue for it.”95 As “thrown” into the world, I “can never get the ground [of my being] into my power,” and yet I “must [i.e., cannot not] take over being a ground.”96

Second-Person Reasons 17 This phrase describes responsibility. As “thrown,” I belong to the order of entities whose behavior is determined by reasons in the nonnormative sense of causes and inclinations. But my finite freedom stands toward such factic grounds as before a choice. I am not able to choose the inclinations or motivations I have, but neither can I merely acquiesce in them as though they were a kind of causal necessitation. I (ontologically) must take over being a ground; that is, I can act only if I treat some of these inclinations as my reasons.97 In this way, I am responsible for them (either authentically or inauthentically, a distinction we need not develop further here). But to treat an inclination as “my reason” is to consider it in light not simply of what it is, but in light of what is best. If I am to respond to the call of conscience I must—to use Platonic language—venture “beyond being” toward the idea tou agathou.98 Taking over being a ground thus has the structure of Levinasian “desire for goodness,” and insofar as I inhabit a “world” (of meaning) and not merely an “environment” of affordances, taking over being a ground is something I have always already done.99 Thus, conscience, taking over being a ground (Grund, reason), like Levinas’s apologia, is the phenomenological condition for “justification” (Begründung), i.e., of accounting for myself by way of reasons.100 This is because Dasein is always Mitsein, always with others, and so also accountable to others for the normative claims that derive from its choice of what is best. This does not make Heidegger’s account of conscience identical to Levinas’s, of course. For one thing, in Heidegger the call of conscience does not have the interdictory character it has in Levinas, and for another, it seems—as has often been argued, notably by Levinas himself—that in Heidegger conscience does not respond to the face of the other but instead subordinates the addresser to an “anonymous” order of Being.101 However, given the paradoxes associated with Levinas’s concept of the face, I do not think that too much should be made of these differences from a phenomenological point of view. The key point in both is that conscience—as freedom’s orientation toward the good beyond being—is the transcendental condition of reason: that is, of a creature to whom reasons to do something are not merely ascribed (as we ascribe to animals reasons to eat), but one who can respond to the normative force of reasons as reasons. And only such a creature can enter into the distinctive game in which specifically second-personal reasons are possible. With that, however, we are in a position to investigate Levinas’s phenomenological approach to such reasons.

§8 Rejoining Liberalism: Second-Person Reasons and Commanding to Command If Darwall is right that second-person reasons presuppose the symmetrical authority of free and rational agents—that is, that the one who addresses

18  Steven G. Crowell me with a second-person reason must presuppose that I can command myself by means of the same authority (Fichte’s Point)—then Levinas must show how such an authority can be ascribed to me if we start from a position of original asymmetry with the other. Here I can only sketch the outline of Levinas’s response to this phenomenological challenge. Levinas notes that his account of the origin of obligation “rejoins liberalism” at the point at which the latter promotes “the person in as much as he represents nothing further,” i.e., is a self, a singular individual.102 If one starts from the social whole, in which the individual is first of all grasped as a type or role, Levinas’s “liberalism” means that “individuals retain their secrecy”103—the reasons they address to one another cannot all be agent neutral but must retain a performative agent-relativity that reflects the encounter of the singular with the wholly other. This agentrelativity is the trace, at the level of the reciprocal claims of justice, of the foundational role of conscience and the desire it arouses, which, as Levinas says, “are the welcoming of the other across his judgment.”104 If welcoming the other underwrites “the universality of reason,” then welcoming is an intentional implication of having valid second-person reasons. However, Levinas’s “liberalism” precludes the idea that “the reciprocity of dialogue” (and so the second-person standpoint) is phenomenologically original or sui generis.105 The second-person standpoint rests upon a condition that can only be understood from the “outside,” lest the normativity at issue in it remain a mere game: in the original relation between me and the other who judges me, “our relations are never reversible.”106 How, then, does Levinas explain the moral reciprocity that belongs to second-person reasons? Despite the secrecy that belongs to my original relation to the other, the fact that this relation is a “response to a call,” not merely a step that I “take with regard to a thing,” means that what “takes place here ‘between us’ ”—namely, putting the world in common through the generosity of concepts—“concerns everyone . . . in the full light of the public order.”107 My response neither cloisters me in the I-Thou, nor seeks the “clandestinity of love.” Rather, in the eyes of the other “the third party looks at me . . . language is justice.”108 The fact that my apologia before the other—“justification” as giving an account of myself—can become “practical reason” in the second-person sense rests on a kind of equality between us that does not eliminate the asymmetry but rather “consists in referring to the third party thus present at the encounter, whom in the midst of his destitution the Other already serves.” The asymmetry of the command is thereby communalized because the other “comes to join me” to himself “for service.”109 Such a communalization of secrecies involves a second command. If the first and original command is an interdict on my freedom—conscience as the birth of my orientation toward the normative, figured as desire for goodness—then joining the other for service is a more positive moment

Second-Person Reasons 19 that arises when the “thou is posited in front of a we,” i.e., the presence of the third party. This presence—“the whole of humanity which looks at us”—delivers the second command, thereby initiating something like symmetry: “This [second] command can concern me only inasmuch as I am master myself.”110 Here, I take it, the point is not that I, as master, have a right to address commands to others; rather, the point is that the original command, the interdict that gives rise to language and so makes possible a world in common, thereby also makes possible a community of those others with whom I am in that world. As Levinas puts it, “this command commands me to command” with what he calls “the prophetic word”111—i.e., to take a stand in public, before the people. Thus, commanding me to command does not mean that I am commanded to command others, make claims upon them; rather, it is to command myself, become master of myself among those others, to be “responsible” by owning the way of going on that my desire for goodness prescribes. Only because I have first responded, in conscience, to the interdict can the sort of responsibility at issue in the second-person standpoint—self-determination, rational self-legislation—be an issue for me. The desire for goodness aroused in conscience becomes orientation toward a common good not because it is derived from agent-neutral considerations, but because it has a kind of agent-relative universality which acknowledges the authority of all others to command. It thereby remains second-personal. To hear the command of the other in this twofold sense is “to posit oneself as responsible.”112 Such a responsible self is both “more and less than the being that presents itself in the face.” Less, because the face “summons me to my obligations and judges me,” something that I cannot accomplish kath’auto, and more, because it is within myself that I find the resources with which I can respond to the “essential destitution of the Other,” to the one who lacks everything except the height from which to command.113 The second-person standpoint, then, begins with apologia or “confession” (Sartre) and entails, thanks to the presence of the third party, economic justice.114 In conscience, the reactive attitude that opens onto goodness, I posit myself; that is, I understand myself as—or, in Heidegger’s performative terms, resolve to be—responsible for a world in which a kind of symmetry holds between all of us. Levinas writes: “The will is free to assume this responsibility in whatever sense it likes; it is not free to ignore the meaningful world into which the face of the Other has introduced it. In the welcoming of the face the will opens to reason.”115 This idea underwrites Levinas’s rejection of Kant’s account of practical reason, which identifies the will with reason and so yields the interchangeability of wills that defines the second-person standpoint.116 In abandoning the Kantian picture, Levinas rejects the idea that politics—the Habermasian “reciprocity of dialogue”—can be a “calculus,” governed in advance by a reason to which we would all be

20  Steven G. Crowell subordinated.117 However, the command from the other does give me a valid second-person reason, a reason I can recognize as a universal, agent-relative obligation to do something. It commands me to command, i.e., to govern myself as the one who, in conscience, “must” not “refuse this responsibility” and so “must” open myself to reason, dwell within the space of reasons.118 Within this space, I am free to assume this responsibility in any way I like—that is, I remain capable of moral failure. But whatever I do in the meaningful world into which the face of the other has introduced me, I do in light of reasons, in light of how, in my desire for goodness, I take it best to go on. And I will be obligated to the other— all others—to give an account of myself, to offer to others the world that opens up through conscience, my choice for the “ideal” that concerns all of us. It therefore seems to me correct to say, with Darwall, that such secondperson reason-giving “presupposes” the second-person standpoint of free and rational persons. At the same time, Levinas’s phenomenology of reason suggests that such a standpoint, and the moral space it constitutes, cannot be a self-enclosed game. Rather, it rests on a phenomenological condition prior to personhood: the shame that freedom feels for itself in the face of the other’s interdict, without which (for Heidegger no less than for Levinas) we cannot be selves at all. On the other hand, such a phenomenological ground is not eo ipso a refutation of moral skepticism, i.e., an ultimate grounding of the validity of the sort of moral claims at issue in the second-person standpoint. That standpoint may involve a kind of psychological necessity; its necessity might, further, be defended through performative self-contradiction arguments or through the sort of descriptive metaphysics undergirding Darwall’s argument that the validity of second-person reasons is no more suspect than any other kind of (practical) reason. Levinas’s phenomenological defense of the idea that we are not duped by morality does not, however, attempt to ground the validity of second-person reasons. Rather, it demonstrates the origin of reasons in conscience, the asymmetrical experience of a normative claim without which I cannot so much as raise the question of validity. For an “ethical” first philosophy, the skeptic’s challenge to the validity of second-person reasons always comes too late.119

Notes 1. Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 3. 2. Ibid., 6. 3. Ibid., 7–8. 4. Ibid., 4. 5. Ibid., 5. 6. Ibid., 261. For a phenomenological criticism of Darwall’s handling of this example, see William H. Smith, The Phenomenology of Moral Normativity (New York: Routledge, 2012), 92–95.

Second-Person Reasons 21 7. Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, 52. 8. For a fuller account of how Levinas belongs to the tradition of transcendental phenomenology than can be given here, see Steven Crowell, “Why Is Ethics as First Philosophy: Levinas in Phenomenological Context,” The European Journal of Philosophy 23, no. 3 (2015): 564–88; Steven Crowell, “Second-Person Phenomenology,” in Phenomenology of Sociality: Discovering the ‘We,’ ed. Thomas Szanto and Dermot Moran (London: Routledge, 2016), 70–89. 9. Jürgen Habermas, “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,” in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholson (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999), 46. 10. Ibid., 47. 11. Ibid., 48. 12. Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, 15. 13. Ibid., 9. 14. Ibid., 252–57. 15. Ibid., 9. 16. Ibid., 12–13. 17. Ibid., 147. 18. Ibid., 12, 95. 19. Ibid., 80. Darwall adopts Locke’s idea that “Person is a forensik term” (126). From a phenomenological point of view, this means that being a person is a constituted role. Husserl develops this point at length in terms of what he calls the “personalistic attitude,” which bears many resemblances to the second-person standpoint. See Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 181–288. 20. Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, 75. 21. Ibid., 34. 22. Ibid., 248. 23. Ibid., 80. 24. This sort of move has been contested by Jean-François Lyotard, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 30–40. Lyotard draws upon the idea of language games and the “pragmatics” of speech-acts to argue that the roles of addresser and addressee cannot simply be exchanged, since any passage from myself as addressee of a command (You-accusative) to myself as the I who addresses a command involves the mediation of “theory” and so an unjustified subordination of a “prescriptive” game to a “descriptive” one. For further elaboration of this objection, see Crowell, “Second-Person Phenomenology,” 78–82. Michael Barber, “Autonomy, Reciprocity, Responsibility: Darwall and Levinas on the Second Person,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 16, no. 5 (2008): 634, also notes this point. 25. Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, 23. 26. Ibid., 114. 27. Ibid., 23. 28. Ibid., 114. 29. Ibid., 112, puts this sort of accountability in terms that suggest the notion of authenticity: “When, however, one accepts and acknowledges blame or censure, one owns the blaming address of the censuring person secondpersonally.” But while being accountable before God is a kind of “owning”—that is, I own up to myself as being so addressed—the addition of

22  Steven G. Crowell “second-personally” here does not seem necessary, at least if it entails the entire machinery of the second-person standpoint. I will return to this issue later. 30. Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, 114, emphasis added. 31. Ibid., 21, 23. 32. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 21. 33. Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, 277. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 278. 36. Ibid., 279–99. Habermas reaches the same point in his attempt to ground second-person reasons in the pragmatics of argumentation, but his defense is somewhat different. The moral skeptic is caught in a “performative selfcontradiction” if he tries to argue for his skepticism, since, in such an argument, he is already committed to the validity of certain morally substantive “presuppositions” that belong to argumentation as a form of “communicative action.” But, as Habermas notes, identifying such presuppositions involves a propositional “reconstruction” of “pretheoretical” practical knowledge, and so “transcendental-pragmatic justification” does not constitute an “ultimate justification” (Habermas, “Discourse Ethics,” 97–98). His argument is a bit stronger than Darwall’s, however, since it reaches “outside” the game of second-person reason-giving to claim that the latter is only “a reflective form” of communicative action, “the action in which argumentation is rooted” (Habermas, “Discourse Ethics,” 100). And the skeptic cannot opt out of that. 37. For instance, Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, 25, comments that “the very distinction between a pure case of second-personal reason-giving and nonrational forms of influence . . . is no doubt itself relatively recent.” But in looking back on morally less enlightened practices, the “presuppositions [of the pure case] will seem to have always been implicit.” And in a chapter on the psychology of the second-person standpoint, he cites research that supports “an early evolutionary origin for second-personal or proto-secondpersonal psychic mechanisms” (Second-Person Standpoint, 175). Habermas, in turn, argues that “indirect corroboration” for his moral theory can be gained through “theories of the development of moral and legal consciousness at both the sociocultural and the ontogenetic levels” (“Discourse Ethics,” 98). For instance, Habermas appeals to the historical thesis of a “modernity” in which a “razor-sharp cut” between the “good and the just” has been made, and he turns to Kohlberg’s stages of moral-psychological development in the child to suggest that our modern “post-conventional” moral consciousness is unavoidable (“Discourse Ethics,” 104, 109). 38. Both Smith (Phenomenology of Moral Normativity) and Barber (“Autonomy, Reciprocity, and Responsibility”) emphasize the phenomenological dimension in their discussions of the Levinas/Darwall relation, and their accounts have informed my own views in significant ways. 39. Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, 297. 40. Ibid., 298. 41. Ibid. 42. John Drummond has cultivated moral phenomenology particularly intensively and often with reference to Darwall. See, for instance, John Drummond, “Respect as a Moral Emotion: A Phenomenological Approach,” Husserl Studies 22 (2006): 1–27; “Moral Phenomenology and Moral Intentionality,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (2008): 35–49;

Second-Person Reasons 23 “Emotions, Value, and Action,” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 16 (2018): 1–21. 43. Barber (“Autonomy, Reciprocity, and Responsibility,” 634) also notes this tendency and contrasts Levinas’s diametrically opposed approach. 44. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 154. 45. Husserl, Ideas II, 232–33. 46. I will limit myself to Levinas’s position in Totality and Infinity, his most phenomenological attempt to articulate an “ethical” first philosophy. There is, of course, a large literature on this, but I cannot take that on here. One strand derives from Derrida’s argument that the language of Totality and Infinity remains caught within the “violence” of the ontology it seeks to diagnose and transcend. Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 79–153. See Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). On scepticism, see Robert Bernasconi, “Skepticism in the Face of Philosophy,” in Re-reading Levinas, ed. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (London: Athlone, 1991); Diane Perpich, The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). On the ambiguity between the metaphysical and the transcendental see Jack Marsh, “Flipping the Deck: On Totality and Infinity’s ‘Transcendental-Empirical’ Puzzle,” Levinas Studies 10 (2016): 79–114. On Levinas and phenomenology see, in addition to Smith (Sources of Moral Normativity) and Barber (“Autonomy, Reciprocity, and Responsibility”), Michael L. Morgan, Discovering Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Inga Römer, Das Begehren der reinen praktischen Vernunft (Hamburg: Meiner, 2018); Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000); Theodore de Boer, “An Ethical Transcendental Philosophy,” in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard Cohen (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986); John Drabinski, Sensibility and Singularity: The Problem of Phenomenology in Levinas (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001); Bernhard Waldenfels, Antwortregister (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994); Rudolf Bernet, Conscience et existence (Paris: PUF, 2004); Tina Chanter, Time, Death and the Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Adriaan Peperzak, Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997). 47. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 67. 48. The example is Darwall’s. Second-Person Standpoint, 115. 49. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 39. This is the crux of Lyotard’s point, mentioned in note 24. 50. Levinas sometimes figures this phenomenon by speaking of the “nudity” or the “destitution” of the other (e.g., Totality and Infinity, 74–75): the meaning expressed in the face does not derive from features we share or from my phenomenological constitution of the world; it has it “by itself, kath’auto.” 51. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 225. 52. Ibid., 51, 171. 53. Ibid., 110ff. Starting from Husserl’s account of time, Drabinski (Sensibility and Singularity, 107–16) explores this material in terms of the peculiar passivity of “sensibility.” For an approach that starts from Husserl’s idea of the “solipsistic subject,” see Steven Crowell, “Solispsism (Modalities of the Strange),” in The Prism of the Self: Philosophical Essays in Honor of Maurice Natanson, ed. Steven Crowell (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995).

24  Steven G. Crowell 54. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 75, 244. 55. Admittedly, such language appears mostly in his later work. See, for instance, Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 128 (“hostage”), 110 (“obsession,” “persecution”). 56. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 87. 57. Ibid., 37. 58. Derrida (“Violence and Metaphysics,” 125–28) argues that this movement involves a “transcendental violence” in its elaboration, but even if this is so—and we cannot explore the argument here—it does not undermine the phenomenological point at issue. 59. Thus Levinas does not have a “reasons-first” account of normativity: he does not approach moral obligation by starting with a certain kind of reason (second-person reason) and reflecting on what could make such reasons valid; rather, Levinas grounds the normativity of reason itself in the fact of obligation. 60. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 199. 61. Ibid., 200. 62. Ibid., 85. 63. Ibid., 76, 200. 64. Ibid., 63. 65. Ibid., 199, 86. 66. Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, 95. 67. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 201. 68. Ibid., 40, 252. 69. Ibid., 201. 70. Ibid., 173. 71. Ibid., 76. For a more detailed phenomenological account of how objectivity is constituted in intersubjective communicative interaction, the intentional experiences that transform my openness onto the world into one among many “perspectives,” see Husserl, Ideas II, 70–94. 72. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 207. 73. Ibid., 171. 74. Ibid., 28. 75. Ibid., 79, emphasis added. 76. Ibid., 98. 77. Ibid., 194. 78. Ibid., 155, 193. 79. Ibid., 77. Henning Nörenberg, Der Absolutismus der Anderen: Politische Theologien der Moderne (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2014), however, has contested this suggestion, linking Levinas’s position to Rudolf Otto’s discussion of the numinous. 80. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 63, 80, 218. 81. Ibid., 232. 82. Ibid., 86. 83. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square, 1992), 351. As Sartre also says, “my shame is a confession” (Being and Nothingness, 350), that is, apologia. 84. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 101. 85. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 362–70, 373–82, vividly describes some of these reaction formations as ways of retaking the subject position from the other. All of them are, as he says, “meta-stable”—that is, subject to collapse with the unpredictable upsurge of the other’s “look.”

Second-Person Reasons 25 86. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 62. 87. Emmanuel Levinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 56. 88. Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, 71. 89. Ibid., 72. 90. Ibid., 70. 91. Ibid., 163. 92. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 328. For further discussion of the issues presented in this section, see Steven Crowell, Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), Part III. One should note that here, too, a phenomenological approach—which targets the intentional implications of a given experience—is not identical to a psychological approach, which focuses on empirical phenomena. Darwall, in contrast, follows what Heidegger calls the “ordinary” account of guilt: “To feel guilty is to feel as if one is appropriately blamed . . . and held responsible for something one has done” (Second-Person Standpoint, 71). And, of course, guilt sometimes does involve this. Phenomenology, however, uncovers an experiential condition or intentional implication in the ordinary notion that connects conscience to the self “before” the “ ‘morally’ good and . . . ‘morally’ evil” (Heidegger, Being and Time, 332)—that is, a certain sense of responsibility that is not tied to a fault or failing. Guilt turns out to be a “predicate for the ‘I am’ ” (Heidegger, Being and Time, 326), one tied to a sense of obligation. For this reason, there is not as much difference in the phenomenology of Heidegger’s account of guilt and Levinas’s account of shame as one would expect if one stuck with the psychology of the two feelings. 93. Heidegger, Being and Time, 334. 94. Ibid., 320. 95. Ibid., 32. 96. Ibid., 330. 97. This claim is similar to Christine Korsgaard’s position in Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). In Crowell, Normativity and Phenomenology, chapter 11: “The Existential Sources of Normativity,” 239–60, I have offered a phenomenological alternative that I believe preserves the central point. 98. Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence of Ground,” in Pathmarks, trans. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 124. 99. This notion of the “always already” (which Heidegger calls “a perfect tense a priori,” Being and Time, 117), expresses the result of a kind of regressive transcendental argument or reflection that starts with the everyday (normatively structured) world that I experience—a world in which things present themselves to me as this or that—and asks after the conditions that make it possible, such that they are “always already” in play in that experience. On this approach, whether or not I act in morally or ethically responsible ways, I have already responded to the command of the other to the extent that I act in a communicatively meaningful world at all. In this sense, all action involves the “guise of the good.” 100. Heidegger, “On the Essence of Ground,” 129–30. 101. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 45, 89. 102. Ibid., 120. 103. Ibid.

26  Steven G. Crowell 104. Ibid., 101. 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid. 107. Ibid., 212. 108. Ibid., 213. 109. Ibid. 110. Ibid. 111. Ibid., 178. 112. Ibid., 215. Here Levinas rejoins Fichte, though Levinas’s “summons” (Totality and Infinity, 196), unlike Fichte’s Aufforderung, does not presuppose that I am free and rational. Instead, through the command to command, it makes a rational freedom possible. In this way, Levinas’s liberalism remains consistent with his criticism of the rationalist idea of plurality, which founders on the fact that reason has no plural (ibid., 207): “a reason cannot be other for a reason” (ibid., 72). “What could a being entirely rational speak of with another entirely rational being?” (ibid., 119). 113. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 215. 114. “Justice can have no other object than economic equality.” Emmanuel Levinas, “The Ego and Totality,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 44. 115. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 219. 116. Ibid., 217. 117. Ibid., 216. 118. This sort of “must” has the structure, discussed earlier, of what Heidegger calls “taking over being a ground.” For further analysis see Crowell, Normativity and Phenomenology, chapter 9: “Conscience and Reason.” 119. I would like to thank Owen Ware and Michael Morgan, organizers of the workshop on Intersubjectivity and the Second Person: 19th and 20th Century Perspectives (Toronto, May 2018), at which the original version of this paper was presented, for valuable feedback on my argument. I am very grateful to the other conference participants—especially Diane Perpich, Sebastian Gardner, and Kristin Gjesdal—for their critical comments. For editorial comments that nudged me to clarify important points in the paper, I would like to thank Michael Fagenblat and Melis Erdur. Finally, special thanks to Bettina Bergo, Michael Morgan, Martin Kavka, Claire Katz, and Inga Römer for many fruitful conversations about Levinas—and to O. Bradley Bassler for sparking my interest in Levinas’s work many years ago.

References Barber, Michael. “Autonomy, Reciprocity, and Responsibility: Darwall and Levinas on the Second Person.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 16, no. 5 (2008): 629–44. Bernasconi, Robert. “Skepticism in the Face of Philosophy.” In Re-reading Levinas, edited by Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley, 149–61. London: Athlone, 1991. Bernet, Rudolf. Conscience et existence. Paris: PUF, 2004. Chanter, Tina. Time, Death and the Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Critchley, Simon. The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.

Second-Person Reasons 27 Crowell, Steven. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. ———. “Second-Person Phenomenology.” In Phenomenology of Sociality: Discovering the ‘We’, edited by Thomas Szanto and Dermot Moran, 70–89. London: Routledge, 2016. ———. “Solipsism (Modalities of the Strange).” In The Prism of the Self: Philosophical Essays in Honor of Maurice Natanson, edited by Steven Crowell, 13–29. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995. ———. “Why Is Ethics First Philosophy? Levinas in Phenomenological Context.” European Journal of Philosophy 23, no. 3 (2015): 564–88. Darwall, Stephen. The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. De Boer, Theodore. “An Ethical Transcendental Philosophy.” In Face to Face with Levinas, edited by Richard Cohen. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986. Derrida, Jacques. “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas.” In Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, 79–153. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Drabinski, John. Sensibility and Singularity: The Problem of Phenomenology in Levinas. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001. Drummond, John. “Emotions, Value, and Action.” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 16 (2018): 1–21. ———. “Moral Phenomenology and Moral Intentionality,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (2008): 35–49. ———. “Respect as a Moral Emotion: A Phenomenological Approach.” Husserl Studies 22 (2006): 1–27. Habermas, Jürgen. “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification.” In Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, translated by Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 43–115. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. ———. “On the Essence of Ground.” In Pathmarks, translated by William McNeill, 97–135. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989. Levinas, Emmanuel. “The Ego and Totality.” In Collected Philosophical Papers, translated by Alphonso Lingis, 25–45. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987. ———. “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity.” In Collected Philosophical Papers, translated by Alphonso Lingis, 47–59. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987. ———. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Lyotard, Jean-François and Thébaud, Jean-Loup. Just Gaming. Translated by Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Marsh, Jack. “Flipping the Deck: On Totality and Infinity’s ‘Transcendental/ Empirical’ Puzzle,” Levinas Studies 10 (2016): 79–114.

28  Steven G. Crowell Morgan, Michael L. Discovering Levinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Nörenberg, Henning. Der Absolutismus der Anderen: Politische Theologien der Moderne Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2014. Peperzak, Adriaan. Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997. Perpich, Diane. The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. Römer, Inga. Das Begehren der reinen praktischen Vernunft: Kants Ethik in phänomenologischer Sicht. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2018. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1992. Smith, William Hosmer. The Phenomenology of Moral Normativity. New York: Routledge, 2012. Waldenfels, Bernhard. Antwortregister. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994. Wyschogrod, Edith. Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2000.

2 The Second Source of Normativity and Its Implications for Reflective Endorsement Levinas and Korsgaard Michael Barber Before constructing this intellectual interchange between Christine Korsgaard’s The Sources of Normativity and the work of Emmanuel Levinas, it is important to understand the differences in their perspectives and the different meanings that the expression “source of normativity” might take on for each of them. Insofar as this paper engages Korsgaard’s book from a Levinasian perspective, the notion of “source” in that book provides the playing field for the engagement. In that book, beginning with all one’s particular motives and inclinations, one “establishes” their normativity by adopting a reflective stance and by testing whether pursuing a course of action to which such motives and inclinations incline one will accord or not with one’s own (and others’) practical identity as Citizens in a Kingdom of Ends.1 Unlike many other normative ethical accounts that justify or prescribe the concrete content of obligations to others, Korsgaard says little about such concrete content, and, instead, she inquires about where obligation in general “comes from”2 and repeatedly affirms that autonomy, flowing from and according with our practical identity as members along with others in the Kingdom of Ends, is the source of obligation.3 Consequently, reflective endorsement, whose testing establishes the moral normativity of whatever we do, “is not merely a way of justifying morality. It is morality itself.”4 One might then say in summary that for Korsgaard “source” is somewhat of an ambiguous, metaphorical term, signifying, on the one hand, an ultimate principle by appealing to which one might rationally justify concrete actions or their prohibition and, on the other hand, an ultimate origin from which all the moral dimensions of our existence derive and to which they can be traced back. Levinas has his own ultimacies or “sources,” analogous in complicated ways to those of Korsgaard, and for him the ethical summons of the other takes an unsurpassable precedence, being referred to as a matter of “ethics,” as distinct from normative “moralities” that appeal

30  Michael Barber to a theoretically established first principle to justify concrete courses of action. This summons, experienced through concrete obligations (e.g., the prohibition against murder, the demand to share one’s bread with the hungry), is itself neither deduced from or justified by any rational principle nor does it function as any kind of deductive premise itself. However, Levinas, like Korsgaard, envisions a place for reflection, the weighing of claims, and the search for a principle (no one of which Levinas endorses) that might provide important guidance as one seeks to balance the excessive responsibilities generated by the summonses of multiple others. Given, then, the rather ambiguous, metaphorical significance of the term “sources” within Korsgaard’s own work and Levinas’s, one could devote an entire investigation to the meaning of the word “source” in these different settings. Rather than follow that strategy, this paper will attempt to articulate illuminative comparisons and contrasts about their different views by considering where they place their emphases, locate their ultimacies, and take their different points of departure—all of which are suggested by the metaphorical term “sources.” This essay presents (1) Christine Korsgaard’s establishment in The Sources of Normativity of an ultimate source of normativity in the reflective endorsement of proposed actions on the basis of one’s practical identity as a Citizen in the Kingdom of Ends. It then (2) demonstrates that Emmanuel Levinas, in addition to including a reflective source similar in ways to Korsgaard’s, introduces as a second “source” the prereflective encounter with the other which dialectically engages the plane of reflectivity. The argument further shows (3) that Korsgaard’s position, while moving somewhat in the direction of such a pre-reflective source of normativity through emphasizing contingent practical identities, nevertheless does not account for the clarity and pervasiveness of the pre-reflective source described by Levinas. In addition, (5) Levinas’s pre-reflective source even takes precedence over the reflection on one’s obligations by evoking reflection in the first place and dialectically engaging its limitations; by opposing Korsgaard’s grounding of ethics only in rational reflection without reverting, though, to any moral-realistic derivation of moral obligations directly from nature; and by portraying an alternative, stronger route to self-valuing. Furthermore, (6) the Levinasian framework improves upon Korsgaard’s effort through social ontology to overcome the privatization and individualism endemic to autonomy-based ethics like her own. Finally, for Levinas moral reflection entails not wariness about another depriving one of one’s autonomy, but rather a striving for reflective neutrality that is, however, for the sake of the other and under pressure from the other, and consequently Levinasian moral reflection can avoid the dangers that often accompany aspirations to reflective neutrality itself.

The Second Source of Normativity 31

1. Korsgaard on the Conception of Self as a Source of Normativity The Sources of Normativity begins by rejecting realist views that oppose the scientific view that the world is devoid of normative entities or objective values and that, as Thomas Hobbes and Samuel Pufendorf contended, insists that laws inscribed in such entities and values proceeding from the will of an all-powerful legislator, namely God, provide realist, objective sources of normativity.5 In fact, Korsgaard continually ties up such realist arguments in regressive circles: the supposed authority of God or objective norms independent of reflective agents depend on those agents’ recognition of their authority in the first place.6 Objective values, then, cannot be used to support our confidence that an obligation is real since the objective values themselves depend on the confidence conferring the value that we purportedly grasp as coming from outside us.7 In a sense, we resort to there being moral facts or entities because we mistakenly suppose that, just as physical entities and facts are needed to support our scientific beliefs about the external world, so we need moral facts to support our moral beliefs. Realism is still, to this extent, a prisoner of the scientific mind-set, despite its resistance to it.8 For Korsgaard,9 it is the fact that we are self-conscious rational animals, capable of reflection regarding what we should do, that lies at the root of normative questions, and, by examining such reflection, we will find the source of normativity rather than by looking to the external world, to something outside us. This “reflective endorsement” methodology enables us to render morally normative whatever claims are made upon us, according to Korsgaard, and she further asserts that David Hume and Bernard Williams employ such a method, as does Immanuel Kant, in whose moral philosophy one finds its model exemplification. Hume, for instance, reflects on whether one ought to endorse the sentiments that arise within oneself, in particular the desires to acquire virtues and avoid vices, and he finds reason to do so in that morality has its own pleasures, insofar as in practicing sympathy one experiences oneself as loveable and worthy of respect in the eyes of others, as well as oneself.10 In practicing such sympathy, one finds that it is in one’s interest, but not one’s narrow self-interest, to practice virtue for its own sake.11 Thus, from the reflection on what the moral sense seems to require of us as well as our self-interest, morality appears as normative and authoritative for us, without any realistic appeal to entities or values outside us. Similarly, Bernard Williams, embracing the distinction between science and ethics and the value-neutrality of the world that science examines, nevertheless concludes that reflection can endorse a minimalist moral norm, such as that a certain kind of life is best for human beings.12 Whereas Hume and Williams see the test of reflective endorsement as capable of establishing the normativity of our

32  Michael Barber moral dispositions and sentiments, for Kant, reflective endorsement is the test “used by moral agents to determine the normativity of all their particular motives and inclinations.”13 When any motives to action present themselves to us, we need to submit them to the test of reflection to see whether or not they provide reasons to act and whether the courses of action that such motives prescribe to us ought to be a law for us or not.14 Reflection alone, however, is not enough since one must make use of some criterion to determine what will give us a reason to act. Korsgaard, following Kant, believes that our will, which is a causality, though one of freedom, must act according to a law, namely its own, as opposed to the laws of nature.15 In fact, one cannot escape acting according to some law. Hence, even if one chooses to treat every desire as a reason, one will be operating according to a law, the law of a wanton.16 Even if one acts in accordance with a conflicting mishmash of laws, the law governing one’s behavior would be just to act unpredictably, on whatever urge arises in the moment.17 Korsgaard, in an unorthodox reading of Kant, suggests that the first formulation of the categorical imperative simply specifies that we must act according to some law.18 The third formulation of the imperative, however, that of the Kingdom of Ends, provides the moral law.19 Depending on which law one acts in accord with on an ultimate plane, one will be constituting one’s practical identity, as, for instance, a wanton or as a Citizen in the Kingdom of Ends. Moreover, whatever one chooses to do contributes to and flows from who one thinks one is.20 Korsgaard insists that without being committed to some conception of one’s practical identity, one would no longer have any reason to do one thing rather than another or to do anything at all, for that matter.21 On this level, beyond that of any particular, concrete practical identity one may embrace (e.g., as a parent or a spouse or a teacher), one is repeatedly choosing what the humanity of any person requires: namely, some reason to act and to live. Consequently, in choosing according to any specific practical identity (e.g., as a parent), one is valuing not only that identity but also oneself as a human being. As Korsgaard observes, “the value of humanity itself is implicit in every human choice.”22 One’s practical identity becomes normative for oneself and determines which impulses one will count as reasons, and to fail consistently to act in accord with one’s practical identity is equivalent to forfeiting the sense that one’s life is worth living.23 Thomas Nagel criticizes Korsgaard’s appeal to one’s practical identity as the standard from which to assess the options for action that one is considering insofar as this standard represents a rather “existentialist idea,”24 prone to contingency and relativism insofar as it rests ultimately on a first-person decision depending on who one thinks one is. In contrast, Nagel argues that, in reflecting on perceptual appearances of the world, one has to think about the world of which one is a part “rather than about yourself and who you feel yourself to be.”25

The Second Source of Normativity 33 It is more important to allow concerns about others and their survival to count as one’s reasons, and to explain the hold of those reasons on oneself in terms of one’s self-conception is to get things backward.26 Korsgaard, however, adequately rebuts Nagel’s objection, in my view, insofar as the practical identity that serves as normative for her is that of oneself as a Citizen within the Kingdom of Ends—which is a view of oneself and others rather than oneself rather than others. In addition, the various concrete identities (e.g., as mother, businessperson, or friend) to be evaluated by this ultimate practical identity are diversified, with the result that our self-conceptions then can be the basis “of our capacity for everyday decency as well as of heroic virtue; and of our capacity for trivial pettiness as well as for great crimes. I think that self-conception is, in short, the root of both moral good and evil.”27 In brief, grounding one’s action in one’s self-conception need not necessarily involve a self-centered turning in on oneself and away from those to and for whom one is responsible. Although Nagel appears to introduce a kind of Levinasian concern for the other, both Nagel and Korsgaard search for their ultimate source of normativity within the theoretical sphere to be governed by certain kinds of reasons (Nagel) or an ultimate practical identity (Korsgaard) serving as a standard from which to evaluate the proposals for action suggested by motives, inclinations, or one’s concrete practical identities. Clearly Korsgaard’s conception of us as not simply following our inclinations but taking a reflective distance from them and determining which of them to follow on the basis of laws, the moral versions of which are very general, correlative to our humanity, implicitly valued in every choice, and formative of our moral identity as Citizens in the Kingdom of Ends, corresponds to the Kantian notion of autonomy. She is well aware, however, that autonomy-based viewpoints tend to be individualistic in nature and, therefore, asserts that we have many practical identities and many of these derive from personal relationships, which are independent sources of obligation. Such relationships and the identities one finds within them can be particularly significant, such as being a parent or a spouse.28 Moral identity, resting on our character as human, though, confers a kind of normativity on our diverse other identities insofar as choices we make with reference to these other identities implicitly affirm the value of our human identity. Correlatively, our moral identity plays a governing role with regard to these other kinds of identity. Hence, for instance, one is morally obligated to care for one’s helpless child, on the one hand, and, on the other, would have to give up practical identities that would be inconsistent with the value of one’s or other’s humanity, e.g., if one’s identity consisted of being a member of a group engaged in human sex trafficking.29 But Korsgaard also recognizes that personal relationships, as independent sources of obligation, might matter more to us in certain situations than our relationship to humanity at large.

34  Michael Barber Personal relationships, consequently, can produce “particularly intractable conflicts with morality.”30 In order to further resist the individualism endemic to autonomy-based ethics like her own, Korsgaard entertains at the end of her third lecture the possibility that she has shown that one must place value only on one’s own humanity, but not on the humanity of others.31 Carrying that discussion into her fourth lecture, she describes how other philosophers, such as Alan Gewirth, have argued that consistency requires valuing others. Gewirth, like others, however, seems to assume that one’s reasons for valuing one’s own humanity are private and that arguments must be given “to construct the public character of reasons, starting from the assumption that reasons are private.”32 Korsgaard’s strategy is not to follow Gewirth’s pattern, but to argue that reasons are public in their very essence, that our social nature enables us and impels us to share our reasons, and that, consequently, those reasons were never private in the first place. In addition, she points out that if the initial reasons were essentially private it would not be possible to exchange or share them.33 Furthermore, in a sense, the very reasons I might give to prove that private reasons can be converted into public ones are already public reasons, and I cannot make the case for public reasons without presupposing and making use of public reasons.34 As Korsgaard expresses it, “The space of linguistic consciousness—a space in which meanings and reasons exist—is a space that we occupy together.”35 She substantiates this kind of transcendental argument by appealing to a series of phenomenological descriptions of experiences that illustrate that we do not start in isolation, needing to build a bridge to others. For example, the reasons of others have the same standing with us that our own desires and impulses do, and we do not need a reason to take their reasons into account.36 Also, one does not hear the other’s words as mere noise but, instead, “in hearing your words as words, I acknowledged that you are someone . . . If I listen to the argument at all, I have already admitted that each of us is someone.”37 Instead of joining Gewirth and others to argue for why private reasons should be converted into public reasons, Korsgaard draws the reader’s attention to what precedes reasoning and arguing: our social relationships with each other: that is, my relationship with you. On this pre-theoretical, pre-argumentative level, which cannot be illuminated so much with argument as with phenomenological description, you are “able to intrude on my reflections—you must be able to get under my skin.”38 As a result, I know from the start that our reasons are shared, are public, and that what I understand about treating my humanity as an end itself cannot avoid including you as an end in yourself. Here, Korsgaard’s phenomenological descriptions of examples of experience converge, to a degree, with Levinas’s depiction of the ethical summons of the other. Korsgaard continues in this effort to articulate a social ontology that prevents the privatization of reasons and the individualism of autonomybased ethics in section 4.3 of her essay, in which she develops the thesis

The Second Source of Normativity 35 that even animals have moral standing.39 For instance, she rightly comments that pain is much more than a matter of a (cognitive) sensation and that it consists in a sensation that stimulates animals and ourselves to fight against it.40 Thomas Nagel had it right in saying that sympathy is not just a feeling of discomfort produced when we recognize others’ being in distress and subsequently find ourselves motivated to remove their distress. Rather, the awareness of the others’ distress is experienced itself as something to be relieved.41 Animals unreflectively reject pain as a threat to their identity42 and, just as valuing one’s humanity includes valuing one’s animality (which is part of one’s humanity), so other animals, when they are in pain, give reasons for us to change their condition.43 Just as one cannot hear the words of another person as mere sounds, so one cannot hear the shrieks of an animal in pain as mere noise.44 Animals obligate us the way other persons do, even before we theorize about such obligation. Korsgaard concludes her essay by opposing the view of John Mackie that the world of science rules out there being objective value or intrinsically normative entities: Of course there are entities that meet those criteria. It’s true that they are queer sorts of entities, and that knowing them isn’t like anything else. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. John Mackie must have been alone in his room with the Scientific World View when he wrote those words. For it is the most familiar fact of human life that the world contains entities that can tell us what to do and make us do it. They are people, and the other animals.45 At this point, at the end of her essay and in an effort to undo the supposition that reasons are private, one might interpret Korsgaard as positing an additional source of normativity besides reflective endorsement in accord with one’s character as a Citizen in the Kingdom of Ends. That animals and persons that can tell us what to do might appear as a supplemental source, one that resembles the kind of intrinsically normative entities that pertain to the moral realism. Although Korsgaard earlier rejected such realism, here at the end of her essay, she acknowledges that “realism is true” on this level.46 However, the purpose of this entire discussion of Korsgaard is not to locate another source of normativity, but to lead one to see the public nature of reasons. Whether this pre-reflective encounter with others and animals constitutes an alternative source of normativity and how, if it were such a source, it would relate to her ultimate source, reflective endorsement, are not questions that Korsgaard addresses.

2. A Second Source of Normativity: Korsgaardian Reflection and the Levinasian Other The central difference between Korsgaard and Levinas has to do with whether Korsgaardian “reflective endorsement” constitutes the principal

36  Michael Barber source of normativity. By eschewing realism, Korsgaard is left with our practical identity as Citizens of the Kingdom of Ends, determined within the territory demarcated by the turn to reflection, as the principal source of moral normativity, however suggestively her mention of the queer entities that Mackie opposes might hint at the possibility of an additional source. Before discussing whether one can find another, rival source of normativity deriving from Levinas’s framework, it should be noted that Levinas, too, acknowledges the importance of reflection in determining what is normative, and hence reflection serves as a source of normativity for him. But such reflection develops for Levinas out of a prior ethical responsibility that involves asymmetrical responsibility to and for the other that takes priority over duties to oneself, without one insisting on reciprocity from the other.47 However, Levinas imaginatively reconstructs how one might get from this baseline experience of the other’s summons to responsibility up to the level on which principles are used to assess proposals for action—precisely the level on which Korsgaard’s Sources is pitched. He achieves this reconstruction through the appearance of the third party who introduces a new dimension in my relationship with the other, in which my “signification before the other until then went in one direction.”48 Upon the entrance of this third person, I find myself responsible to the other, the Third, and many others, with the result I must now search for a principle in order that “duties and rights” might be “measured and measurable.”49 Such a reflective situation is characterized by the kind of equality and reciprocity between the competing claims of several others, in much the way that the competing claims of citizens might deserve to be treated in the just and egalitarian state to which we are accustomed. On this level of reciprocal, equal relations, generated from the prior experience of asymmetrical responsibilities, Levinas insists that the other, the Third, and all the others implied by the Third (such as all the others of the other I serve and even the “I” myself who can also be understood as another for all those others) are all equally due the reverence, responsibility, and service that are elicited in the originary proximity in which I am ordered to the other alone.50 In this setting, in which all the others obsess me (and I myself as an another to all others would obsess them) with an obsession that “cries out for justice” and “demands measure and knowing,”51 one must have recourse to “weighing, thought, and objectification”52 and “co-presence on an equal footing as before a court of justice”53—features of the kind of reflection that Korsgaard, too, calls for in the face of the motivations, inclinations, and obligations springing from our other identities (e.g., those of a father of a child or a spouse of a partner). In this convergence between Korsgaard’s work and Chapter 5 of Otherwise Than Being, it seems evident that Levinas would concur with Korsgaard that, within the reflective sphere, a principle or guideline can emerge as a source of normativity. Despite this convergence,

The Second Source of Normativity 37 Levinas’s understanding of reflectivity differs from Korsgaard’s. He does not seem interested in establishing, as is typical of normative ethics, a first principle to deduce or justify concrete courses of action, and he does not spell out the contents of such a principle, as does Korsgaard, in terms of the Kingdom of Ends formulation of the categorical imperative or, more importantly for her, one’s practical identity as a citizen of that kingdom. Levinas’s other “source” of normativity, hinted at earlier, though, must be located in what precedes the undertaking of reflection: namely, that which he had spent the previous four chapters of Otherwise Than Being unearthing and describing and that which generates the very undertaking of reflection itself: the ethical relationship with the other. Even in his fifth chapter on the equality, reciprocity, and weighing of reasons typical of reflection among competing claims, one hears echoes of this primordial relationship. Signification is “more ancient . . . than the equality implied by it”54 and consists in “my responsibility for the other, in my inequality with respect to him for whom I am a hostage.”55 This relationship involves the “asymmetry of proximity.”56 In Totality and Infinity, Levinas advances this same theme, explaining how reflection involves a calling into question oneself and self-criticism “produced in the face of the other and under his authority.”57 It is this “forgotten experience”58 that phenomenology discloses, that thought lives from, and that higherlevel theory and the simpler reflection, out of which theory arises, are both responsive to and depend on.59 That experience underpins even the theoretical elaboration of Levinas’s philosophy itself which “remains the servant of the saying that signifies the difference between the one and the other as the one for the other, as non-indifference to the other.”60 In other words, for Levinas, prior to engaging in reflection, one encounters the imperative of the other, calling one to responsibility, inviting one into reflection, as well as higher-level modalities of reflection, such as discourse and theorizing. Clearly, the issue between Levinas and Korsgaard has to do with the sphere that precedes reflection. By eliminating normative realism, rejecting its normative entities, and pointing to our confidence as conferring normative value on such entities, Korsgaard conceives the reflective sphere as standing over against a pre-reflective field in which one finds courses of action proposed by inclinations, motivations, and perhaps obligations emerging from our various contingent practical identities (as a mother or a colleague).61 While there may be various values at stake as we consider the actions suggested to us, it is not clear that they are moral values or if the suggested courses of action are essentially morally neutral until reflectivity confers value upon them once it recognizes that such courses of action would be consistent with our practical identity as a member of the Kingdom of Ends. By contrast, for Levinas, the very presence of the other confronts one with the obligation to be responsible to him or her, even though there is a space of freedom within which one

38  Michael Barber is free to take up that responsibility or not and even though the other does not specify the set of norms to be obeyed that realism hoped to find deducible from normative entities. For Levinas, the domain preceding reflection is not morally neutral; indeed, one’s reflection itself is inspired by and responsive to the summons to responsibility for the other issues, even though this preceding summons is often discoverable after one has already commenced reflecting, as when one finds the other’s order in the response that one has already enacted or when one detects that order in one’s already implemented obedience to it.62 Phenomenological reflection on the experience of the other discloses a field of experience that precedes reflection, that is not void of moral inducements, and that contrasts with the seeming moral neutrality preceding the reflective conferral of moral value according to Korsgaard. There would appear then to be an additional “source of normativity,” in a special Levinasian sense, from beyond the domain of reflection in which Korsgaard situates her ultimate source. That Levinas is advocating for such a counter-source to the sphere of reflection becomes clear insofar as he argues for a kind of continual tension and dialectic between the reflection introduced by the appearance of the third party and the face-to-face signifyingness of the one for the other.63 There is, he says, from the side of post-third reflection, an “incessant correction of the asymmetry of proximity in which the face is looked at.”64 Conversely, proximity challenges the reflective equilibrium that follows on the Third, and hence justice, determined after the Third’s intervention and pertaining to the sphere of principles and weighing conflicting claims, should not be just a matter of seeking social equilibrium and harmonizing antagonistic forces.65 Without proximity, the sphere of reflection that calls for one to take account of all others toward all of whom one is responsible (including oneself) could degenerate into a mere effort to preserve a balance of power, possibly at odds with what is ethically demanded, thereby delivering this entire sphere of reflection over to its own necessities in which reflective processes can succumb to “having their center of gravitation in themselves, and weighing on their own account.”66 It would seem, then, that by assigning to the reflective sphere the ultimate source of normativity, Korsgaard neglects such a dialectical counter-pole, a counter-source of normativity that Levinas has identified and that calls even one’s reflectivity itself to accountability.

3.  A Pre-Reflective Second Source in Korsgaard? To be sure, Nagel’s criticism of Korsgaard moves in the direction of the Levinasian positing of a second source insofar as Nagel advocates that one ought to act out of a non-individualist self-identity that enables her to care more about the survival of others than her own self and that one should stop thinking about oneself instead of the world to which one belongs.67 However, Nagel’s discussion itself unfolds within the reflective

The Second Source of Normativity 39 sphere in which reasons are being considered and in which some reasons take precedence over others, and, as such, they still stand at one remove from the encounter with the other to whom reasons are a response and from whom actions or reasons (such as that the life of others is more valuable than my own) take their start. The Levinasian experience of proximity not only lies behind the reasons offered when one deliberates, but it also shapes one’s personal practical identity “in the fact that infinite exigencies, that of serving the poor, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan converge at one point of the universe.”68 Although Nagel and Korsgaard carry on their debate within the reflective sphere that for Levinas is generated in the encounter with the other, one can imagine Nagel and Korsgaard resolving their own differences by conceiving reasons and one’s practical identity as working in a circular fashion within that sphere. For instance, the reasons one endorses would shape one’s identity, and those reasons could only be reasons at all only because one possesses a certain practical moral identity, however implicit and present on the horizon of consciousness such an identity might be.69 Despite such a possibility of reconciliation among themselves, neither Korsgaard nor Nagel really reach all the way to the second source of normativity that Levinas highlights as a counter-pole to the reflective domain. It could be, however, that Korsgaard herself might have a counterbalance to the ultimate reflective plane on which one assesses proposals for action that arise on pre-reflective soil. For example, although the motives and inclinations that become the stuff of reflective evaluation might be taken as morally neutral, at least until they are reflectively endorsed, it seems more difficult to take as morally neutral the requirements emerging from some of one’s contingent practical identities, such as one’s role as a mother or a citizen or a Quaker.70 On the basis of these identities, one can find oneself summoned to responsibility by and for others, to one’s children, one’s fellow citizens, or those who might be the victims of the kind of violence that Quakers traditionally oppose. As such and within the Levinasian scheme, these persons and the responsibilities they evoke pose a challenge with moral force to one’s effort to determine on the reflective plane what action would be incumbent upon one as a Citizen in the Kingdom of Ends. This moral force consists in requiring one, on a most basic level, to at least try to determine what obligations one has or perhaps even to reconsider how one conceives one’s moral practical identity and the principles it might imply. Nevertheless, Korsgaard’s account of what precedes reflection lacks the clarity and pervasiveness of the moral imperativeness to be found in Levinas’s account. Although Korsgaard acknowledges structural similarities between personal and moral obligations, she considers personal relationships as “independent sources of obligations”71 (but not necessarily moral obligations). Confusingly, they are said to be “structurally just like moral ones,” but they are not “completely subsumed” under such moral obligations.72 Furthermore, personal relationships can be the

40  Michael Barber source of “some particularly intractable conflicts with morality,”73 as if such conflicts arise from beyond the realm of morality rather than within it. While there is certainly a necessary place for the moral evaluation of the obligations that arise from others who engage one’s practical identities, and while one might, with difficulty, be able to imagine some personal obligations that are not moral, it does seem that such obligations themselves, insofar as they proceed from another person at all, confront one inescapably with a summons to moral responsibility counterpoised to the plateau of reflection. It is in the face of the ethically summoning presence of the other that all kinds of particular ethical obligations are evoked, including the ethical obligation to reflect on a meta-level on these particular obligations themselves to determine whether they are morally appropriate or not. Consequently, in the face of the other, one is called upon to continually and reflectively re-attune and reconfigure one’s responses to such summonses and to the other from whom these summonses issue. Besides presenting personal obligations as falling outside the domain that reflective moral endorsement encompasses, Korsgaard does not appreciate, as Levinas does, how the responsibilities evoked by others who engage one’s practical identities are themselves already moral insofar as they originate from the obliging personal presence of the other. While Korsgaard appears ambiguous, Levinas is quite clear that the imperatives emerging from another person are already moral, hence deserving our attention. Furthermore, the scope of moral obligation for Levinas is much wider than that confined within the sphere of reflective endorsement, which in its entirety is itself already a response to an ethical summons from beyond itself. The ethical encounter with the other, by counterbalancing (while also soliciting) reflection on the obligations to be found within that encounter, poses the further question of whether reflection itself is the principal source of normativity. Korsgaard, in fact, starts with our reflectively established moral identity as a Citizen in the Kingdom of Ends, which makes it necessary to have other forms of practical identity, which, in turn, derive part of their importance and part of their normativity from it.74 Here again, one’s membership as a citizen among other ends, a guiding identity uncovered within the reflective sphere, bestows moral worth upon the demands arising from more specific concrete identities, from the top down, as opposed to the Levinasian view in which the other’s summons to responsibility precedes reflection and mediates itself through such concrete demands from the bottom upward, as it were.

4. Levinas Versus Korsgaard on the Priority of the Ethical Summons, Counter-Idealism, and Self-Valuing Levinas, however, is not only indicating another “source” of normativity in addition to the domain of reflection that is central to Korsgaard’s

The Second Source of Normativity 41 framework. His second source, the ethical demand that another’s presence by itself presents, is not just on a par with the level of reflection that it elicits, but rather it takes on a kind of priority over “justice,” understood as the reflective balancing and weighing of claims. Justice, undertaken “on an equal footing as before a court justice”75 “is born from the signifyingness of signification, the one-for-the-other.”76 “The law is in the midst of proximity”;77 justice, society, exchanges “are comprehensible out of proximity”;78 and “nothing is outside of the control of the responsibility of the one for the other.”79 In no way is justice meant to degrade obsession,80 and “the equality of all is borne by my inequality, the surplus of my duties over my rights.”81 It is as though reflection itself arises as an island within a sea of obligations impinging on us from many others and many quarters, to all of which we can never do sufficient justice, because of whose extent and intensity we are impelled to resort to balancing and weighing, and on account of which we might find it necessary to restrict our responses to some degree and with regret that we cannot respond adequately to all that is asked. Reflection, then, plays a restraining, critical role in reference to the multiple and pressing responsibilities generated before one even begins to reflect and compelling one to reflect in the first place. If one wanted to find a parallel to the kind of Gestalt shift Levinas calls for when he situates the reflective, delimitating, and adjudicating source of normativity with reference to the never-satisfactorily placable encounter with the other and many others, one might think of what occurs when one practicing Husserlian phenomenology abandons the restraints of the phenomenological reduction. One then enters the natural attitude and finds oneself overwhelmed by experiences that perturb and occlude the clear-sightedness and detachment of the transcendental sphere. Another difference between Levinas and Korsgaard appears in what one might call the idealist motif that surfaces in Korsgaard’s opposition to realism and that Levinas’s paradigm resists. This motif appears in Korsgaard’s defense of the primacy of the reflective endorsement methodology. Moral norms are determined by self-reflection rather than by appealing, as realists do, to objective entities in the world whose “value,” for Korsgaard, really results from realists’ consciousness projecting a value onto them, ignoring this projection, and arguing that the entities possess value of their own. Such an argument bears resemblance to arguments for idealism, such as those of Hegel, who, for instance, commences with knowers who find themselves cut off from objects, incapable of reaching them, and tormented by this gap that they cannot cross. For instance, the Kantian idea of a “thing in itself” represents just such a predicament since one can never reach the noumenal Ding-an-sich lying behind phenomena. For Hegel, though, to overcome this disconnection all one needs to do is to recognize that the noumenon is simply a product of one’s imagination: that is, a dreamed-up, anxiety-producing fantasy

42  Michael Barber that the way the object appears may not be the way it actually is. If one drops this fantasy of the thing in itself, one can be at peace, content with dealing with objects only as they appear (as phenomena). Similarly, for Korsgaard, the realist projects values onto objective, value-neutral entities that are then claimed to embody the values that, in turn, bind the realist. Once the realist realizes that the idea of an object endowed with objective values is nothing but the realist’s own self-projection on the world, then one is free to locate the real source of normativity in one’s self, in one’s reflective sphere in which one endorses inclinations, motivations, or obligations insofar as they lead to one acting consistently with one’s practical identity as a Citizen in the Kingdom of Ends. While Korsgaard’s perspective mimics the idealist pattern of withdrawing from extraversion to find the origins of moral value in oneself—a move that could tend to diminish the moral value coming to one from beyond oneself—Korsgaard could nevertheless defend herself by stating that the practical identity of being a Citizen in the Kingdom of Ends requires that one affirm not only one’s own value but also that of others as equals of oneself. Before considering this response, though, we need to examine how Levinas struggles, too, with this idealist motif, and such a struggle underpins his entire approach. In his earlier writings, Levinas repeatedly opposes the idea that the other’s summons to responsibility by which we are bound is something that we have originally produced or projected onto the other since such a view risks attenuating the summons’s moral force by absorbing it within the sphere of our own power. In Totality and Infinity, he notes that “the other imposes himself as an exigency that dominates this [my] freedom, and hence as more primordial than everything that takes place in me.”82 However, in contrast to this earlier paradigm in which the other stands over against me, independently of any appropriative activity on my part, Levinas, in Otherwise Than Being, seems to incline toward a kind of “idealism” to which Korsgaard’s reflective endorsement might be compared insofar as the source of normativity “out there” emerges first from within me. Hence, I find in my present that trace of a past (the obliging of me by the other). Similarly, maternity becomes a metaphor for the gestation of the other in me, the groaning of my wounded entrails through which I become aware of a moral persecution by another in me.83 Or I find the order of the other in my response.84 In all these references, it is within myself first that I locate the other’s summons, in a manner that parallels the way in which reflective endorsement replaces the realist’s projection of value outside herself, and the idealist comes to understand that the mysterious noumenon is nothing more than consciousness’s projection. However, a careful reading of Otherwise Than Being shows that Levinas shifts to a temporal paradigm that still points to an irreducible ethical summons by the other, there before we ever assume it, appropriate it, bring it into our present, respond to it, or even become aware

The Second Source of Normativity 43 of it. Hence, I find myself responsible prior to any commitment on my part,85 or the origin of that responsibility is never present but is rather an immemorial past that can never be brought into my present.86 One can draw parallels between Levinas’s theoretical maneuvers here and Husserl’s epistemic transcendental idealism. What is outside me cannot be given except by reference to what is going on within me, and what is objective cannot be given except by reference to my intentionality toward it, but nevertheless what is objective is not my own product, retains its independence from me, and acts on me prior to my response. However, one must not press such resemblances too far insofar as the Husserlian paradigm is epistemic in character and insofar as Levinas operates within an ethical framework in which the serenity of knowing consciousness, which is adequate to its objects, is broken up by the extreme urgency of assignation,87 by a modality of obsession which is known but not a knowing.88 In this question of an idealist derivation of moral obligation, Levinas can be seen to be struggling from the beginning against any possible idealist diminishment of the ethical summons of the other by absorbing it within one’s theoretical framework. In contrast to Levinas, Korsgaard seems inclined at first to embrace idealist tendencies against her realist opponents, and then, only within that reflective framework, she would be able, I have argued, to resist such a diminishment or absorption of the value of the other by appealing to anyone’s ultimate practical identity as a Citizen within a Kingdom of Ends in which others are ends in themselves as much as oneself. Given their different emphases, Levinas’s opposition to idealism appears from the start and is constantly fundamental to his project, and hence he seems to have a deeper appreciation than Korsgaard of the danger that idealistic tendencies pose for reducing the irreducible summons of the other to one’s own productive activity. At the same time, however, Levinas’s account of the other’s ethical summons involves no reversion to realism: that is, the belief in “moral facts or entities . . . in order to explain our moral beliefs and motives,”89 which Korsgaard rejects from the outset. One does not experience the other the way one experiences realist objective values. Realist objective values, according to Hobbes and Pufferndorf, are legislated by God who commands that we engage in specific prescribed actions and whose creation provides us with objective truths from which we can read off our obligations for no other reason than because God has willed them.90 For Korsgaard, this effort to establish realist objective values originated when skeptics, inspired by the natural sciences, rejected the idea that there are moral entities, intrinsically normative entities, which would be able to make such knowledge possible. Moral philosophers, responding to such skeptics, “frantically”91 sought to find and point out precisely the kinds of entities that skeptics categorize as “queer” and nonexistent, in order to demonstrate that there are such entities that could provide for morality the kind of objective facts, like those that lie at the basis of science.92

44  Michael Barber Korsgaard, however, denies that the normative question is a request for science-like knowledge, rejects the moral realism that seeks to provide it and, consequently, locates the source of normativity in reflection. Levinas, too, would oppose the same kind of moral realism that Korsgaard repudiates insofar as the summons of the other has nothing to do with a moral realist effort to establish objective moral facts from which one could derive moral knowledge. Rather, the other calls one to responsibility, even prior to and evocative of Korsgaard’s reflective endeavor to determine reflectively what one’s moral obligations are: that is, from outside this reflective sphere and in tension with it. For Levinas, the other exerts a pull on the whole person who is affectively and intellectually drawn into responsibility, and Levinas’s phenomenological account of this experience is not part of an overarching project to construct a system of knowing parallel to scientific knowing. Moreover, Levinas is clear that, when it comes to the relationship with the other, “there is no meaning in speaking here of knowledge or ignorance.”93 Again, “extreme urgency is the modality of obsession—which is known but is not a knowing.”94 Another difference between Levinas and Korsgaard can be detected in their account of how the self comes to value itself. Starting with specific practical identities, Korsgaard proceeds to reflect on the universal structures at work in the variety of practical identities to which we are committed. For example, although we embrace a wide diversity of specific identities (e.g., as mother, teacher, or personnel manager), we each must, in fact, endorse some conception of our practical identity, unless we simply allow ourselves to be determined by any inclinations haphazardly eliciting our response, but then we would end up lacking any reason to do one thing or another and even any reason to live and act at all.95 Here, though, in the very choice to conform (or not) to the requirements arising from lower-level practical identities, one never loses one’s ultimate, generalized identity as a human being, “as a reflective animal who needs reasons to act and live.”96 Hence, behind our choices to live out our contingent, practical identities lies our value of ourselves as human beings. The importance of performing in accord with these lower-level identities “is partly derived from the importance of being human.”97 Consequently, as Kant saw, the value of our humanity, as an end in itself, is implicit in every choice that we make.98 Korsgaard’s discovery of the value of one’s humanity, however, depends on one having already embarked upon reflection. One is considering reflectively what to endorse regarding the solicitations to act arising from one’s contingent practical identities, and one finds through reflection a norm in the valuing of one’s identity as a human being implicit in those lower-level valuings. Levinas, by contrast, reaches back to a moment before reflection, to the moment when reflection is born, when “consciousness is born as the presence of the third party.”99 For Levinas, it is the “extraordinary commitment of the other to the third party that

The Second Source of Normativity 45 calls for control, a search for justice.”100 If reflection, as Levinas holds, is launched after the Third appears, it is not that one reflects on the appearance of the Third and then infers that, just as the other whom I serve also serves the Third, so now the other becomes my equal in service.101 This would be to put reflection itself at the basis of reflection, rather than one’s ethical responsibility to the other that lies at the basis of the Third, whose appearance and ethical summons elicits reflection in the first place. Instead, the mechanism of transference of ethical responsibility from the other to the Third to oneself may involve something like a non-inferential passive synthesis by which the similarity of my service to the other and the other’s service of the Third evokes my recognition of our equality in service to each other. Likewise, I find myself “approached as an other by the others,”102 and the reverential accord given to all the others whom I serve and whom the other I serves is immediately and passive-synthetically transferred to me. As a result, Levinas states, “my lot is important,”103 and “I am counted among them.”104 So for Levinas, the valuing of myself, which Korsgaard finds by reflecting on the valuing at work in my lower-level identities, takes its origin when the impressive force with which the other summons me to value him or her in our face-to-face encounter is immediately transferred to the many others and back on to me. When Levinas states, “ ‘Thanks to God’ I am another for the others,”105 he expresses the surprise that, without any preplanning, inference, or rationalization, the very valuing that the other evoked from me should come around to be conferred back on me as another among all others. For Levinas, my self becomes the object of the same powerful reverence that the other first solicits from me, as if every ethical response I give to another is already intimately and immediately linked to and reinforcing of my own self-worth. Self-valuing, rooted in the intensity of such reverence, would be based on the experience of the infinity of the other, “stronger than murder,”106 which is the fundament and moving engine of the entire Levinasian project. By contrast, the Korsgaardian motivation of self-valuing, discovered by a meta-level, abstract reflection that, in valuing my other practical identities, I am implicitly already valuing my own humanity and myself as an end in myself, lacks the energy, forcefulness, and tight integration with my obligations to others beyond myself that are to be found in the Levinasian scheme.

5. Conclusion: The Two Sources of Normativity and the Challenge to Autonomy-Based Ethics As mentioned in the summary of The Sources of Normativity, after Korsgaard explains how the norm of one’s practical identity as a Citizen in the Kingdom of Ends governs the process of reflective endorsement, she raises the self-critical question of whether she has shown only that one must value one’s own humanity as an end in itself but not yet that

46  Michael Barber of others. This predicament, she acknowledges, might be interpreted as resulting from the autonomy-based views of the sort she is developing insofar as such views are taken to be “unduly individualistic”107 and “to exclude deep forms of affiliation with others.”108 But for her the predicament rests on the mistaken premise that reasons are private, and any attempt to reason about why reasons are public already presupposes what it attempts to prove. Rather than offering such reasons, then, she points to our “social nature.”109 Our social nature is an unavoidable ontological fact about us that lies at the root of our giving reasons and thereby renders them public from the start. In fleshing out this point, she appeals to what seems to be a series of phenomenological descriptions that illustrate our social nature and that occur on a pre-theoretical level. For instance, we do not need a reason to take another’s reasons into account since we do so immediately. In hearing your words, I do not hear sounds but at once recognize you as someone; likewise, when we meet, you get under my skin, and you intrude upon me. Even the pain of animals presents itself as something to be relieved; their shrieks are not “sounds” but expressions that we understand and provide us immediate reasons for changing their condition or situation. All these experiences illustrate the social nature we share with others that precludes us from thinking that what each of us takes for “reasons” only belong to ourselves, or myself, and not to any other. Further, in such experiences it is as though animals and human beings by their very presence and expression lay claim to some kind of moral response on our part, and Korsgaard acknowledges such a claim when stating, “for it is the most familiar fact of human life that the world contains entities that can tell us what to do and make us do it. These are people, and the other animals.”110 Consequently, she feels herself impelled to reject Mackie’s view that scientific findings evacuate the world of such queer things as intrinsically normative entities, and she even goes so far as to assert that realism may be true on this level, despite her earlier criticism of its explanation of the source of normativity. One can wonder, though, about whether such a social ontology really provides the underlying basis for the fact that reasons are not essentially private but public or whether, at an experiential level before we ever elaborate a social ontology, the human or animal other enjoins an ethical obligation upon us, as Levinas suggests. The experience of the ethical relationship with the other, rather than our sharing the same ontological status, underpins the publicity of our reasons. To be sure, at some level, one must recognize cognitively that it is another human being who, in speaking (similar to the way one would speak oneself), commands one’s attention or an animal that shrieks in pain and that their expressions are dissimilar to the noises of an alarm clock. One could say that the recognition of such commonality takes place immediately, without theorizing, without drawing any ontological conclusions, again through passive syntheses of the similarities between me and the human or animal other.111

The Second Source of Normativity 47 But then, as Levinas points out, the phenomenality of the object collapses into a face112—that is, the summons to responsibility to and for the other supervenes on the recognition of similarities with such impressiveness and with the urgency of assignation113 that the similarities of which one would be cognitively aware between me and the other recede to the horizons of experience. Even to give a reason why one ought to consider another’s reasons, which Korsgaard rightly considers to be futile, would also be at one remove from the demand for attention raised ethically as soon as the other appears before me and offers me a reason. The other’s mere presence upsets and challenges my tranquility and indifference and so is experienced as imposing upon me and inviting a response. To take the speech of an interlocutor standing before me as mere sounds would amount, then, to a kind of ethical disservice. Likewise, the animal in pain already morally appeals to us to provide relief. In brief, the ethical entreaty of the other can explain why giving reasons for giving reasons seems to be a rather superfluous abstraction, and this ethical experience precedes any subsequent explanation of that superfluity based on elaborating a social ontology that would also build on a stratum of prior experiences, whether ethical or epistemological in nature. In fact, Korsgaard’s attributing the origin of the public character of reasons to social ontology instead of to the ethical imperatives of the other has the effect of muting or hiding those imperatives. Indeed, the very experiences she selects and phenomenologically sketches to substantiate our social nature (e.g., a human being speaking to us or an animal in pain crying out) are already suffused with the kind of ethical meaning that reflects the deepest layer of their significance and that provides the ultimate support for her insistence that we are not isolated within the circle of our own reasons. The question arises, further, why Korsgaard brings up only in Lecture 4 such concrete cases in which one seems to experience normativity as emerging within one’s face-to-face encounter with the other and only to illustrate why the reasons she has given in the first three lectures are not merely private but already thoroughly public. Why did such encounters seem to play little if any role at all prior to the undertaking of the reflective attitude that becomes prominent in Lectures 2 and 3? Even though, as we have suggested, the other, as a child or spouse or friend or student, commands us through the practical identities that constitute us, Korsgaard114 tends to deemphasize the moral, even personal, nature of such demands by associating them with the morally neutral inclinations, incentives, motives, and impulses that were the stuff of reflection for Hume and Williams, that epistemically provoke the adoption of the reflective stance, and that all need to be further evaluated for Korsgaard in the light of our ultimate practical identity as Citizens in the Kingdom of Ends. These personal appellants, further, by being situated outside the reflective sphere, her ultimate source of normativity, become, consequently, assimilated with the sources of normativity that the realists, looking for a science-like

48  Michael Barber foundation for ethics, insist upon, such as objective values, normative entities, or a divine legislator that makes it possible for one to read off one’s objective moral obligations. Korsgaard refuses to recognize in any of these objective values or objects a source of normativity since any value emanating from them and producing confidence in them as objectively binding originates from that confidence in the first place rather than causing it. Korsgaard tends to refuse to recognize any source of normativity outside the reflective domain because anything which would play the role of such a source would have to be recognized by reflection as such. As a result, Korsgaard is right when she acknowledges at the end of Lecture 3 that she is advocating an “autonomy-based” view, even though she acknowledges that she wants to avoid the individualism and exclusion of affiliation often characterizing such views. However, had she considered, before the opening of Lecture 2, which insists on the importance of the reflective sphere, the ways in which others oblige us, as she does in Lecture 4 in order to illustrate that reasons are already public, she might have uncovered from the start another “source” of normativity. That source would be the one that Levinas has illuminated, the other whose presence evokes responsibility, invites a wide range of possible responses (from feeding the other to letting the other pass through a doorway first to reflecting on one’s obligations), and even enjoins the reflection to determine the appropriateness of any responses. This source of normativity, however, does not permit one to read off the specific kinds of moral obligations as realism had hoped for from normative entities. At the same time, this source of normativity, which through the appearance of the Third engenders the necessity and importance of reflection as another source of normativity, the reflectivity that Korsgaard recognizes, stands as continual counter-pole to such a reflective domain. The experience of the other’s summons stimulates the rise of reflection, poses for it continual questions and challenges, and thereby takes a priority over it by providing the context in which it originates and to which it is always beholden and responsible. Levinas provides a kind of foundation that would have ensured that the autonomy-based perspective that Korsgaard admits she is advocating might have been able to overcome more decisively the individualism and antipathy to affiliation that she rightly recognizes often characterize perspectives of the type she recommends. In fact, the structure of Korsgaard’s autonomy-based argument falls short of the full appreciation for the social source of normativity that the Levinasian point of view makes available. By beginning with the rejection of realism and turning to reflection as the ultimate source of normativity because anything outside of the reflective sphere will only oblige because reflection recognizes it and grants it such obligating power, Korsgaard could be seen to reproduce the ideals typical of many individualistic autonomous-based ethics. That ideal is that we as autonomous reflective

The Second Source of Normativity 49 agents should be wary of being subordinated to anything outside ourselves, whether it be desires, impulses, inclinations, motives, or the responsibilities generated by lower-level practical identities. To be sure, Korsgaard’s including of these lower-level responsibilities springing from our social relationships and her replacing the Kantian principle of self-love with the principles associated with such contingent practical identities115 help reduce the individualism often characterizing such autonomy-based ethics. In addition, she rightly defends herself against Nagel’s charge that her idea of an ultimate practical identity appears to be idiosyncratic, “existentialist,” and “relativist” by insisting that her ideal of one’s ultimate identity as being a Citizen in the Kingdom of Ends requires that one “conceive oneself as related to others in a certain way—it is not a private ideal.”116 But perhaps her strongest defense might be to claim the attitude of reflective distance taken toward solicitations to action from whatever corner they derive need not involve a wariness of being subordinated to others but simply a kind of cognitive and affective neutrality, through which one will dispassionately and fairly consider what proposals to action one ought to endorse reflectively in the light of one’s identity as a Citizen in the Kingdom of Ends. In other words, although Korsgaard repeats a pattern of argument common to individualist autonomy-based ethics, opposing the normativity that realists believe external facts and divine legislators impose upon us in favor of recovering the source of normativity in ourselves and our reflectivity, she could argue that such reflectivity does not imply a wariness, particularly of others whose demands impinge on us because of our contingent practical identities. And would not Levinas, too, at the level of the Third, have to engage in a similar kind of reflection, not based on wariness but rather neutrality, if such reflection is to achieve the kind of “weighing,”117“comparison,”118 “measuring,”119 and “disinterestedness,”120 on a “terrain common to me and the others where I am counted among them,”121 “on an equal footing as before a court of justice”?122 What is distinctive, though, for Levinas—and what is not clear in Korsgaard—has to do with the ethical experience of the other out of which such reflection emerges and in which one can find a counterbalancing source of normativity to the domain of reflection. If “nothing is outside of the control of the responsibility of the one for the other”123 and if one’s sense of asymmetrical responsibility for the other never disappears even after the Third appears, then one would continually be concerned to ensure that, as far as possible, the needs and desires of every other, including oneself, are met. One would embark upon reflection not because one is suspicious or fearful of others or because one wishes to remain neutral, but because one takes them so seriously that one would like to do everything in one’s power to ensure their well-being and the value of their humanity and because one knows at the same time that because claims conflict and resources are lacking,

50  Michael Barber one might not be able to do all that they require. Given that reflection in general presupposes a certain disinterest and neutrality, the relations of proximity out of which reflection rises would continually counterbalance any indifference to others or any insensitivity to their demands to which such reflective distance might be prone. Furthermore, one could not allow oneself within the reflective domain to assume an attitude of superiority, as if one’s assumption of the reflective stance constituted oneself as a tribunal to which others are subordinated, subjected, and liable to be judged by one’s own standards that one might be inclined, mistakenly, to consider beyond any criticism. In addition, should the weighing of claims end in justifiably favoring some over others, such decisions would always be accompanied by a sense of tragedy, a wish that more could have been done and the needs even of the “losers” accommodated. One would be less able to pursue reflection in the comfort that reflection often allows but would find oneself troubled by the welter of counterdemands encountered and by the never-finished character of one’s reflection as morally bound to others. Justice “summons me to go beyond the straight line of justice, and henceforth nothing can mark the end of this march.”124 “Duties become greater in the measure that they are accomplished,”125 and “the equality of all being is born by my inequality, the surplus of my duties over my rights.”126 If Korsgaard could have incorporated this second source of normativity within her theory that prioritizes reflective endorsement and seems to lack any significant counterweight to its ultimacy, she would have been able to overcome better the individualism to which autonomy-based ethics are prone and to protect reflective endorsement from the indifferent serenity to which it might be predisposed. In sum, Levinas’s counter-source ensures that equality and serenity of practical rationality are bound continually and inescapably to the “extreme urgency of the assignation.”127

Notes 1. Cristine Korsgaard, with G. A. Cohen, Raymond Geuss, Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams, The Sources of Normativity, ed. Onora O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 89. 2. Ibid., 92. 3. Ibid., see also 91, 103–4, 117, 125, 128, 165. 4. Ibid., 89. Emphasis in original. 5. Ibid., 21, 22–29, 37. 6. Ibid., 29–30. 7. Ibid., 40. 8. Ibid., 45–46. 9. Ibid., 46. 10. Ibid., 55–56, 59. 11. Ibid., 60. 12. Ibid., 67, 75. 13. Ibid., 89. 14. Ibid., 93.

The Second Source of Normativity 51 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

Ibid., 97–98. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 120. Ibid., 99. Ibid. Ibid., 107. Ibid., 120–21. Ibid., 121. Ibid., 129. Thomas Nagel, “Universality and the Reflective Self,” in The Sources of Normativity, ed. Christine Korsgaard, G. A. Cohen, Raymond Geuss, Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams, foreword by Onora O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 203. Ibid., 206. Ibid. Christine Korsgaard, “Reply,” in The Sources of Normativity, ed. Christine Korsgaard, G. A. Cohen, Raymond Geuss, Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams, foreword by Onora O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 251. Ibid., 128. Ibid., 130. Ibid., 128. Ibid., 130. Ibid., 133. Emphasis in original. Ibid., 135. Ibid., 136. Ibid., 139–40. Ibid., 140. Ibid., 143. Emphasis in original. Ibid., 136. Ibid., 130. Ibid., 147. Ibid., 149. Ibid., 150. Ibid., 153. Ibid. Ibid., 166. Ibid. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1981), 157. Ibid. Ibid., 157, 160. Ibid., 157–61. Ibid., 158. Ibid. Ibid., 157. Ibid., 158. Ibid. Ibid. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay in Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 81. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 82, 82–84, 201. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 162; see also Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 81.

52  Michael Barber 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, 48. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 148, 150. Ibid., 159. Ibid., 158. Ibid., 159. Ibid. Nagel, “Universality and the Reflective Self,” 206. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 245. Korsgaard, “Reply,” 248. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, 120. Ibid., 148. Ibid. Ibid., 128. Emphasis added. Korsgaard, “Reply,” 219. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 157. Ibid., 159. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 87. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 75. Ibid., 147–50. Ibid., 103, 109, 116, 138. Ibid., 88, 107, 168. At this point, one might see a possible Levinasian response to an objection that Korsgaard might raise against the Levinas critique. While Levinas seems to be appealing to a pre-reflective, pre-theoretical summons from the other, Korsgaard, in a move that might reestablish the priority of reflective endorsement framework, might object that Levinas himself must rely on the reflective-theoretical framework of philosophy even to make the case for that which is pre-theoretical and pre-reflective and that challenges the level of reflection and theory. Derrida made something of a similar case in his essay “Violence and Metaphysics,” namely one must use philosophy to capture that which places philosophy in question. However, Levinas himself, in what would amount to an extension of his struggle against idealism, acknowledges that he must rely on theory to get at what precedes theory. But even then, in his very recognition that his theory betrays the saying of the ethical relationship in the said of his theory, Levinas objects that even to see this problem is to recognize the distinctiveness of the saying relationship from the theory that presents it. He even contrasts the diachronic time at which one recognizes the summoning, never-encompassed moment of the ethical encounter (the “conditioned”) with the time of a subsequent reflection on the theory the conveys the saying relationship and that synchronically ties everything together at once (the theory’s “conditions” of presenting what is conditioned by them). Furthermore, just as philosophical refutations never suppress the skepticism that continually arises after supposedly being refuted, so the ethical saying relationship emerges again after philosophical theory seems to subdue and domesticate it within theory. See Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 156, 171. That Korsgaard’s own theory seems to escape such a tortured dialectic has to do with the fact that she has no significant counter-ballast to the theoretical sphere of reflective endorsement. Along these lines, one might be tempted to think that if Levinas is describing what is pre-theoretical, his account of the summons of the other

The Second Source of Normativity 53 is rationally defenseless compared to the kind of rational defense that Korsgaard can mount of the ultimacy of one’s character as a citizen in the kingdom of ends, a defense that reflects on ultimate ends already implicit in the pursuit of lower-level practical identities. This question, too, represents a version of Derrida’s critique of Levinas: in pointing to the other that places philosophy in question, Levinas has undercut any philosophical basis for any of his claims about the other’s summons. However, Levinas does argue that his “theory”—and he does have a theory—reduces the betrayal of the saying in the said. That “theory” actually involves phenomenology, a kind of describing of phenomena that attempts to lead one’s interlocutor to see what the phenomenologist sees in the case at hand, the summons of the other evoking one’s responses. Levinas’s ultimate “source” of normativity is no less rationally defensible than is Korsgaard’s ultimate source; it is just that the kind of rationality that Levinas deploys is of a different character. 87. Ibid., 87. 88. Ibid., 88. 89. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, 45. 90. Ibid., 24, 33, 46–47. 91. Ibid., 47. 92. Ibid. 93. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 89. 94. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 88. 95. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, 121. 96. Ibid. 97. Ibid. 98. Ibid., 122. 99. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 161. 100. Ibid. 101. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 213. 102. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 158. 103. Ibid., 161. 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid. 106. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 199. 107. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, 126. 108. Ibid. 109. Ibid., 135. 110. Ibid., 166. 111. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960). 112. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 88. 113. Ibid., 89. 114. For Korsgaard, the desires about which we must deliberate do not simply derive immediately from impulse but arise from a complex interplay of instinct and reason (Korsgaard, “Reply,” 238–39), but she adds that “it remains true that at the moment of action these impulses are the incentives, the passively confronted material upon which the active will operates, and not the agent or active will itself.”(240–41). 115. Korsgaard, “Reply,” 243. 116. Ibid., 246. 117. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 158. 118. Ibid., 161. 119. Ibid., 160.

54  Michael Barber 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127.

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 157. Ibid., 159. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 245. Ibid., 244. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 159. Ibid., 87.

Bibliography Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to the Phenomenology, translated by Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960. Korsgaard, Christine, G. A. “Reply.” In The Sources of Normativity, edited by Christine Korsgaard, G. A. Cohen, Raymond Geuss, Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams, foreword by Onora O’Neill, 219–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Korsgaard, Christine, G. A. Cohen, Raymond Geuss, Thomas Nagel, and Bernard Williams. The Sources of Normativity, edited by Onora O’Neill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay in Exteriority, translated by Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979. ———. Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1981. Nagel, Thomas. “Universality and the Reflective Self.” In The Sources of Normativity, edited by Christine Korsgaard, G. A. Cohen, Raymond Geuss, Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams, foreword by Onora O’Neill, 200–9. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

3 Grounding and Maintaining Answerability Michael Fagenblat

455. We are inclined to say: “When we mean something, there is no dead picture here (no matter of what kind), but, rather, it’s like going towards someone.” We go towards the thing we mean. 456. “When one means something, it is oneself that means”; so one sets oneself in motion. One rushes ahead, and so cannot also observe one’s rushing ahead. Indeed not. 457. Yes, meaning something is like going towards someone. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

1.  Two Ways of Being Answerable There are two philosophical objectives to Totality and Infinity, both concisely stated in the preface. One is to show that “we are not duped by morality” (1969: 21/5); the other consists of “a defense of subjectivity” (1969: 26/11). Yet the relation between these objectives is not obvious for they seem to invite two quite different types of inquiry. Levinas does not specify exactly what he means by subjectivity, though he is clearly working with the concept as it is developed from Kant through German Idealism, Kierkegaard, Husserl, and Heidegger. We can hazard a definition. Subjectivity is the awareness of one’s first-person singular existence as answerable to the normative claims of meaning. Thus characterized, the overlap between subjectivity and morality is at best partial. Subjectivity accompanies all first-person singular experience, not just moral experience. Moreover, the moral claim is often “agent neutral”; it appeals to me without regard for my personal point of view, answerable as one among others, as a “member of the moral community” or a rational being, for example, just the same as others. Levinas, of course, construes morality in radically first-personal, “agent-relative” terms, and thus, for him, the vindication of morality and subjectivity coincide. But how and why this is the case is not stated. Anyone who naturally enough thinks that subjectivity and morality readily come apart must be puzzled. How and why do a vindication of morality and a defense of subjectivity coincide? How do the two main objectives of Totality and Infinity converge?

56  Michael Fagenblat It is by following the two lines of inquiry to the level of their grounding that Levinas seeks to establish the essential coinciding of morality and subjectivity. The aim is to vindicate not the fact of moral answerability or its occurrent norms but the grounds of moral answerability; so, too, the defense of subjectivity aims not at the ubiquity of being aware of and answerable to meaning claims but at the grounds of that awareness of answerability. The idea is not that the respective range of morality and subjectivity coincide but that the grounds of morality and the grounds of subjectivity coincide. For reasons that will become apparent, I use the term grounding as did Heidegger: “grounding something means making possible the why-question in general.”1 The why-question in general is not an empirical question that asks after a causal explanation for the entity, whether it be provided by natural or social science. It is an inquiry into the grounds of the intelligibility of entities, the grounds of the asstructure of meaning in virtue of which it is possible to be directed at something as something so that one can thereby think or talk about it. If we can indulge in an old-fashioned word, it is a matter of accounting for the presence of things, that which enables a thing—any thing, be it an object, an affect, a concept, a situation, or whatever—to disclose some aspect of itself as such-and-such and thereby be an intentional object, an item toward which consciousness or comportment can be directed.2 Construed in this transcendental sense, Levinas’s thought is that the “why-question in general” of intelligibility—why does this mean that?— is finally grounded in moral answerability to the Other. As an inquiry into grounding, “ethics” is not only a groundwork for the metaphysics of morals but a groundwork for the metaphysics of meaning, a point likewise made by Heidegger in his reading of Kant: “ ‘Metaphysics of Morals’ means the ontology of human existence.”3 Grounding moral answerability is to be distinguished from being morally answerable. Levinas has little to say about being morally answerable, as do I. Being morally answerable is merely the point of departure for the why-question, a way of setting out toward the grounds—why be morally answerable? If Levinas were talking about being answerable rather than grounding answerability, the incessant appeal to (and of) “responsibility” would amount to an uncritical acceptance of whatever authority is empowered to exercise its demands, whether it be convention, conscience, or the police. Merely being responsible, as Blanchot cautioned, amounts to adopting “a notion moralistically assigned to us as a (political) duty . . . in a prosaic bourgeois manner . . . which the language of ordinary morality uses in the most facile way possible by putting it into the service of order.”4 What interests Levinas, however, is not the adoption of existing ways of allocating accountability but the grounding of an answerability that cuts through and across, even at times undermining, such ways of distributing responsibility. Seeking the grounds of answerability presupposes nothing about ordinary norms and determined

Grounding and Maintaining Answerability 57 conceptions of being morally answerable; indeed, it maintains a critical vigilance with respect to the norms of answerability that govern everyday life. One of the aims of this chapter is to explain how ethics maintains a critique of the norms of everyday answerability. The other is to show how this critique goes to the grounds of the why-question of meaning in general.

2.  Meaning Something Is Like Going Towards Someone In the epigraph, as elsewhere,5 Wittgenstein proposes an analogy between the experience of meaning and the approach to another person congruent with the two modes of being answerable that interest Levinas. Phenomenologically construed, the experience of meaning is the experience of something as something. Units of intelligibility (however simple or complex, abstract or concrete, present or absent) manifest by virtue of their as-structure. The basic feature of intelligibility is the claim something makes in being or meaning what it is, and I shall limit myself to this, ignoring the modalized affordances of units of meaning, which they also bear as possibilities, necessities, hypotheticals, and conditionals for action. To speak of an intelligible unity as a claim is to cede the initiative of its intelligibility “to the thing itself” and thus, as Levinas says of Husserl, to conceive of subjectivity as “the place where everything answers [répond] for itself.”6 Objects invite (silently, forcefully, equivocally, etc.) being seen or understood as such-and-such, they solicit intelligibility by showing up as such-and-such. That’s why I can be wrong about things, for they provide me with ways of measuring their intelligibility, and I am answerable to their standards, at least if I want to understand or comport myself towards them. Phenomenology stands at the antipodes to constructivism. Subjectivity is responsive to the antecedent validity structures of the things themselves. It’s the simplest thing. I open my eyes, and there they are, things claiming to be this or that. Even before I open my eyes—for the source of meaning-claims is not the present of consciousness but something always older. And yet to come, for after these eyes close, each night when I sleep and (I assume) for the final time in the long night that awaits them, meanings will lay their claim (even if I am not there to receive them). It is because the initiative of intelligibility belongs to phenomena that “pure consciousness” is answerability to meaning-claims. Things can therefore surprise me, turning out to be not what I first thought. I can be wrong about them, or right, improve my understanding or sharpen my vision of them, and so forth. What is important here is that the intentional relation—about, of, etc.—is preserved precisely when it becomes evident that I am mistaken. For the measure of things is not mine, things are not mere “projections.” Since the initiative belongs with the things themselves one must, if one is to understand them, approach them with the measure they provide and at an appropriate speed. Just like people.

58  Michael Fagenblat It’s like going towards someone. We go towards the thing we mean (¶455). Without an adequate measure and pace, I won’t be able to understand anything. There is no dead picture here (no matter of what kind), when we mean something because meaning is always corrigible, unforeseeable, dependent on others and future occasions. To receive or respond to the claims of meaning, to access the simple as-structure of an entity, one must therefore maintain attention to its open-endedness, respect for its unforeseeability, care for its way of giving itself in this specific context, and humility in the face of the essential possibility of misunderstanding that it essentially contains. Epistemic virtues are grounded in the forms of moral virtues (if not in the moral virtues directly) for it is the form of moral virtues like attention to others, respect, care, and humility that sustain the phenomenology of epistemic virtue. Moreover, one is oneself at stake in the measure and motion of meaning something—“When one means something, it is oneself that one means.” And because one is always at stake in motion, temporally—“one rushes ahead”—one cannot observe oneself as such (¶456). The approach, the measure, the motion, the no dead image (Bild), the being oneself at stake, rushing ahead and being unable to observe oneself as such. Yes, for Levinas, meaning something is like going towards someone (¶457). All the likenesses to which Wittgenstein points in these paragraphs are elaborated by Levinas.

3.  The Temporal Grounds of Meaning Something Levinas says that the moral claim “deformalizes” or “concretizes” my answerability to meaning-claims. It does so, enigmatically enough, by presenting the concrete form of time “in person.” The two ways of being answerable are thus united through the temporality of the claim; the moral claim provides, “in person,” the concrete temporal grounds for all meaning-claims. Levinas argues that answerability to meaning-claims is founded on answerability to the Other in three ways—conceptually, phenomenologically, and temporally—that are linked by their grounding relation. At the end of this chapter, we will consider how the phenomenological argument is grounded in the temporal argument. Let us now briefly consider how the conceptual argument is grounded in the phenomenological. The conceptual claim is similar to the one made by Donald Davidson in his essay on “The Second Person,” which describes the as-structure of meaning in terms of a hermeneutical triangle, “one apex of which is oneself, the second apex another creature similar to oneself, and the third an object (table or bell) located in a space thus made common.”7 The claim is that the as-structure of the meaning of a thing is implicitly “triangulated” in relation to a second subject who stands for the possibility of considering the thing from another angle, even when no such

Grounding and Maintaining Answerability 59 other subject is present. The sorts of things considered by implicit triangulation are not only physical objects; any coherent unit of meaning is implicitly triangulated, including one’s own private thoughts, memories, fantasies, and so forth. Mere access to “the same” mental content implies another point of view to the one in which I access that very content now. The other point of view belongs to “the second-person,” even if, in the course of time, I myself occupy its perspective, for example, by walking (or imagining myself walking) around the table or by representing the object of my memory, fantasy, etc. as being the same across time. Levinas of course differs from Davidson in emphasizing that the original access I gain to the possibility of a second-person point of view derives from the “truth” of the exteriority of the Other. This grounds Davidson’s claims concerning the triangulated nature of mental content in the phenomenology of interpersonal life. Thus grounded, the intelligibility of one’s own mental contents are now to be understood as “always already” shared with, and indebted to, the Other. As Levinas puts it, “A proposition is maintained in the outstretched field of questions and answers. A proposition is a sign which is already interpreted, which provides its own key. The presence of the interpretative key in the sign to be interpreted is precisely the presence of the other in the proposition, the presence of him who can come to the assistance of his discourse, the teaching quality of all speech” (1969: 96/69; emphasis added). The implicit “presence of the other in the proposition” is, in Davidson’s terms, that which makes every intelligible thought I have, any thought “about” something as such-and-such, implicitly triangulated via “the second person,” another subject sufficiently similar to oneself. But for Levinas, the conceptual argument is grounded in a phenomenological argument—“To seek truth I have already established a relationship with a face which can guarantee itself” (1969: 202/177)—and this in turn, as we will see, is grounded in a temporal argument. As Levinas said in one of his final interviews, in a comment that reaches all the way back (at least) to Time and the Other and the remarkable analyses of “the instant” in Existence and Existents: “The essential theme of my research is the deformalization of the notion of time.”8 This is because it is impossible to experience or conceive of the as-structure of meaning without accounting for its temporalization. For a thing to be itself is for the thing to be reidentifiable as such-and-such across time. Unities of meaning are concretely constituted as unities by virtue of the temporality of being. Levinas’s way of grounding, then, proposes that there is no claim of meaning without maintaining the unity of the thing meant in time, no way of being answerable to meaning without maintaining oneself in time, and no way of being answerable to meaningclaims without being answerable to the Other. As Levinas conceives it, grounding and maintaining answerability to the Other sustains the entire as-structure of intelligibility to which I am answerable at any moment.

60  Michael Fagenblat

4.  Being Answerable Before considering the temporality of the claim, however, we need to get clearer on what grounding moral answerability entails because, as mentioned, it is possible and indeed common for what passes as moral answerability to be, in truth, merely demands made by some external authority with no legitimate moral claim. Levinas’s aim is to vindicate ethics or morality—the terms are used interchangeably in Totality and Infinity—against the claims of moral nihilists and moral skeptics, not to defend the moralizing standards of established authorities, conceptions, conventions, or roles. The goal is to vindicate the fundamental moral sense and the basic experience of moral conscience, thereby motivating the seriousness of moral deliberation and action, but without taking a stand on first-order moral problems or committing to a particular normative theory. Levinas admits the manifold distortions of morality in historical and natural life (opinion, ideology, politics, error, instinct, unconscious drives, etc.), the ease with which the true source of moral authority can be ignored or violated, and deep, endless uncertainty about how exactly to respond to a moral claim. It is precisely all this warranted suspicion of morality that motivates his quest for the grounds of moral answerability. Consider some plausible accounts of moral answerability that are downstream from the subterranean source Levinas seeks to excavate. Angela Smith suggests that to be morally answerable is to be “eligible for requests for justification and eligible for negative and positive moral responses should those actions turn out to violate or exceed the moral norms or expectations to which I am legitimately subject.”9 To be morally answerable is to be eligible for appraisal—praise, blame, and other ways of being measured—against a standard to which one can be legitimately held. Emphasis on answerability as eligibility to appraisal is important, for the vast majority of my actions do not, in fact, elicit moral responses from others. But they can, and justifiably so, when they violate moral norms to which I am legitimately subject. The goal, then, is to account for how it is that I am legitimately eligible to being morally answerable. By virtue of what, and when, am I legitimately morally answerable? There are two leading candidates. One appeals to “the moral community” that authorizes the norms in light of which one is morally answerable to others. Stephen Darwall’s recourse to the moral community is particularly instructive. On the one hand, the “second-person standpoint” situates moral answerability directly in response to another person who constitutes a legitimate target of praise or blame, a legitimate source of shame or guilt, and a legitimate recipient of gratitude or anger. To be morally answerable, Darwall argues, is to be directly answerable to someone. This seems prima facie conducive to Levinas’s way of vindicating morality. On the other hand, however, Darwall does not ground answerability on the authority of the second-person standpoint but on the authority of

Grounding and Maintaining Answerability 61 the moral community. The second-person standpoint rests on “demands that one (anyone) would sensibly make of all from the shared standpoint of a member of the moral community.”10 It consists in “demands that are ‘in force’ from the moral point of view, that is, from the (first-person plural) perspective of the moral community.”11 Darwall’s approach to the second-person standpoint turns on a conceptual analysis of second-person claims whose legitimacy rests on the moral authority of the community. The legitimacy of such claims “presuppose[s] the authority to demand and hold[s] one another responsible for compliance with moral obligations (which just are the standards to which we can warrantably hold each other as members of the moral community).”12 The justification of the structure of accountability inherent in the second-person standpoint is thus extrinsic to that standpoint. It appeals to the authority of the moral community. For Darwall, we authorize me to hold you to account, and so too we authorize you to hold me to account. From where does the community get its moral authority? Darwall accommodates this problem by appealing to “Fichte’s Point,” which holds that the very possibility of a second-person demand to give reasons assumes an equal normative standing for both parties as free and rational persons. Fichte’s Point suggests that the authority of the community is derived from the authority of individuals with second-person moral standing. But this results in a circular analysis. The authority of the community determines the standards of being accountable to second-person reasoning, yet the community is only authorized to determine such standards by virtue of being constituted by free and rational persons. William H. Smith thus rightly identifies a “normative lacuna” in Darwall’s account, for the authority of the secondperson claims to which I am legitimately answerable is contingent on the legitimacy of the authority of the moral community.13 For Darwall’s purposes, such circularity is not vicious but is rather a feature of the holism of the accountability structure in which second-person reasons arise. “It is assuming a second-person standpoint that gets us inside the circle of interdefinable second-personal notions and that commits us, moreover, to the equal dignity of free and rational persons.”14 Accountability to the second-person standpoint is a presupposition of shared moral life. But why should I enter into the circle of reciprocal accountability? Darwall’s approach does not allow for a moral or even a broadly normative answer to this question, only a psychological one. It is “not optional in any realistic psychological sense” to avoid the circle of reciprocal accountability, he avers.15 Even if this is granted as a sound empirical observation, it does not answer the normative question of why I am morally obliged to take up the second-person standpoint. It simply determines that I am empirically constrained to do so, while grounding the validity of the second-person standpoint in the moral authority of the community. It is the community that authorizes the standards to which one is accountable in the second-person standpoint.

62  Michael Fagenblat The other leading candidate for grounding moral answerability appeals to reason or our rational nature, as does John Gardner. His view is that there is a “basic responsibility” constitutive of human nature. It consists of “the ability to explain oneself, to give an intelligible account of oneself, to answer for oneself, as a rational being. In short it is exactly what it sounds like: response-ability, an ability to respond.”16 Gardner thinks of basic responsibility as grounded in our rational nature, which consists of being able to provide reasons for one’s actions—not only instrumental (Hobbesian) reasons, as when I make excuses in order to avoid unwanted consequences, but (Aristotelian) reasons that make sense of my actions by providing “a good account of myself.”17 Gardner appeals to “the reason-communication interface” (logos, in short) as constitutive of human nature in order to ground basic responsibility. To be able to respond to reasons—or rather, to be unable not to respond to reasons—is to be responsible in a basic sense, for it is to be able to communicate the intrinsic reasoning of one’s actions. In his view it is a mistake, bequeathed to us by Hobbes and Kant, to think that human beings are not essentially and primordially rational but are driven by a deeper animal nature and an unconstrained will (Willkür). As Gardner observes, even those of us who indulge our wayward wills and animal natures seek to justify our actions rationally, not merely instrumentally. But how do we come to do so? Gardner, a philosopher of law, does not address this question. Instead, he helps himself to a rationalist anthropology while observing, rightly enough, that the justificatory demands of communicative reason are “instantiated” by the public nature of legal processes. While no one, including Gardner, doubts that the law is routinely instrumentalized, its procedures essentially appeal to our capacity to provide rational explanation and thus admit “the value of basic responsibility which is instantiated in, rather than instrumentally served by, the legal process.”18 But even if this is granted, it does not suffice to ground basic responsibility. For one, the law does not merely “instantiate” the justificatory nature of communicative reason, it institutes and enforces it. Clearly, whatever traction our nature as reason-givers has in our concrete lives, it is not enough. At most, the law instantiates one way that our justificatory nature is expressed. Moreover, even if we grant, ex hypothesi, that law (or a particular legal order) expresses a natural form of communicative reason and thus works with human nature and not against it, can this bond bear the weight of grounding moral answerability? The most that such a grounding can achieve is responsibility to public reasons or, more accurately, to standards of reasonableness that are determined by the public. But moral answerability to persons does not coincide with response-ability to reasons, and certainly not with standards of reasonableness determined by the public. This is why, as answerability to persons, moral answerability can sometimes be “instantiated” by ignoring or defying the law and the public.

Grounding and Maintaining Answerability 63 It is difficult to separate the concept of “a person” from the concept of a “reason giver.” That is precisely Gardner’s point. But that is what Levinas tries to do. A person is an “interiority,” he proposes, while carefully maintaining a distinction between “interiority” and “psychology”; interiority is not one’s material constitution or the memory chains that make up one’s psychology. Interiority, rather, is the way one identifies with oneself. Levinas calls it the “psychism” or “egoism” of being oneself, the basic way one identifies as oneself, which he characterizes in terms of affect, sensibility, the way enjoying or suffering the elemental qualities of being individuates me from one instant to the next. “The psychism will be specified as sensibility, the element of enjoyment, as egoism. In the egoism of enjoyment dawns the ego, source of the will. It is the psychism and not matter that provides a principle of individuation” (Levinas 1969: 59/52). It is as an affective ego, “beyond instinct, beneath reason,” that I am individuated. This is the source of my will. It is as will, not reason, that I am who I am. And it is as will, not reason, that the other is Other. Prior to reason-giving, then, is the meeting of wills, from which follows the decisive role given to Desire, construed as willing another’s will or willing the other’s interests, thus as primordial contact with goodness and plurality. Like Gardner, Levinas founds personhood on language, but on language as the excess of communicative reason, language as a discourse of Desire. It is only by understanding language as a relation between a plurality of wills rather than reasons that the plurality of society can be respected. We value a plurality of languages because without it we have diminished access to the plurality of persons (not just cultures), even if we want everyone to agree to the reasonableness of this value. We value style because without it we have diminished access to the plurality of persons (not just books or clothes), even if we want everyone to agree that style is no substitute for reason-giving. In communicating reasons, language articulates, behind those very reasons, the plurality of persons expressed as a plurality of wills. “The passage to the rational is not a dis-individuation precisely because it is language, that is, a response to the being who in a face speaks to the subject and tolerates only a personal response” (1969: 242/219 trans. mod.). To ground basic responsibility on our “natural” ability to provide rational explanation, as Gardner does, is to assume that one is fundamentally morally answerable to reasons, not persons. Darwall, then, thinks that being morally answerable rests on being answerable to the authority of the community, while Gardner thinks it rests on being answerable to reasons. But Levinas thinks that being answerable is grounded on being answerable directly to persons—prior to their entry into the space of reasons or their authorized standing within a community. He has an account of how I become answerable to reason, why I should care about being reasonable, and how being morally answerable does not coincide with being answerable to reason

64  Michael Fagenblat or law. “In the welcoming of the face the will opens to reason” (1969: 219/242). I come to be able to offer reasons for my actions not because it is my nature to do so, nor because the state forces me to try my reasonableness before the law, nor because the moral community demands it of me—not even when it conveys those demands in person through the second-person standpoint—but because I am claimed by the Other. For Levinas, as noted earlier, the temporality of the claim of the Other grounds the claims of meaning at large. To approach this idea, it may help to proceed via another attempt at grounding meaning in the temporality of moral life.

5.  The Temporality of Valuing In the Tanner Lectures delivered in 2012, Samuel Scheffler explores a thought experiment designed to help us reconceive the temporal nature and grounds of moral value. We are invited to imagine that a short time, say 30 days, after we will die of natural causes, a giant asteroid will collide with the earth and destroy humanity. A version of this “doomsday scenario” is illustrated by P.D. James’s apocalyptic novel, The Children of Men, adapted into a film by Alfonso Cuarón, in which the whole of humanity has become infertile. Scheffler’s interest is in making vivid the prospect of no future humanity even under conditions where one’s own life and the lives of all the people one knows and loves are not in jeopardy. At issue is not the familiar concept of the afterlife of the soul or a consciousness that survives the demise of the body but a secularized conception of the afterlife of strangers who will live after me. How would one’s own life be affected if the afterlife of humanity were subtracted from the implicit structure of one’s own beliefs and values? Scheffler’s claim is that: in some significant respects, the existence of the afterlife matters more to us than our own continued existence. It matters more to us because it is a condition of other things mattering to us. Without confidence in the existence of the afterlife, many of the things in our own lives that now matter to us would cease to do so or would come to matter less.19 The argument attempts to explicate the implicit features of mattering, valuing, and temporally relating. This is a type of “hermeneutical explication” of everyday life, which seeks to make explicit an underlying feature that wields effective significance on our current lives without showing up as such—the doomsday scenario presents a type of collective ontological anxiety in which the meaning structure of our shared existence as a whole shows forth. On the basis of his admittedly “speculative” account of how “we” would respond, Scheffler suggests that in the doomsday scenario,

Grounding and Maintaining Answerability 65 besides the initial panic, grief, and so forth, many of our cherished activities and values would come to appear quite pointless, and widespread demoralization would set in. He imagines that scientific research would become pointless—why strive to cure cancer if, in any case, humanity will soon be wiped away?—and so, too, all of the intergenerational projects in which we are involved, from procreating and educating our children to improving our social and political institutions to our concern for infrastructure and the environment. If so, he claims, then the afterlife of others matters to us more than our own life because it implicitly bears the load of sustaining our current projects, which are valuable only in tacit view of others to come. The hermeneutical explication of everyday life thus points to our implicit “desire for a personalized relation to the future.”20 For a project to matter or be valuable is for it to extend across two times, the present of my activities and a future belonging to others. “Valuing is a diachronic phenomenon,” Scheffler suggests, “in the sense that, in valuing something, one does not merely manifest an occurrent preference about how things go in the future. Instead, one acquires a stake in how things go, in whether what one values is realized or achieved or sustained.”21 The point is not that the content of one’s psychological attitudes are other-regarding but that one’s individual psychology is “vulnerable to and dependent on others in unexpected ways” because it is susceptible to being affected by their fortunes and misfortunes.22 We may still be egoistically motivated insofar as we do things for our own benefit, but this egoism is nested in a temporal structure oriented toward the lives of future others. Individualism is a false ground in determining what matters. The importance of the afterlife conjecture shows how “individual valuing is, as a conceptual matter, part of a social or collective enterprise or practice.”23 The wide scope of this conceptualization of our moral psychology, which includes valuing, caring, mattering, and regarding as important, motivates the claim that the temporality of valuing is important not only for a limited sphere of our lives or a special concern of the virtuous but, on the contrary, “provides the implicit frame of reference for most of our judgments about what matters. Remove that frame of reference, and our sense of importance—however individualistic it may be in its overt content—is destabilized and begins to erode . . . we need humanity to have a future for the very idea that things matter to retain a secure place in our conceptual repertoire.”24 We are not duped by morality, Scheffler argues, because even our egoistic projects are intelligible on account of being staked on others yet to come. If whatever matters to us is temporally dependent on others yet to come, the doomsday scenario suggests that our sense of owing something to future strangers is justified and our answerability to them well founded. Scheffler’s argument is reminiscent of Levinas’s appeal to “a secret diachrony,” to “the discontinuity or diachrony of signification,” which implicitly structures experience.25 In particular, the idea that valuing is

66  Michael Fagenblat oriented toward the future affords a way of interpreting Levinas’s concept of “fecundity,” which likewise seeks to account for the way one’s present concerns are implicitly aimed at others to come. The temporal mattering of things in the present has an essentially personal character that points beyond the horizon of my personal possibilities (Levinas 1969: 267–69, 299–301). This temporality of mattering is not an impulse or drive that could be explained by appeal to evolutionary biology.26 The point is not only that we in fact care about the future of others as, for example, when we care about our descendants, but that we are justified in caring about strangers who will live after us, whether or not they are our biological descendants. Without such strangers to come we would have good reason for being demoralized, for the real grounds of our valuing will have been eroded. The claim is normative, not explanatory. The afterlife of others is not a cause for things mattering but a reason. A person might take a drug so that they would be caused to be not demoralized or just fail to see what was so demoralizing, but they would then fail to be subject to the norms of reason. If our experience of valuing and mattering are in truth oriented toward strangers to come, the demise of these future others would provide a justified reason for a pervasive disorientation of how we value and how things matter. Scheffler concludes that “we discover something” about the nature of valuing and mattering, that they are justified and not merely explained by being temporally oriented toward strangers to come, for many of our activities lose their sense in the absence of strangers to come. One’s experience of how things matter is drawn forth across time by what Levinas calls an “absolute orientation” toward a personal future belonging to others. One thus lives “without entering into the Promised Land,”27 a metaphor that Scheffler also deploys: “like the biblical Moses denied access to the Promised Land, we stand gazing through the lens of shared values and history toward a future we will not enter.”28 Scheffler’s argument is suggestive and provides some speculative psychological support for Levinas’s way of describing the temporality of moral answerability, but it is also problematic and finally unpersuasive. It alludes to a significant feature of the implicit grounds and nature of valuing and can contribute to an elucidation of Levinas’s idea that meaning matters by virtue of its implicitly diachronic and personal temporality. But in order to defend those claims, Scheffler’s argument needs to be rehabilitated in light of objections that can be raised against it. I shall focus on two. First, Scheffler’s resort to speculative, empirical claims about how we would react psychologically in the doomsday scenario exposes his claim to disconfirmation. There is no prima facie reason to think that such responses to the doomsday scenario would hold universally or even for the most part.29 Some people might be demoralized by the doomsday scenario, but others might not, just as people react very differently to the prospect of death, be it their own or others. It seems reasonable to suppose that some of us would lose the sense of valuing and mattering, but

Grounding and Maintaining Answerability 67 others among us would be more attentive to it. Many of us might cherish or enjoy our lives more in the absence of answerability to future others. We might finally learn to live “in the now,” as they say, for the sake of things of intrinsic value, whether they are games, pleasures, friendships, truth, or objects of beauty. Perhaps the intrinsic value of things will matter more vividly to us as doomsday approaches so that they finally matter as the very things they are, the game as a game, the friend as a friend, the rose as “a rose without why,” rather than things always mattering in view of some always receding sense of why they matter. Perhaps such an apocalypse will finally reveal our dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough, as Wallace Stevens imagined it. Approaching the doomsday scenario in terms of the moral psychology of valuing, even construed as widely as Scheffler does, leaves it open to empirical variation and discomfirmation and thereby attenuates its significance. By contrast, Levinas’s construal of the temporality of mattering is not an empirical or a psychological claim. The fecundity of time is an “ontological category,” “a structure that goes beyond the biologically empirical” (Levinas 1969: 277/310). More specifically, as we shall see, Levinas construes fecundity as the structure of answerability as such of subjectivity as first-person accountability to the claims of meaning, which does not designate the psychological self that I drag along while being me but the one who is answerable to whatever that psychology throws at me (the feelings and thoughts that never seem to stop popping up) each time I find myself here. It is not enough to appeal to the diachronic nature of “our” valuing, however, for why should I be answerable to that? The second objection, then, is not that Scheffler has got the moral psychology wrong but that the grounds of moral answerability (and agency) do not lie in the psychological self. A variant of this objection applies equally to Darwall and others who ground moral answerability in communal authority, as to Gardner and others who ground it in our rational nature. Scheffler makes a similar move in his “uninhibited use of the first-person plural” by constant recourse to “what we think” and “our attitudes and beliefs.”30 He defends recourse to the first-person plural by appealing to Bernard Williams’s thought “that ‘we’ operates not through a previously fixed designation, but through invitation.”31 I am invited to consider reasons “one” has or reasons “we” have for acting or even just being answerable. What a delightful invitation! But why should I accept it? As Williams himself says elsewhere: Practical deliberation is in every case first-personal, and the first person is not derivative or naturally replaced by anyone . . . The I of the reflective practical deliberation is not required to take the result

68  Michael Fagenblat of anyone else’s properly conducted deliberation as a datum, nor be committed from the outset to a harmony of everyone’s deliberations— that is to say, to making a rule from a standpoint of equality.32 Why should I accept the invitation to ground my answerability in our reasons for acting? To be sure, most of the time I cannot avoid doing so; when asked I give reasons, and I usually identify with the moral requirements of my social world. I am indeed “eligible” to answer when called to justify myself. But an eligible bachelor is still a bachelor. He has precisely not committed himself. Why should I commit myself to being morally answerable to tests of reasonableness and communal standards? As Williams observes, from a first-personal point of view, I am “not required” to, and I am, after all, a first-personal point of view (even if my I am also identifies from third-person, generic, reflective, and theoretical points of view, “as one does” and “as we do”). While admitting to common sense answerability, as being answerable to public reasons and communal norms might be loosely called, I do not entirely identify with those common-sensical ways of holding myself thus answerable. While they are doubtless determinative of how I am in fact held to account and eligible to be held to account, it begs the question to say that I ought to hold myself to account by public, generic standards. Why should I? Their normative force cannot just consist in their being standards or reasons, they must be standards and reasons for me. Of course, they can be forced on me and not only by the police; in fact they always are. I am “thrown” into the standards to which I am answerable, simply by virtue of the force of my being which, being social and historical, necessarily includes normative standards to which I myself am answerable. Just by virtue of being myself at this geo-historical point in existence, I cannot but adopt our reasons and our standards as my own—“as one does,” says Heidegger—even if only as standards by virtue of which I modify my own unique way of being answerable. But the fact that I am normatively bound in the very structure of my first-person existence to being answerable to public norms and common sense does not explain why I ought to hold myself answerable to them.

6.  Grounding Answerability Why shouldn’t I just act “as one does”? Levinas, like Heidegger, argues that, without holding myself answerable, I lose a grip on intelligibility as a whole, including the understanding I have of myself. Heidegger argues that holding oneself answerable is an ontological condition on intelligibility on account of the holistic nature of meaning. An item only means something definite within an intelligible whole. It only signifies as within a “totality of involvements”: that is, a context in which things hang together “in order to” signify as they do. I myself am only

Grounding and Maintaining Answerability 69 intelligible within some such concrete totality of involvement. That’s how I understand myself as a father, teacher, friend, animal, whatever. But totalities of involvements are not enough. They must be grounded in something “in which there is no further involvement.” The buck of meaning, circulating in a transitive holistic economy, must stop somewhere. Heidegger calls the place where meaning comes to a rest that “for the sake of which” the intelligible entities (including us) show up as they are or mean to be. But where is this place? It cannot be in a being that is not answerable to meaning-claims. Only a being that is itself answerable can answer, one way or another, to the claims of meaning, which is the distinctive feature of the being that we ourselves are in our concrete ways of being (Dasein). Without holding ourselves answerable, there is no sense talking of anything as making sense. The buck stops with us, beings who have a stake in the meaning of things. The being answerable to meaning-claims is that being for the sake of which the asstructure of meaning is ontologically grounded, where meaning comes to rest concretely in a moment of worldly intelligibility in which things make sense, however vaguely or precisely. As Steven Crowell says, that for the sake of which I am is “the pivot upon which turns disclosure of the world as a meaningful space wherein things show up as the things they are.”33 But this is only the beginning of the problem, for being answerable is indefinite or underdetermined. In being answerable, the question Who is answerable? has not been resolved. More precisely, when I am answerable, it remains an open question as to who is being answerable here and now? For I often answer “as one does” and indeed cannot avoid doing so for I am “thrown” and “dispersed” into the for-the-sake-of which that I am. The “subjectivity of the subject”—a phrase Levinas adopts from Heidegger for his own purposes—is grounded in a care structure (the way things matter) in which I myself am dispersed into generic modes of answering to meaning-claims. As Heidegger says, this “deprives the particular Dasein of its answerability [Verantwortlichkeit]” for it grounds my first-person singular existence, the for-the-sake-of which that I am, in generic ways of being.34 As Levinas glossed Heidegger’s position in an early essay, “[t]he subject is neither free nor absolute; it is no longer entirely answerable for itself. It is dominated and overwhelmed by history, by its origin, about which it can do nothing, since it is thrown into the world and this abandonment marks all its projects and powers.”35 Having shown how I myself am dispersed and disburdened of being answerable, in Division II of Being and Time, Heidegger grounds answerability in the first-person singular being for-the-sake-of which I am.36 In other words, despite considerable misconception, Division II of Being and Time provides a defense of subjectivity, exactly as Levinas understands it, as a defense of one’s first-personal answerability to the claims of meaning in which we abide. For our purposes, the point is that Heidegger locates

70  Michael Fagenblat the grounds of first-person singular answerability in the breakdown of all my practical identities and the meaning-claims they entail. In this breakdown, I am individuated as being answerable to meaning-claims in the concrete first-person singular being for-the-sake-of-which I am. The privilege given to anxiety, being-toward-death, and wanting to have a conscience consists in their ways of attesting to the sense of being oneself in the absence of all public and third-person criteria in virtue of which the as-structure of meaning hangs together as a whole. It is in being answerable to the “not” (Nicht) that binds the as-structure of meaning as a whole that I myself am located in the first-person concrete singularity of my own existence, whatever “they” say about it. It is, as Crowell says, “an account of the subjectivity that belongs to, but remains invisible in, the one-self.”37 Heidegger thus defends subjectivity as the invisible (because “one” cannot see it, only I myself can) first-person singular answerability that I am at any possible moment, if only I could maintain the requisite distance between my thrown self and my own self. We thereby arrive (for a moment) at the place where “the why-question in general” comes to a ground, in the first-person singular way of being for-the-sake-of-which I myself am at any moment, for it is here that a being is finally answerable for itself. This does not mean that one creates or constructs oneself as the grounds of answerability but that one appropriates them for oneself understandingly: “in existing as thrown—Dasein constantly lags behind its possibilities . . . ‘being-a-ground’ means never to have power over one’s ownmost being from the ground up.”38 To understand the “not” that binds the as-structure of meaning is to come to terms with myself as the only one who is answerable here and now—now that no “one” else is answerable. This way of being myself answerable makes it possible to be “legitimately eligible” to provide justifications for my actions and so, too, answerable to communal norms and public reasoning for I now understand myself in the first-person singular way of being answerable that I myself am. It also makes it possible to be answerable to others—to others as they are in this concrete moment and also, if one dares, to others as they are disclosed in light of the “nullity” of this concrete moment into which we are thrown.39 Levinas’s presents his position in Totality and Infinity as an alternative to Heidegger’s—“a defense of subjectivity” not “in its anguish before death, but as founded in the idea of infinity” (1969: 26/11). What is the difference? One way of putting it is to say that, for Levinas, my firstperson singular answerability is grounded in my way of being for-thesake-of-whom, not my way of being for-the-sake-of which I am. Another is to say that, for Levinas, the individuating call of conscience—purged of its moralizing, common-sensical demands—is the call of the Other, not of one’s ownmost self. In both cases, the argument is that the Other is an external ground to my being answerable. I am not answerable for

Grounding and Maintaining Answerability 71 my own sake but for the sake of the Other. To be answerable is to be for goodness sake. How does this work? Levinas’s idea is that I myself am at stake by virtue of being morally answerable to the Other in each moment that I am answerable to meaning-claims (thus all the time). This is the phenomenological argument mentioned in Section 3. It proposes that the sense of the Other constitutes me as a subject. The Other creates in me the awareness of my answerability to the normative quality of intelligible experience. I become a subject capable of answering to the normativity of meaning by being subjected to the judgment of the Other. This is not an ontic judgment; it has nothing to do with people being “judgmental.” It is a matter of accounting for judgment as the possibility of a measure by which anything at all can be understood as what it is (or what it isn’t), what it means to be (or doesn’t). Acknowledging the subjectivity of the Other introduces a “new orientation of the inner life” (1969: 246/275), its orientation toward normativity, the necessity of measure or judgment. Only by standing under the possibility of judgment, facing the Other, is the as-structure of intelligible existence open to me as a space of meaning in which consciousness, cognition, and comportment are possible.40 As Crowell says, the normative measure introduced by the Other “provides a necessary condition for any genuine re-identification of things in my own experience. Only if re-identification is possible can I experience something as something . . . [A]ll intentional content, and so also all perceiving of something as something, depends on the normative orientation that first arises through that very welcome.”41 The novelty of Levinas’s position consists in the idea that my being answerable is, in the first instance, being answerable to the normative sense of the Other. This cannot happen through empathy, which already supposes two subjects able to feel into each other, or recognition, which likewise supposes two subjects able to perceive each other. There must be an acknowledgement of being answerable before there can be any knowledge of what or, indeed, who it is that I am answerable to. The acknowledgement of being answerable takes place as a subjection of my spontaneous “egoism” to a limit which subjectifies me as answerable to normative claims. This happens in shame; not the psychological shame for having done something but an ontological shame in which one feels oneself subject to the sheer possibility of judgment and is thereby affectively aware of the insufficiency and arbitrariness of one’s own free will. The Other provides this limit by soliciting an acknowledgement of its own intrinsic normativity, “having meaning by itself . . . as an always positive value” to which I am subjected (1969: 75/73). This is not the value of being good or evil or some other moral value; it is the value of the possibility of value, the value of normativity as such. Prior to being answerable to the normativity of reasons (Gardner and others), prior to being answerable to the normative demands of the moral community

72  Michael Fagenblat (Darwall and others), prior even to the normativity of self-consciousness, which generates reasons by self-reflection (Korsgaard and others), I am grounded in my first-person singular way of being answerable to normativity as such. Put this way, one might wonder about the relation between moral experience and the sense of the Other, or whether there is anything specifically moral about “ethics.”42 Levinas was entirely cognizant of the gap between “ethics” and moral experience. “Ethics” is not a moral sense that can be directly intuited through the concrete face, as Robert Audi, for example, thinks in his defense of “Kantian intuitionism” based on “moral perception” of the dignity of persons.43 Levinas speaks, rather, of the way ethics “concretizes” and “deformalizes” the normative sense. In his later work, he argues that this concretization takes place through the tropes of “ethical language” rather than moral experience. His point is not that a face is morally authoritative—“Authority is not somewhere, where a look could go seek it, like an idol, or assume it like a logos,”44 he says in his later work—but that a face exposes me concretely to my sense of myself as answerable in the first-person, to the endless and variegated demands of normativity at large. It is subjectivity as first-person answerability that is being defended, not a dogmatic moralism that can naively be read off the face, derived from the presupposition of rational nature, or legitimated in virtue of belong to a moral community.

7.  Maintaining Answerability The phenomenological argument establishes how it is that my being held answerable to the Other opens the space of meaning. The Other subjectifies me as being answerable to the normativity of meaning. But Levinas thinks that even if this much is granted, there remains a problem. Totality and Infinity signals this problem by arguing that it is necessary to go “Beyond the Face.” This is because grounding my first-person answerability must be maintained in both its moral and non-moral modalities. In the non-moral, general sense, being answerable to the claims of meaning must accommodate the sense I have of something as something, as well as the metamorphoses of meaning sustained in time, for the thing itself changes its meaning from one moment to the next. The “identity of things remains unstable . . . A thing exists in the midst of its wastes. When the kindling wood becomes smoke and ashes the identity of my table disappears. The wastes become indiscernible; the smoke drifts off elsewhere” (1969: 139–40/148). But if, as Levinas continues, this “imposes a quantitative physics in place of the world of perception” (1969: 140/148), a phenomenological account of the intelligibility of something as something must also accommodate the sense I have that things are not stable, that they show up differently from one moment to the next, surprising me, proving me wrong, and so forth. Being answerable to the claims of meaning necessitates a type of epistemic openness,

Grounding and Maintaining Answerability 73 humility, and respect for the metamorphoses of meaning. Whence this answerability to the unforeseeable and the epistemic openness, humility, and respect that it demands? Levinas argues that maintaining one’s answerability to the open-ended nature of meaning-claims necessitates maintaining the stance of being morally answerable to the Other. There is another reason that moral answerability must be maintained. Levinas identifies it at the very end of Section III by way of introducing Section IV, “Beyond the Face.” The phenomenological argument subjectifies me on the basis of a strictly “invisible” sense, one that claims me only from the point of view of my first-person existence facing the Other. There is no third-person description of it. No one else can see it, for only as existing in the first-person singular does this look constitute me as being answerable. But because it is invisible, the subjectivity it establishes remains “clandestine” (1969: 247/277). In facing the Other I discover the normative structure of my interiority as the inward awareness that I am answerable to the claims of meaning; but being I, myself answerable, must be maintained. If the grounds of being morally answerable remained clandestine, claimed only in the moment of an invisible inwardness, they could count neither as moral nor concrete. I myself, who am neither a substance nor a self-grounding principle but a way of answering to normativity as such, must be maintained as such concretely across time. This is what Heidegger called the “self-constancy” (Selbstständigkeit) of being answerable, the way the care structure of existing persists through time without being a substance or a subject. As Levinas puts it, “this inner life [of subjectivity] cannot renounce all visibility. The judgement of consciousness [conscience] must refer to a reality beyond the cessation of history [l’arrêt de l’histoire]” (Levinas 1969: 247/277, trans. mod.). Levinas proposes that this maintaining of subjectivity takes place as “fecundity, by which the I survives itself,” in being discontinuously for-the-sake-of-someone “yet to come.”45 In “Beyond the Face,” the Other is therefore no longer construed as “the Stranger” (the widow, the orphan, the poor) but as the Child. Levinas reiterates this in Conclusion 9 of Totality and Infinity, Le maintien de la subjectivité. Generally overlooked, the term “maintaining” can now be understood in three semitechnical senses. (1) Maintenant, as the ordinary French word for now, is carefully distinguished from what Levinas calls “the instant,” which designates the concrete way of being riveted to oneself as an embodied being in the present. The phenomenology of “the instant” through which one is “riveted” to oneself as an embodied being goes back to Levinas’s earlier works, but their conclusions are carried forth into Totality and Infinity. The instant has no duration, but nor is it an abstraction. An instant is a pure beginning of concrete time, with no past or future, an “evanescence” than has contracted being and is thus weighed down with itself. It is “a relationship with itself in the present . . . which should have dazzled it with freedom,

74  Michael Fagenblat [but] imprisons it in an identification.” It is in its existing instantly that “the ego returns ineluctably to itself.” Totality and Infinity describes the instant as the temporality of sensibility and affect, of jouissance and suffering, of living from elemental existence in “the independence of happiness.” By virtue of being an embodied affectively disposed being—prior to self-consciousness and reason, independently of social life—I am individuated as an “egoism” at each instant of my existing, as “absolutely for myself . . . without reference to the Other . . . innocently egoist and alone. Not against the Others, not ‘as for me . . .’—but entirely deaf to the Other, outside of all communication and all refusal to communicate— without ears, like a hungry stomach” (1969: 134–42). The instant of my Egoism attests to “the permanent truth of hedonist moralities” (1969: 134–42). But this truth attests to “the instability of happiness. Nourishment comes as a happy chance” (1969: 141, 150–51). The evanescent quality of the instant individuates me concretely in a “time prior to representation—which is menace and destruction” (1969: 141/150), for “each happiness comes for the first time” (1969: 114/117). The instant of happiness, “the navïete of the unreflected I, beyond instinct, beneath reason,” cannot be maintained. It even threatens to destroy or decreate the as-structure of meaning in its paroxysms of pleasure and pain. By individuating me “without reference to the Other,” it threatens to abrogate the as-structure of meaning that the Other demands of me. The instant of happiness no less than the instant of hunger threaten to send me back to “animal existence” (in the first person, thus not a conception of animal nature) and even to the realm Levinas calls “the mythical,” where existence lacks the necessary conditions for the identification of intentional objects, to “existence without existents,” “an indeterminate density which has no meaning of itself prior to discourse” (1969: 190/208). To exist from one instant to the next in the instability of enjoyment is to put one’s answerability meaning-claims at risk. This, incidentally, is Levinas’s “doomsday scenario,” to use Scheffler’s phrase, but thought ontologically rather than ontically or empirically, as the decreation of the structure of subjectivity. (2) Hence le maintien, as in the title to Conclusion 9, which designates the maintaining or upholding of subjectivity in the face of the gravity of egoism, which risks plunging the creature back into the abyss. To keep the menace of indeterminate unintelligibility at bay, one must maintain one’s answerability in time. “To be conscious is to have time—not to overflow the present by anticipating and hastening the future, but to have a distance with regard to the present: to relate oneself to being as to a being to come, to maintain a distance with regard to being even while already coming under its grip.” This distance is lacking in the instant, and so subjectivity must uphold or maintain itself. Levinas describes this as the “recommencement” of answerability that takes place as “fecundity.” In fecundity, I am answerable to a claim that is “discontinuous” with this clandestine moment in which I am answerable

Grounding and Maintaining Answerability 75 now (maintenant) for it claims me from a future that is beyond my entire horizon. Fecundity realizes the structure of subjectivity across the discontinuity of my being answerable. It realizes me as the Desire that I am, for goodness sake, as being answerable to meaning-claims that will never reach me because they are meant for the Other. The “infinity” of time is thereby produced, for the Child “does not stop the movement of Desire. The other that Desire desires is again Desire . . . Fecundity engendering fecundity accomplishes goodness” (1969: 269/302). (3) Finally, through etymological allusion, Levinas occasionally notes that maintaining myself from one maintenant to the next is like holding hands, main-tenir, with another time. I am maintained in my answerability because I am claimed, reached, or at least gestured at, perhaps pointed to, by an Other who implores me from another time, across the discontinuity of time, to be answerable now, maintenant. To maintain being answerable to meaningclaims maintenant, “in the now,” is to hold one’s hand open to the Other. It is the fecundity of subjectivity, not the diachrony of our valuing, that grounds our answerability to future claims.

8.  The Answerability That I Am I have argued that the problem of grounding answerability motivates Levinas’s way of construing moral answerability as a critique of responseability to reasons (Gardner and many others) and accountability to the community (Darwall and many others). Critique, of course, does not mean a rejection of reason-giving or a denial of accountability to communal norms but a way of showing how their authority is “founded on prior structures of being whose first articulations are delineated by the metaphysical movement, or respect” (1969: 303/338; emphasis added). Note again that Levinas does not say that all one’s answerability is articulated in what he here calls “the metaphysical movement” of “respect,” by which he is referring to the direct answerability to the Other; he says that such respect constitutes the “first articulations” of my ­answerability. ­Ethics provides a critical grounding of moral answerability as m ­ aintaining being answerable to persons, or rather, to the claims of persons and not to the claims of reasons or the authority of the community. Its grounds the claims of meaning are not my own; I cannot appropriate or own them, construct myself on them, or rest in them. Ethics is the upholding of answerability to the Other that precedes and transcends the normative claims of community, society, and state. The grounds of being answerable are found neither in the moral community nor one’s rational nature but in the demands of the Other. But ethics is also a defense of subjectivity, of the metaphysics of meaning and not just of morals, for it shows how being answerable in the first-person singular to the claims of meaning at large is critically grounded in answerability to the Oher. In this way, yes, meaning something is like going toward someone.46

76  Michael Fagenblat

Notes 1. Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence of Ground,” in Pathmarks, trans. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 129. For an analysis of Heidegger’s way of grounding answerability see Steven Crowell, “Being Answerable,” in Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). The approach I develop in this chapter is heavily indebted to Crowell. 2. This formulation is indebted to Johnston, “Objective Mind and the Objectivity of Our Minds.” Johnston’s work, there and in Surviving Death, is the stimulus for the present chapter, but as it turns out, it will take another chapter to say why. Johnston, however, does not try to account for or ground presence, only (though this is no small thing) to defend its irreducibility to natural representation and causation. 3. Martin Heidegger, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1975), 195; Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter, 2nd rev. ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), 135. 4. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 25–26. 5. For other relevant similarities, see Soren Overgaard, Wittgenstein and Other Minds: Rethinking Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity with Wittgenstein, Levinas, and Husserl (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013). 6. Emmanuel Levinas, Discovering Existence with Husserl, trans. Michael B. Smith and Richard A. Cohen (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 83 trans. modified; Emmanuel Levinas, En découvrant l’existence Avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 1967), 68. 7. Donald Davidson, “The Second Person,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 17, no. 1 (1992), Rpt. in Davison, Essays on Action and Events: Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 121. 8. Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (London: Continuum, 2006), 232. 9. Angela M. Smith, “Responsibility as Answerability,” Inquiry 58, no. 2 (2015): 107. 10. Stephen Darwall, Second Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 35. 11. Ibid., 9. 12. Ibid., 17. 13. William H. Smith, The Phenomenology of Moral Normativity (New York: Routledge, 2012), 85. 14. Darwall, Second Person Standpoint, 23. For more on the phenomenological task of breaking into the circle of accountability analyzed by Darwall, see Crowell’s contribution to this volume. 15. Darwall, Second Person Standpoint, 278. 16. John Gardner, “The Mark of Responsibility,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 23, no. 2 (2003): 161. 17. Ibid., 165. 18. Ibid., 168. 19. Samuel Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife, ed. Niko Kolodny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 26. 20. Ibid., 31. 21. Ibid., 60–61. 22. Ibid., 178–79. 23. Ibid., 59.

Grounding and Maintaining Answerability 77 24. Ibid., 60. 25. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Springer, 1991), 7, 141; Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement Qu’être: Ou Au-Delá de l’essence (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 1974), 20, 128. In Otherwise Than Being, Levinas explores this temporal dimension of intelligibility principally in terms of the past, whereas in Totality and Infinity, he emphasizes how the future is ethically structured. 26. Samuel Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife, ed. Niko Kolodny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 31–32. 27. Emmanuel Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Simon Critchley, Robert Bernasconi and Adriaan T. Peperzak (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 50; Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife, 35. 28. Ibid. 29. As Susan Wolf and Harry Frankfurt both caution in their responses to Death and the Afterlife; Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife, 113–30, 131–43, respectively. 30. Samuel Scheffler, Why Worry About Future Generations? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 3. This slim volume extends the argument of Death and the Afterlife. 31. Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 171; cited in Scheffler, Why Worry, 4n.1. 32. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 68–69. 33. Steven Crowell, Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 217. 34. SZ 127/BT 170. Crowell, Normativity and Phenomenology, 174, and further references at 174n.11. 35. Levinas, Discovering Existence, 84; see also the concluding remarks of this essay, p. 87. From this point of view, being answerable to the moral community or being answerable to reasons are both fallen and dispersed ways of being answerable that are not yet grounded in one’s own first-person existence. 36. Crowell demonstrates this in a detailed and compelling way that is, I think, consistent with Levinas’s interpretation of Heidegger. 37. Crowell, Normativity and Phenomenology, 176. 38. SZ 284/330. 39. This is how Levinas understood Heidegger. In 1930 he noted how the “not” in the as-structure of meaning disclosed through anxiety “brings Dasein to understand itself from itself, it brings it back to itself,” and thereby renders it answerable. “Martin Heidegger and Ontology,” trans. Committee of Public Safety. Diacritics 26, no. 1 (1996): 30, trans. mod.; Levinas, “Martin Heidegger et l’ontologie,” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger 113 (1932): 428. In “The Work of Husserl” (in Levinas, Discovering Existence, 47–90) from 1940 he contrasts Husserlian subjectivity, which is able to retreat into itself as pure thought, with Heideggerian subjectivity which, being concrete, is not a “game” but precisely takes responsibility for who one is. No one understood better than Levinas than Being and Time was a defense of subjectivity as founded on the anxious disclosure of the “not” trembling in the as-structure of meaning. This is why, when De l’existence a l’existant appeared in 1947, it was wrapped in a red band declaring, “where it is not a question of anxiety.” Levinas deep understanding of Heidegger has been widely misconstrued; for an account of why, see Michael Fagenblat, “Levinas and Heidegger: The Elemental Confrontation,” in Oxford Handbook on Levinas, ed. Michael L. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), which still does not go far enough.

78  Michael Fagenblat 40. In this consists a new “proof for the creation of the world” on the basis of nothing but a radical first-person approach to the intelligibility of being. Note, however, that this proof does not establish who created the world, only the sense of being created. 41. Steven Crowell, “Why Is Ethics First Philosophy? Levinas in Phenomenological Context,” European Journal of Philosophy 20, no. 4 (n.d.): 10. 42. As Michael Roubach put it to me. 43. Robert Audi, The Good in the Right: A Theory of Intuition and Intrinsic Value (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Robert Audi, Moral Perception (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). 44. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 150; Levinas, Autrement qu’être, 235; see passim for an elaboration of this nuance. 45. Levinas’s position here compares with that of Mark Johnston, Surviving Death, who likewise seeks to vindicate morality on the basis of a metaphysics of meaning. 46. Research for this chapter has been supported by Israel Science Foundation grant 698/16. My thanks also to Michael Roubach and Robert Stern for their comments on a late draft.

References Audi, Robert. The Good in the Right: A Theory of Intuition and Intrinsic Value. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. ———. Moral Perception. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Crowell, Steven. “Being Answerable.” In Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger, 214–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. ———. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. ———. “Why Is Ethics First Philosophy? Levinas in Phenomenological Context.” European Journal of Philosophy 20, no. 4 (n.d.): 564–88. Darwall, Stephen. The Second Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Davidson, Donald. Essays on Actions and Events: Philosophical Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. ———. “The Second Person.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 17, no. 1 (1992): 255–67. Fagenblat, Michael. “Levinas and Heidegger: The Elemental Confrontation.” In Oxford Handbook on Levinas, edited by Michael L. Morgan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Gardner, John. “The Mark of Responsibility.” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 23, no. 2 (2003): 157–71. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson. London: SCM Press, 1962. ———. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Translated by. Albert Hofstadter, 2nd Rev. ed. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988. ———. Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1975. ———. “On the Essence of Ground.” In Pathmarks, translated by William McNeill, 97–135. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Grounding and Maintaining Answerability 79 ———. Sein Und Zeit. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977. Johnston, Mark. “Objective Mind and the Objectivity of Our Minds.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75, no. 2 (n.d.): 233–68. ———. Surviving Death. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Levinas, Emmanuel. Autrement Qu’être; Ou Au-Delá de l’essence. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 1974. ———. Basic Philosophical Writings. Edited by Simon Critchley, Robert Bernasconi and Adriaan T. Peperzak. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996. ———. De l’existence à l’existant. 2nd ed. Paris: Vrin, 1993. ———. Discovering Existence with Husserl. Translated by Michael B. Smith and Richard A. Cohen. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998. ———. En Découvrant l’existence Avec Husserl et Heidegger. Paris: Vrin, 1967. ———. Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other. Translated by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. London: Continuum, 2006. ———. Existence and Existents. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978. ———. “Martin Heidegger and Ontology.” Translated by Committee of Public Safety. Diacritics 26, no. 1 (1996): 11–32. ———. “Martin Heidegger et l’ontologie.” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger 113 (1932): 395–431. ———. Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Springer, 1991. ———. Totalité et infini: essai sur l’extériorité. Le Livre de Poche. Dordrecht: Le Livre de Poche, 1990. ———. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Overgaard, Soren. Wittgenstein and Other Minds: Rethinking Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity with Wittgenstein, Levinas, and Husserl. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013. Scheffler, Samuel. Death and the Afterlife. Edited by Niko Kolodny. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. ———. Why Worry About Future Generations? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Smith, Angela M. “Responsibility as Answerability.” Inquiry 58, no. 2 (2015): 99–126. Smith, William H. The Phenomenology of Moral Normativity. New York: Routledge, 2012. Williams, Bernard. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.

4 Buber, Levinas, and the I-Thou Relation Patricia Meindl, Felipe León and Dan Zahavi

Introduction Research on social cognition looks quite different today than it did two or three decades ago. Back then, a central question was whether simulation theory or theory-theory offered the right account of social cognition. Today, after a period where people favored hybrid mixtures of both types of theories, various alternative accounts have gradually become part of the standard repertoire. One of the proposals that has gained increasing momentum during the last ten years, not only within philosophy,1 but also in developmental psychology2 and in social neuroscience,3 is the idea that we should replace the traditional privileging of either first-person experience or third-person observation with a theory that explicitly foregrounds second-person engagement. Despite all the enthusiasm, it still remains contested what exactly second-person engagement amounts to. What is involved in relating to a person as a you, rather than as a he or she? Does the adoption of a second-person perspective on someone entail that one directly engages with the person in question, rather than simply observing him or her from afar? Can one approach the other as a you unilaterally, or does a you-attitude necessarily involve some kind of mutuality or reciprocity, such that for me to address another as a you is for me to relate to someone who in turn addresses me as a you? What has often been overlooked in these recent discussions is the fact that many of the same questions have been raised and addressed previously. Captured under the heading of the “I-Thou relation,” the topic of the second-person perspective was also an important theme in classical phenomenology and philosophy of dialogue. Might contemporary discussions of the second-person perspective learn something from some of these earlier debates? In the following contribution, we will discuss ideas found in the work of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas. Buber and Levinas—two of the most prominent Jewish thinkers of the 20th century—both develop their respective accounts of the intersubjective encounter out of a refusal to conceive of one’s relation towards the other in purely cognitive terms. Yet Levinas frequently sought to

Buber, Levinas, and the I-Thou Relation 81 demarcate his own position from Buber’s, particularly when it concerned the very structure and nature of the dyadic relation. Whereas for Levinas the significance of the “face” is central, highlighting my unconditional responsibility for the other, Buber’s “I-Thou relation” epitomizes the fundamental “meeting” with the other. Acknowledging their shared philosophical outlook, Levinas presents their disagreement as follows: The main thing [la grande chose] that separates us—or the minor thing [la petite chose] (when one speaks of someone to whom one draws near, one often says: “In minor things, there are some differences between us”)—the principal thing [la chose principale] separating us is what I call the asymmetry of the I-Thou relation. For Buber, the relationship between I and the Thou is directly lived as reciprocity.4 It was this feature of reciprocity, integral to Buber’s conception of the I-Thou relation, that motivated Levinas to develop a range of interrelated objections to Buber’s account. In this contribution, we will discuss these objections and examine the extent to which the disagreement between them is substantial, and we will also highlight some aspects of their exchange concerning the reciprocal status of the I-Thou relation that we believe to be of relevance for contemporary debates on second-person engagement.

1.  Buber and the I-Thou Relation With his 1923 book Ich und Du, Buber provided a seminal and influential contribution to a philosophical tradition, which, though largely fallen into oblivion today, was once praised as a second Copernican turn.5 Attempting to overcome the traditional subject-object dichotomy, Buber and his fellow “dialogicians” sought to disclose a more fundamental dimension arising between beings. The most famous articulation of this dimension can be found in Buber’s distinction between the I-It and the I-Thou attitudes. Contrary to what might perhaps be expected, the I-Thou relation is not exclusive to the interhuman realm. Rather, Buber understands both these attitudes as two distinct modes of relating to different entities in the world, be they human beings, animals, plants, or even inanimate objects. While in Ich und Du, Buber illustrates key features of the I-Thou relation by also pointing to the relation between human beings and plants or animals,6 in later works and as he develops the category of the “between” further, he effectuates what Theunissen has called a certain “anthropological narrowing” and tends to be primarily concerned with the interhuman realm.7 For Buber, it is only the I-Thou attitude that establishes a proper relation (Beziehung) with entities in the world, whereas the I-It attitude only allows for an “experience” (Erfahrung) of them. Referring to the

82  Patricia Meindl, Felipe León and Dan Zahavi etymology of the German term Erfahrung, which has its roots in the Middle High German ervarn (“to explore by travelling”),8 to experience objects in this sense means to travel on their surface, to explore them and extract “knowledge about their constitution.”9 A defining moment of experience, as Buber understands it, is its implication of an active, determining subject and a passive, determined object. While the I within the I-It attitude exercises activities which have a “thing for their object”10— perceiving something, imagining something, feeling something—the thing in question is stuck in passivity, offering no resistance to the grasping subject. If the I-It relation is characterized by an active-passive divide, in the I-Thou relation both parties are equal partners since both are simultaneously active and passive. It is a relation of “mutuality,” or, as Buber puts it at one point, “you say Thou to it and give yourself to it, it says Thou to you and gives itself to you.”11 In contrast to the I-It relation, neither party remains unaffected by the other.12 Whereas the I-It relation might be compared to a monologue, in which the I talks about various Its, Shes and Hes, without ever talking with them, the I-Thou relation constitutes a genuine dialogue, where I address the other and where I am in turn addressed by the other. Based on Buber’s presentation of the contrast between the I-It and the I-Thou relations, we can now highlight one of the latter’s most distinct features. To stand in a dialogical I-Thou relation with another involves a fundamental openness that allows for a meeting “with essential otherness.”13 Buber, in fact, considers the preservation of otherness to be the most fundamental feature of dialogue: “Every attempt to understand monologue as fully valid conversation [. . .] must run aground on the fact that the ontological basic presupposition of conversation is missing from it, the otherness, or more concretely, the moment of surprise.”14 As Buber elaborates, what distinguishes a true dialogue or “meeting” with another is not only a certain astonishment or surprise in the face of the other’s alterity but a fundamental appreciation thereof: “that which is different in the other person, his otherness, is prized.”15 Buber consequently doesn’t conceive of dialogue as a simple exchange of words. Not only can dialogue also take the form of a non-linguistic interaction, e.g., an exchange of glances between strangers,16 but it specifically requires the recognition or acknowledgement of the other’s difference.17 In some of his later works, Buber elaborates further on the specific kind of human capacity that allows us to reach out to the other and establish a common sphere between us. In describing this capacity, Buber appeals to a variety of notions, such as “imagining the real” (Realphantasie), “making present” (Vergegenwärtigung),18 and “inclusion” (Umfassung).19 All these notions refer to the imaginative act of holding “before one’s soul a reality arising at this moment, which, however cannot be experienced with one’s senses.”20 Another person’s wishes, feelings,

Buber, Levinas, and the I-Thou Relation 83 perceptions, thoughts, etc. are thereby “made present” to oneself, without being directly experienced as such. This act of “making present,” which Buber also describes as a “swinging [. . .] into [Einschwingen] the life of the other,”21 allows one to experience the relation between me and another from the other’s side, the side of the Thou, without thereby abandoning one’s own standpoint.22 The act of inclusion can vary both with regard to the concreteness in which the other’s experience is made present and with regard to its mutuality. Buber mentions three different cases, which are supposed to exemplify the various forms that an I-Thou relation can take.23 The first form is based on an abstract but mutual experience of inclusion, which finds its clearest illustration in the case of two persons caught up in an argument. Being set apart by diverging attitudes and convictions, two persons involved in a dispute “stand over against each other so that each of the two knows and means, recognizes and acknowledges, accepts and confirms the other, even in the severest conflict, as this particular person.”24 The experience of inclusion is abstract in this case since neither of the two gains access to the other’s concretely lived experiences. The difference between their lives remains too big. Yet there is still, according to Buber, a form of mutual recognition of the other’s being a particular person, a recognition of the other’s So-Sein.25 A different case—a concrete but one-sided experience of inclusion—can be observed in a second set of examples, namely hierarchical relations arising in, for instance, educational or therapeutic contexts. Elaborating on the former, Buber argues that it pertains to the essence of a teacher-student relationship that only the teacher seeks to experience the common situation from the student’s perspective, i.e., for the teaching to be effective, the inclusion must be one-sided. The teacher, but not the student, “catches himself ‘from over there,’ ” from the position of the student, in order to gain a full understanding of how his or her own actions affect the student and his or her learning objectives.26 If this asymmetry is not preserved, the relationship between teacher and student might change character and develop into friendship.27 Friendship, in fact, is the third and remaining form of a dialogical relation, which Buber defines as a relationship based on both a concrete and a mutual experience of inclusion.28

2.  Levinas and the Significance of the Face Let us now turn to Levinas. In Totalité et infini, Levinas contests that intentionality can provide us with an encounter with true otherness. Rather, the encounter with the other is fundamentally different from the encounter with any worldly objects: “[t]o think the infinite, the transcendent, the Stranger, is hence not to think an object.”29 It is true, Levinas says, that the world I am living in is a world filled with objects that differ from myself. But whenever I study them or consume them or utilize

84  Patricia Meindl, Felipe León and Dan Zahavi them in work, I transform the foreign and different into the familiar and same, and thereby make them lose their alterity.30 Although intentionality does relate me to that which is foreign, in the end it never makes me leave home. As Levinas puts it, the knowing subject acts like the famous stone of the alchemists: it transmutes everything it touches. It absorbs the foreign, annuls its alterity, and transforms it into the same.31 When I perceive objects, I am their condition of manifestation. In contrast, my encounter with the other is not conditioned by anything in my power. It is an encounter with an ineffable and radical exteriority. The other surpasses any conceptualization or categorization: “If one could possess, grasp, and know the other, it would not be other.”32 Whereas Buber highlights the extent to which the relation to the Thou involves an interplay of activity and passivity, Levinas insists that the encounter with the other is a question of being affected in radical passivity by something “invisible.”33 When Levinas talks of “the face,” he is precisely referring to this encounter: The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face. This mode does not consist in figuring as a theme under my gaze, in spreading itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image.34 Thence the importance of the relation to the other man as the incomparable, as emptied of all “social role,” and who thus, in his nudity—his destitution, his mortality—straightaway imposes himself upon my responsibility: goodness, mercy, or charity. This nudity which is a call to me—an appeal but also an imperative—I name face.35 Given that, for Levinas, the absence of the other is exactly his presence as other,36 the face of the other is never actually seen. Rather, the face of the other speaks, in the sense that it appeals to me and demands a response. Yet being responsible for the other is not something one actively and freely chooses; rather, responsibility is passively imposed upon me by the other: “[S]ince the Other looks at me, I am responsible for him, without even having taken on responsibilities in his regard; his responsibility is incumbent on me. It is responsibility that goes beyond what I do.”37 Responsibility, as understood by Levinas, occurs prior to one’s actions and decisions insofar as it signifies an originary being-for-the-other.38 Importantly, responsibility for Levinas is something I owe the other, and not something I should expect from the other: “I am responsible for the Other without waiting for his reciprocity, were I to die for it. Reciprocity is his affair.”39 Responsibility is consequently one-sided and non-reciprocal. As Levinas also writes, “[r]esponsibility, the signification which is non-indifference, goes one way, from me to the other.”40 To talk of reciprocity in this context would be to opt for a kind of exchange

Buber, Levinas, and the I-Thou Relation 85 economy where one imagines the other to be similar to oneself, and where one thereby violates the very alterity of the other.41 Although Levinas frequently speaks of the other as the “weak,” or the “poor” facing me, “the rich or the powerful,”42 the other is at the same time calling upon me from a height. By making an irrefutable appeal to my responsibility, the other’s voice does not come from below, or from a position equal to or symmetrical with mine, but from above. To understand what Levinas has in mind, it is crucial to recall that for him the encounter with the face of the other is first and foremost ethical in nature. Ethics, in this context, is not to be understood as a set of abstract and generalizable rules but precisely as an unconditional responsibility for the other. It is important to highlight the very position from which the interpersonal encounter is described. Levinas insists that the encounter with the other has to be described from within rather than from without. It is, in his view, precisely from the first-person perspective that the height of the other, indeed his or her alterity, is apprehended, whereas it vanishes as soon as we adopt a standpoint outside the relation: The reversibility of a relation where the terms are indifferently read from left to right and from right to left would couple them the one to the other; they would complete one another in a system visible from the outside. The intended transcendence would be thus reabsorbed into the unity of the system, destroying the radical alterity of the other. [. . .] The alterity, the radical heterogeneity of the other, is possible only if the other is other with respect to a term whose essence is to remain at the point of departure, to serve as entry into the ­relation, to be the same not relatively but absolutely. A term can remain absolutely at the point of departure of relationship only as I.43 According to Levinas, when viewed from without, one might indeed consider the relation between me and the other as reciprocal. But to describe the relation from without is precisely to adopt the very objectifying gaze that Levinas is seeking to overcome.44 As we shall see in the next section, it is exactly this issue that is at the heart of Levinas’s criticism of Buber’s conception of the I-Thou relation.

3.  Levinas Contra Buber Levinas’s long-lasting engagement with Buber, spanning more than 30 years,45 evinces a deep-seated disagreement about the encounter with the concrete other. In fact, Levinas and Buber seem to articulate two opposing views on the kind of relationship that must be in place if the alterity of the other person is to be acknowledged: a vertical relation of radical asymmetry or a horizontal relation of reciprocal engagement.

86  Patricia Meindl, Felipe León and Dan Zahavi Despite Levinas’s remark in Totalité et infini that his work “does not have the ridiculous pretension of ‘correcting’ Buber,”46 Levinas presents over the years a variety of objections to Buber’s account of the I-Thou relation—some of which will be reinforced, some of which retracted in later discussions.47 Following Derrida, it is possible to single out three objections at the core of Levinas’s criticism of Buber’s conception of the I-Thou relation.48 First, Levinas criticizes Buber’s I-Thou relation for being “selfsufficient” and “forgetful of the universe,”49 a claim echoing Levinas’s earlier assessment of the I-Thou as reaching its apogee in the “spiritual friendship.”50 On the face of it, this criticism seems to be based on a misinterpretation, however. As Buber points out, “Levinas errs in a strange way when he supposes that I see in the amitié toute spirituelle the peak of the I-Thou relation.”51 For Buber, friendship is only one of the forms a dialogical relation can take. In fact, he even claims that the most authentic form of I-Thou relationship is to be found in antagonistic situations where two people confirm and acknowledge each other, in spite of the fact that they do not have much in common.52 Second, Levinas criticizes Buber for emptying the I-Thou relation of any content by extending the I-Thou to animals and even inanimate objects.53 This allegedly “formal” character of the relation contrasts with Levinas’s own emphasis on the ethical character of the self-other relation.54 Levinas renews this critique a few years later in “Martin Buber’s Thought and Contemporary Judaism,” where he claims that “[w]e remain, with Buber, too often on the level of the purely formal meeting, even though he adds the word ‘responsibility.’ ”55 In a sense, this objection is derived from Levinas’s third and most fundamental objection. As Derrida puts it, Levinas reproaches Buber’s I-Thou relation “for being reciprocal and symmetrical, thus committing violence against height.”56 A passage from Levinas’s “Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge” is most instructive in this regard. Addressing the tension between the feature of reciprocity and an ethical relation, Levinas argues: How can we maintain the specificity of the interhuman I-Thou without bringing out the strictly ethical meaning of responsibility, and how can we bring out the ethical meaning without questioning the reciprocity on which Buber always insists? [. . .] We shall direct our main criticism to the reciprocity of the I-Thou relation. Ethical themes are frequent in Buber’s own descriptions, but a more abstract structure of distance and relation also replaces the I-Thou relation, and apparently even underlies the I-It relation. We wonder whether the relation with the alterity of others which appears in the form of dialogue, of question and answer, can be described without introducing a paradoxical difference of level between the I and the Thou. The

Buber, Levinas, and the I-Thou Relation 87 originality of the I-Thou comes from the fact that that relation is known not from the outside, but from the I who brings it about. Its place is therefore not interchangeable with the place occupied by the Thou. In what does this position of ipseity consist? If the I becomes I in saying Thou, I have obtained this position from my correlate, and the I-Thou relation is like all other relations: as if an external onlooker were speaking of I and Thou in the third person. The meeting, which is formal, can be reversed, read from left to right just as well as from right to left. In the ethics in which the other is at once higher and poorer than I, the I is distinguished from the Thou, not by any sort of “attributes,” but by the dimension of height, which breaks with Buber’s formalism.57 This passage pinpoints the main difference between Buber’s and Levinas’s conceptions of the relation between self and other. Buber insists that the most fundamental relation between self and other is captured in the I-Thou relation, where both are equal partners, reciprocally relating to each other as a Thou. Levinas, by contrast, insists that the relation between self and other is fundamentally an ethical relation; one that is inherently in tension with an understanding of it in terms of reciprocity. The fundamental relation to the other is a relation to an absolute other “which does not imply reciprocity.”58 It is a relation of “ethical inequality,” of “subordination to the other.”59 Indeed, the insistence on reciprocity compromises for Levinas the absolute distance and difference of the other.60 This is also why Levinas doubts whether the usage of “the familiar I-Thou” is justified at all.61 In fact, Levinas has already pointed out many years earlier in Totalité et infini that the other is not a “Thou” (tu), but a “You” (vous), who reveals himself “in his lordship.”62 For Levinas, this asymmetrical situation necessitates a change in the way we conceptualize not only the second-person singular, but also the firstperson singular. In “Apropos of Buber: Some Notes,” Levinas substitutes the first-person singular in the nominative case (“I”) with the accusative (“me”). I am aware of myself in the accusative as being called upon by the other. The other approaches me with a demand, a call that only I can answer “as if I were the only one concerned [. . .]. My ethical responsibility is my uniqueness, my election and my ‘primogeniture.’ ”63 Indeed, responsibility is Levinas’s alternative to Buber’s reciprocity. As Levinas also writes, “the approach to others is not originally in my speaking out to the other, but in my responsibility for him or her. That is the original ethical relation.”64 Ultimately, Levinas’s criticism of Buber appears to vacillate between two slightly different positions. On some occasions, Levinas seems to be objecting to Buber’s account of the I-Thou, namely as one that necessarily involves reciprocity. On other occasions, Levinas seems to agree with Buber that the I-Thou relation necessarily entails reciprocity, but

88  Patricia Meindl, Felipe León and Dan Zahavi denies that it constitutes the fundamental relation between self and other. Hence, Levinas raises the following question against Buber: “Are we not compelled to substitute for the reciprocity of the I-Thou relation a structure which is more fundamental and which excludes reciprocity, that is, one which involves an asymmetry or difference of level and thereby implies real distancing?”65 How does Buber respond to the criticism? In Philosophical Interrogations, Buber directly addresses Levinas’s question and criticizes the proposed primacy of asymmetry: Understood in utter seriousness, the asymmetry that wishes to limit the relation to the relationship to a higher would make it completely one-sided: love would either be unreciprocated by its nature, or each of the two lovers must miss the reality of the other. Even as the foundation of an ethic, I cannot acknowledge “asymmetry.” I live “ethically” when I confirm and further my Thou in the right of his existence and the goal of his becoming, in all his otherness. I am not ethically bidden to regard him as superior to me through his otherness.66 One central issue of controversy between Levinas and Buber concerns the question of whether reciprocity entails interchangeability and thereby a denial of the alterity of the other. For Levinas, the denial of the reciprocal character of the I-Thou relation is a way of protecting the incommensurable alterity of the other. For Buber, the reciprocity of the I-Thou relation serves the very same purpose; it is a way of acknowledging and confirming the other in his or her otherness.67 It is consequently important to understand that Levinas and Buber are united in their opposition to the view that the relation between I and Thou is best understood as some form of mirroring or self-projection, as if one comes to understand others by recognizing oneself in them. In the following, we will engage with two questions: (1) Is Levinas right when insisting that the reciprocity of the I-Thou relation can only be ascertained from without the relation, by taking an objectifying and third-personal stance on it? (2) Does Buber’s reference to the notion of “inclusion” in his account of the I-Thou relation really do justice to the alterity of the other? In order to address these questions, it will be instructive to briefly engage with the work of two figures who haven’t been mentioned so far: Alfred Schutz and Iris Marion Young. Both provide further resources for investigating the role of reciprocity in interpersonal encounters, and, more specifically, both insist on acknowledging the role of reciprocity while at the same time resisting the idea that an emphasis on reciprocity goes hand-in-hand with a commitment to a third-personal stance (Schutz) and a morally questionable self-projection (Young).

Buber, Levinas, and the I-Thou Relation 89

4. Engaging with Levinas’s Criticism: Schutz and Young on Reciprocity According to Levinas, the reciprocal character of a relation can only be established from outside the relation, from the position of an external observer. But this, he argues, is problematic for two reasons. First, by appealing to the perspective of an outsider, we simply don’t do justice to the actual experience of encountering the other. Second, viewed from the outside, “[t]he intended transcendence would be thus reabsorbed into the unity of the system, destroying the radical alterity of the other.”68 While Buber’s reply to these charges left many questions unanswered, the phenomenological tradition harbors resources which allow for a more direct engagement with Levinas’s outright rejection of reciprocity. Buber and Levinas were not the only philosophers discussing whether a second-person relation requires reciprocity. Quite independently of their dispute, we find another phenomenologist, Alfred Schutz, discussing this issue in his own work on phenomenological sociology. A central idea in Schutz’s main oeuvre from 1932, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt: Eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie is that the social world is heterogeneous and structured in complex ways and that other subjects can be given to the social agent “in different degrees of anonymity, experiential immediacy, and fulfillment.”69 It is in the context of his investigation of how we encounter others in the Umwelt, in the surrounding world, that Schutz introduces the notion of the “Thouattitude” (Du-Einstellung) or “Thou-orientation” (Du-Orientierung).70 Schutz characterizes this Thou-attitude as a type of intentionality that is pre-predicative and pre-reflective in nature. It precedes any acts of judgment and is not the result of an act of reflection or any analogical reasoning. Rather, it offers us a primitive grasp of the other’s psychophysical existence in its spatiotemporal immediacy.71 Interestingly, Schutz argues that there is nothing in the Thou-attitude as such that requires the target of attention to be aware of being attended to, let alone to reciprocate. In contrast to Buber, Schutz consequently allows for a non-reciprocal, or unilateral, Thou-orientation.72 This is not to say, however, that Schutz would side with Levinas since we are dealing with quite different positions. In “direct social observation,” Schutz writes, the Thou-orientation is “one-sided” insofar as “I am observing someone else’s behavior and [. . .] he either does not know that he is being observed or is paying no attention to it.”73 In other words, Schutz’s concept of a non-reciprocal Thou-orientation is precisely an instance of the purely epistemic relation that Levinas is calling into question. Despite his reference to a unilateral Thou-orientation, Schutz does, however, highlight the significance of the reciprocal engagement that we find in the face-to-face encounter, i.e., in the mutual or reciprocal

90  Patricia Meindl, Felipe León and Dan Zahavi Thou-attitude.74 When two people are reciprocally oriented toward each other, or, to adopt the first-person perspective, when I ascertain that the other towards whom I am Thou-oriented is also Thou-oriented towards me, we get what Schutz calls a “we-relationship” or a “living social relationship.”75 I take up an Other-orientation toward my partner, who is in turn oriented toward me. Immediately, and at the same time, I grasp the fact that he, on his part, is aware of my attention to him. In such cases I, you, we, live in the social relationship itself, and that is true in virtue of the intentionality of the living Acts directed toward the partner. I, you, we, are by this means carried from one moment to the next in a particular attentional modification of the state of being mutually oriented to each other. The social relationship in which we live is constituted, therefore, by means of the attentional modification undergone by my Other-orientation, as I immediately and directly grasp within the latter the very living reality of the partner as one who is in turn oriented toward me.76 According to Schutz, a we-relationship is a subject-subject relation. It is a relationship constituted by me and at least one co-subject. But for me to relate to another as a co-subject is for me to relate to somebody who not only has a perspective of his or her own on the world of objects, but on me as well. In short, from my first-person perspective, there is a quite salient difference between a unilateral and a bilateral Thou-orientation. There is a difference between talking to and talking with somebody, between watching someone unobserved and realizing that one’s attention is being noticed and reciprocated. In the latter case, we affect each other immediately; there is a pre-reflective interlocking of perspectives; “you and I are in a specific sense ‘simultaneous’ . . . we ‘coexist’ . . . our respective streams of consciousness intersect.”77 Reciprocity, in other words, manifests itself in a specific modification of the experiences, which could not have been attained within a unilateral relation. How are these ideas related to Levinas’s criticism of reciprocity as implying the adoption of a third-personal stance? Schutz’s description of the we-relationship shows how reciprocity is something that directly affects and transforms the experiences of those involved in a face-to-face relation. Hence, it seems fairly straightforward to reject the claim that a commitment to reciprocity necessarily entails a betrayal of the firstperson perspective and instead presumes a totalizing third-person view from nowhere. However, rejecting the claim that reciprocity is necessarily tied to the adoption of a third-person perspective does not alleviate Levinas’s more deep-seated concern about the other’s alterity and transcendence. Even if reciprocity is experientially manifest from a first-person point of view,

Buber, Levinas, and the I-Thou Relation 91 might it still violate the absolute and irreducible otherness of the other that Levinas is seeking to preserve? Much depends on how one conceptualizes the relation between reciprocity, symmetry, and reversibility. The very issue is discussed in a paper by Iris Marion Young with the intriguing title “Asymmetrical Reciprocity.” According to Young, concepts such as symmetry and reversibility evoke “images of mirror reflection” where we allegedly understand others because we see ourselves reflected in them, and vice versa.78 But to suggest that we come to understand others in this manner, however, in no way does justice to the particularity and alterity of the other. This is not only the case, Young claims, when one attempts to adopt the perspective of a person situated in a radically different life situation, e.g., when an able-bodied person attempts to put herself in the shoes of a blind or deaf person; even in cases where individuals share significant life circumstances, their lives will still very much be shaped and individuated by divergent experiences, values, habits, etc., which makes a facile reversal of perspectives impossible. In fact, often such an imaginative perspective taking amounts to nothing but a form of self-projection, a mere imposition of one’s own view upon the other, which transforms everything that is truly different about the other into bland sameness.79 Young now contrasts the notions of symmetry and reversibility with that of reciprocity. Reciprocity might indeed require that the other is “an ‘I’ to herself just as I am an ‘I’ to myself and that I am an ‘other’ to her just as she is an ‘other’ to me,” but for Young, this “neither describes nor presupposes a reversibility of standpoints.”80 On the contrary, precisely because the relation between self and other is reciprocal, it is also “asymmetrical and irreversible.”81 Here is one way to understand Young’s argument: when engaged in a reciprocal self-other relation, where I am not simply aware of the other, but also simultaneously aware of myself in the accusative, aware of being attended to and addressed by the other, something novel is happening. I come to possess a socially mediated selfcomprehension very unlike my immediate experience of myself. Had this simply been a question of mere reversibility, had it simply been a question of perspective shifting, I would not have had to await the encounter with the other, I could have accomplished it all on my own.82 Young’s claim that reciprocity is neither symmetrical nor reversible stands in clear contrast to Levinas’s claim that reciprocity is both symmetrical and reversible, but her analysis can also be used to criticize Buber’s notion of “inclusion.”83 As shown earlier, the idea of “inclusion” is explicated by Buber in terms of one’s capacity to reverse perspectives and to adopt the other’s standpoint.84 Buber seems convinced that viewing one’s relation with the other from his or her point of view serves the purpose of attaining “the complete presence of the reality in which one participates.”85 But this surely presupposes a quite substantive symmetry in subject positions, which by far exceeds the more innocuous

92  Patricia Meindl, Felipe León and Dan Zahavi acknowledgement of the other also being a self. What seems implicitly presupposed by Buber’s concept of “inclusion” is that an understanding of the other can be accomplished simply as a result of “swinging” into the other’s life situation. While Buber’s concept of inclusion is not, at least not explicitly, at the forefront of Levinas’s criticism, there is reason to think that the notion is far more vulnerable to his critique than Buber’s insistence on the importance of reciprocity.

5. Conclusion Our discussion of the exchange between Levinas and Buber regarding the I-Thou relation suggests that reciprocity per se does not threaten or eliminate alterity. To insist that the other is also an irreducible self can hardly be seen as an act of violence, and it is only in conjunction with the ideas of interchangeability and reversibility that the relation to the other takes on the morally questionable feature of an exchange economy, where the other is nothing but a mirror-image of myself. The problematic equation between reciprocity and interchangeability is most explicitly endorsed by Levinas in De l’existence à l’existant, where he claims that “the interpersonal situation is not of itself the indifferent and reciprocal relationship of two interchangeable terms.”86 Levinas’s view that reciprocity is inextricably linked with an interchangeability of subject positions is further motivated by his claim that reciprocity can only be ascertained from a totalizing, third-personal stance. By appealing to Schutz analysis of the “we-relationship,” however, we have suggested that this assumption is mistaken. Reciprocity is not a feature only discernable from the perspective of an outside spectator but is rather something that directly affects and transforms the experiences of those involved in a way that is firstpersonally manifest. It might at this point be objected that our criticism of Levinas fails to engage with his main objection and prime agenda, which remain ethical. Even if it should turn out that the I-Thou relation is characterized by reciprocity, and even if this reciprocity doesn’t entail an alterity-destroying reversibility, it could still be argued that the reciprocal I-Thou relation is a founded and derived encounter, one that presupposes a more fundamental non-reciprocal and vertical relation of responsibility for the absolute other. Let us simply acknowledge that our criticism doesn’t address this aspect of the disagreement between Levinas and Buber. Our focus and interest in the present contribution has been on whether their dispute can inform contemporary debates on what second-person engagement amounts to, and here Levinas’s claim concerning the existence of a relation to the other which differs from and is more fundamental than the I-Thou relation is less relevant. Where does all of this then leave us with regard to the contemporary debates on social cognition? It has recently been suggested by various

Buber, Levinas, and the I-Thou Relation 93 scholars that reciprocity is a distinctive feature of second-person engagement, of relating to another as a you.87 Our discussion of the exchange between Buber and Levinas lends some support to this view. In addition, it also offers some ammunition against those who have suggested that second-person engagement is simply a question of using one’s own experiences to understand other subjects, i.e., who argue that it is a question of simulating, replicating, or imagining the mental states of another.88 Not only does such an account seem to miss the intended explanandum, since it simply reduces second-person perspective taking to a version of first-person simulation, but by appealing to a model of self-replication, it also remains vulnerable to all the challenges raised by Levinas and Young. Let us add a final note on some implications of the foregoing discussion for the understanding of larger-scale social formations. Foregrounding the differences that set apart Buber’s and Levinas’s accounts of dyadic relations does not entail that there is no common ground between them. On the contrary, Levinas’s account of the face and Buber’s notion of the I-Thou relation can both be seen as attempts to oppose the tendency to conceptualize human sociality in terms of fusion and uniformity. In Le temps et l’autre, Levinas rejects this model of sociality as one in which the subject is swallowed up in a collectivity that places the other at one’s side, rather than in front of oneself.89 One of Levinas’s targets is undoubtedly Heidegger. According to Levinas, the Heideggerian notion of Miteinandersein not only refers to a collectivity formed around “something common.”90 Moreover, the “Mit is always being next to . . . It is not in the first instance the Face, it is zusammensein [being-together], perhaps zusammen-marschieren [marching-together].”91 Levinas explicitly opposes the collectivity of this “side-by-side,” with the “I-You” collectivity, “a collectivity that is not a communion”, but “the face-to-face without intermediary.”92 In a similar vein, Buber quite explicitly rejects conceptions of sociality that bundle together individuals, placing them side by side or shoulder to shoulder.93 Critiquing Heidegger for failing to replace the destructive anonymity of the “one” (das Man) with a positive account of the relation between an individual and a plurality of others, Buber develops a conception of community centered around the I turning towards a Thou.94 As he writes already in 1929, “community, growing community [. . .] is the being no longer side by side but with one another of a multitude of persons. And this multitude, though it also moves towards one goal, yet experiences everywhere a turning to, a dynamic facing of, the other, a flowing from I to Thou.”95 Addressing another as a Thou and being in turn addressed as a Thou by the other(s) are consequently essential to the life of a community, which rather than being a mere side-by-side, is a with-one-another. While these brief references should make clear that both Levinas and Buber are rejecting a conception of sociality that is based on fusion, this should not cover up the fact that both defend two quite distinct visions of community. In

94  Patricia Meindl, Felipe León and Dan Zahavi fact, although an examination of this topic goes beyond the scope of the present contribution, the differences that set apart Buber’s and Levinas’s accounts of dyadic relations carry over and shape their respective conceptions of communal life.96

Notes 1. Naomi Eilan, “The You Turn,” Philosophical Explorations 17, no. 3 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1080/13869795.2014.941910. 2. Vasudevi Reddy, How Infants Know Minds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 3. Leonhard Schilbach, Bert Timmermans, Vasudevi Reddy, Alan Costall, Gary Bente, Tobias Schlicht and Kai Vogeley, “Toward a Second-Person Neuroscience,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (2013). 4. Levinas, “On Buber,” in Levinas and Buber: Dialogue and Difference, ed. Peter Atterton, Matthew Calarco and Maurice Friedman (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2004), 33. 5. Karl Heim, “Ontologie und Theologie,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 11 (1930): 333. 6. Martin Buber, I and Thou (London: Bloomsburry, 2013), 6. 7. Michael Theunissen, Der Andere: Studien zur Sozialontologie der Gegenwart, zweite, um eine Vorrede vermehrte Auflage (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1977), 260. Even then, Buber still defended the claim that the I-Thou relation is also possible with inanimate objects. See Buber, I and Thou, 88. Our focus, however, will only be on the I-Thou relation within the interhuman realm. 8. Friedrich Kluge, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1957), 171. 9. Buber, I and Thou, 4. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 23. 12. Ibid., 6. 13. Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 213. 14. Martin Buber, The Knowledge of Man: Selected Essays, ed. Maurice Friedman and trans. Maurice Friedman and Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 113. 15. Ibid., 178. 16. Buber, Between Man and Man, 5. 17. Ibid., 22. 18. Martin Buber, Urdistanz und Beziehung: Beiträge zu einer philosophischen Anthropologie (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1978), 33. 19. Buber, Between Man and Man, 115. 20. Buber, Urdistanz und Beziehung: Beiträge zu einer philosophischen Anthropologie, 33; our translation. 21. Buber, The Knowledge of Man: Selected Essays, 81. 22. Buber, Between Man and Man, 115. 23. Ibid., 117. 24. Martin Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” in The Philosophy of Martin Buber, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp and Maurice Friedman. The Library of Living Philosophers (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1967), 723.

Buber, Levinas, and the I-Thou Relation 95 25. Martin Buber, Dialogisches Leben: Gesammelte Philosophische und Pädagogische Schriften (Zürich: Georg Müller Verlag, 1947), 281; cf. Buber, Between Man and Man, 117. 26. Buber, Between Man and Man, 119. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 49. 30. Ibid., 111, 129. 31. Emmanuel Levinas, Cahier de l’Herne: Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Catherine Chalier and Miguel Abensour (Paris: L’Herne, 1991), 52. 32. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 90. 33. Ibid., 32, 68, 86. 34. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 50. 35. Jill Robbins, ed., Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 114–15. 36. Levinas, Time and the Other, 94. 37. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 96. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 98. 40. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publisher, 1991), 138. 41. Ellie Anderson, “From Existential Alterity to Ethical Reciprocity: Beauvoir’s Alternative to Levinas,” Continental Philosophy Review (2019): 175; Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, 138. 42. Levinas, Time and the Other, 83. 43. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 35–36. 44. cf. Sophie Loidolt, “Value, Freedom, Responsibility,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology, ed. Dan Zahavi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 709. 45. Levinas discusses Buber in the following works: Time and the Other (1987), based on a series of lectures presented in 1946–1947; “Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge” (1967), newly translated in Proper Names (1996), first written in 1958; Totality and Infinity (1979), originally published in 1961; “Dialogue with Martin Buber” in Proper Names (1996), which includes a letter to Buber written in 1963; Philosophical Interrogations (1964); “Martin Buber’s Thought and Contemporary Judaism” (1968), “Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel and Philosophy” (1978), “Apropos of Buber: Some Notes” (1982), in Outside the Subject (1994); “Le Dialogue. Conscience de soi et proximité du prochain” (1980); Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers ed. Richard Kearney (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), which includes an interview with Levinas conducted in Paris in 1981. 46. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 69. 47. As Bernasconi points out, Levinas’s reading of Buber undergoes several changes: from a predominantly critical assessment in his earlier works, e.g., in “Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge” (1967) or Totalité et infini (1961) to a more charitable reading in “Martin Buber, Gabriel ­Marcel and Philosophy” (1994) and “Le Dialogue. Conscience de soi et proximité du prochain” (1980), aimed at detecting hidden resources in Buber. However, Levinas returns to his earlier criticism in his last essay on Buber, “­Apropos

96  Patricia Meindl, Felipe León and Dan Zahavi of Buber: Some Notes” (1994). See Robert Bernasconi, “ ‘Failure of Communication’ as a Surplus: Dialogue and Lack of Dialogue between Buber and Levinas,” in Levinas and Buber: Dialogue and Difference, ed. Peter Atterton, Matthew Calarco and Maurice Friedman (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2004), 65–97. 48. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2007), 131 fn. 37. This is only a selection of Levinas’s objections to Buber. For a more extensive overview, see Bernasconi, “ ‘Failure of Communication’ as a Surplus.” 49. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 213. 50. Levinas, “Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge,” 33. 51. Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” 723. 52. Ibid. 53. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 68. 54. Ibid. 55. Emmanuel Levinas, Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 17. As Bernasconi points out, however, this assessment underwent substantial revision a decade later when Levinas argued that the I-Thou relation, despite retaining in some sense the character of a pure, “formal confrontation,” nevertheless has “ethical concreteness.” The responses establishing a dialogue, he claims, signify “responsibility of one for the other.” Levinas, Outside the Subject, 34f; cf. Bernasconi, “ ‘Failure of Communication’ as a Surplus: Dialogue and Lack of Dialogue between Buber and Levinas,” 81. However, this reading of Buber stands in tension with his later assessment in “Apropos of Buber: Some Notes,” where Levinas argues that Buber’s reciprocal I-Thou relation begins with “justice” and neglects the more fundamental ethical relation between I and Thou. Levinas, Outside the Subject, 45. 56. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 131 fn. 37. 57. Levinas, Proper Names, 32. 58. Emmanuel Levinas, “The Philosophy of Dialogue,” in Philosophical Interrogations, ed. Sydney Rome and Beatrice Rome (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 24. 59. Levinas, Outside the Subject, 44. 60. Levinas, “The Philosophy of Dialogue,” 26. 61. Levinas, Outside the Subject, 44. 62. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 101. 63. Levinas, Outside the Subject, 44. 64. Ibid., 43–44. 65. Levinas, “The Philosophy of Dialogue,” 26. 66. Martin Buber, “The Philosophy of Dialogue,” in Philosophical Interrogations, ed. Sydney Rome and Beatrice Rome (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 28. 67. One slightly surprising outcome of this difference is that whereas Buber is, indeed, a philosopher of the face-to-face relation, Levinas might better be described as a philosopher of the face. See Anderson, “From Existential Alterity to Ethical Reciprocity: Beauvoir’s Alternative to Levinas.” 68. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 35–36. 69. Alfred Schutz, Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 8; translation modified. 70. Ibid., 163. In the early text Lebensformen und Sinnstruktur, which the editors of Schutz’s critical edition date to 1925, Schutz was already engaged in

Buber, Levinas, and the I-Thou Relation 97 an attempt to develop a method that could allow for a comprehension of the Thou, and he even characterized the goal of his investigation as the attempt to ground “the social sciences in the Thou experience.” Alfred Schutz, Life Forms and Meaning Structure, trans. Helmut R. Wagner (London: Routledge, 2014), 34. 71. Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, The Structures of the Life-World, trans. Richard M. Zahner and H. Tristram Engelhardt, Vol. 1 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 1, 62. 72. Schutz, Phenomenology of the Social World, 146; Schutz and Luckmann, The Structures of the Life-World, 1, 62. 73. Schutz, Phenomenology of the Social World, 173. 74. Ibid., 165–66, 173. 75. Ibid., 157. 76. Ibid., 156–57. 77. Ibid., 102; cf. Felipe León and Dan Zahavi, “Phenomenology of Experiential Sharing: The Contribution of Schutz and Walther,” in The Phenomenological Approach to Social Reality: History, Concepts, Problems, ed. Alessandro Salice and Hans Bernhard Schmid (Cham: Springer, 2016). 78. Iris Marion Young, “Asymmetrical Reciprocity. On Moral Respect, Wonder, and Enlarged Thought,” Constellations 3, no. 3 (1997): 346. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid., 348. 81. Ibid. 82. Let us here highlight that the target of Young’s criticism is a reversibility of standpoints, through which one would understand the other’s concrete situation in terms of one’s own. This line of criticism is compatible with acknowledging that reversibility plays other roles in interpersonal relations, most notably when these are communicative and dialogical relations involving reversible speech roles (speaker-hearer), and, more generally, an alternation between addressing and being addressed in turn by the other. See Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics (Coral Gables, FL: Miami University Press, 1971), 199; Felipe León, “Autism, Social Connectedness, and Minimal Social Acts,” Adaptive Behaviour 27, no. 1 (2019). 83. Somewhat puzzling, Young claims that she is deriving her notion of asymmetrical reciprocity from a reading of Levinas, but that surely is a misreading, since Levinas, as we have seen, persistently equates reciprocity and reversibility. See Young, “Asymmetrical Reciprocity,” 351. 84. It should be noted, however, that there is one case of “inclusion” which does not seem to rest on one’s capacity to reverse perspectives. In the case of two persons arguing with each other, being separated by different attitudes and convictions, but both recognizing each other’s So-Sein, inclusion remains abstract. See Buber, Dialogisches Leben, 281; Buber, Between Man and Man, 117. 85. Buber, Between Man and Man, 115. 86. Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Kluwer Academic Publisher, 1978), 98. 87. Leon de Bruin, Michiel van Elk and Albert Newen, “Reconceptualizing Second-Person Interaction,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6 (2012); Dan Zahavi, “You, Me, and We: The Sharing of Emotional Experiences,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 22, no. 1–2 (2015); Dan Zahavi, “Second-Person Engagement, Self-Alienation, and Group-Identification,” Topoi 38, no. 1 (2019); Naomi Eilan, “Joint Attention and the Second Person,”

98  Patricia Meindl, Felipe León and Dan Zahavi accessed October 12, 2019, https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/philosophy/people/eilan/jaspup.pdf. 88. Michael Pauen, “The Second-Person Perspective,” Inquiry 55, no. 1 (2012): 38. 89. Levinas, Time and the Other, 93. 90. Ibid. 91. Levinas, Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 116. 92. Levinas, Time and the Other, 93f. 93. Buber, Between Man and Man, 37. 94. Ibid., 207f. 95. Ibid., 37. 96. This research was supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark, as part of the project ‘You and We: Second-person Engagement and Collective Intentionality’ (DFF – 7013-00032). We are grateful to Thomas Szanto, Sophie Loidolt, Michael Fagenblat and Søren Overgaard for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

References Anderson, Ellie. “From Existential Alterity to Ethical Reciprocity: Beauvoir’s Alternative to Levinas.” Continental Philosophy Review 52 (2019): 171–189. Benveniste, Émile. Problems in General Linguistics. Coral Gables, FL: Miami University Press, 1971. Bernasconi, Robert. “ ‘Failure of Communication’ as a Surplus: Dialogue and Lack of Dialogue Between Buber and Levinas.” In Levinas and Buber: Dialogue and Difference, edited by Peter Atterton, Matthew Calarco and Maurice Friedman, 65–97. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2004. Bruin, Leon de, Michiel van Elk, and Albert Newen. “Reconceptualizing Second-Person Interaction.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6 (2012): 1–10. Buber, Martin. Between Man and Man. Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. ———. Dialogisches Leben: Gesammelte Philosophische und Pädagogische Schriften. Zürich: Georg Müller Verlag, 1947. ———. I and Thou. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. ———. “The Philosophy of Dialogue.” In Philosophical Interrogations, edited by Sydney Rome and Beatrice Rome, 27–29. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964. ———. The Knowledge of Man: Selected Essays. Edited by Maurice Friedman and translated by Maurice Friedman and Ronald Gregor Smith. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. ———. “Replies to My Critics.” In The Philosophy of Martin Buber, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp and Maurice Friedman, 689–744. The Library of Living Philosophers. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1967. ———. Urdistanz und Beziehung: Beiträge zu einer philosophischen Anthropologie. Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1978. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. London: Routledge, 2007.

Buber, Levinas, and the I-Thou Relation 99 Eilan, Naomi. “Joint Attention and the Second Person.” Accessed October 12, 2019. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/philosophy/people/eilan/jaspup.pdf. ———. “The You Turn.” Philosophical Explorations 17, no. 3 (2014): 265–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/13869795.2014.941910. Heim, Karl. “Ontologie und Theologie.” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 11 (1930): 325–38. Kearney, Richard. Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Kluge, Friedrich. Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1957. León, Felipe. “Autism, Social Connectedness, and Minimal Social Acts.” Adaptive Behaviour 27, no. 1 (2019): 75–89. León, Felipe, and Dan Zahavi. “Phenomenology of Experiential Sharing: The Contribution of Schutz and Walther.” In The Phenomenological Approach to Social Reality: History, Concepts, Problems, edited by Alessandro Salice and Hans Bernhard Schmid, 219–34. Cham: Springer, 2016. Levinas, Emmanuel. Cahier de l’Herne: Emmanuel Levinas. Edited by Catherine Chalier and Miguel Abensour. Paris: L’Herne, 1991. ———. Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other. Translated by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. ———. Ethics and Infinity. Translated by Richard Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985. ———. Existence and Existents. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Kluwer Academic Publisher, 1978. ———. “Le Dialogue: Conscience de soi et proximité du prochain.” Archivio di filosofia 48 (1980): 345–57. ———. “On Buber.” In Levinas and Buber. Dialogue and Difference, edited by Peter Atterton, Matthew Calarco, and Maurice Friedman, 32–34. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2004. ———. “The Philosophy of Dialogue.” In Philosophical Interrogations, edited by Sydney Rome and Beatrice Rome, 23–26. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964 ———. Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publisher, 1991. ———. Outside the Subject. Translated by Michael B. Smith. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. ———. Proper Names. Translated by Michael B. Smith. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. ———. Time and the Other. Translated by Richard Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987. ———. Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979. Loidolt, Sophie. “Value, Freedom, Responsibility.” In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology, edited by Dan Zahavi, 696–716. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pauen, Michael. “The Second-Person Perspective.” Inquiry 55, no. 1 (2012): 33–49. Reddy, Vasudevi. How Infants Know Minds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.

100  Patricia Meindl, Felipe León and Dan Zahavi Robbins, Jill, ed. Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Schilbach, Leonhard, Bert Timmermans, Vasudevi Reddy, Alan Costall, Gary Bente, Tobias Schlicht, and Kai Vogeley. “Toward a Second-Person Neuroscience.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (2013): 393–414. Schutz, Alfred. Life Forms and Meaning Structure. Translated by Helmut R. Wagner. London: Routledge, 2014. ———. Phenomenology of the Social World. Translated by George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967. Schutz, Alfred, and Thomas Luckmann. The Structures of the Life-World. Translated by Richard M. Zahner and H. Tristram Engelhardt, Vol. 1. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Theunissen, Michael. Der Andere. Studien zur Sozialontologie der Gegenwart. Zweite, um eine Vorrede vermehrte Auflage. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1977. Young, Iris Marion. “Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On Moral Respect, Wonder, and Enlarged Thought.” Constellations 3, no. 3 (1997): 340–63. Zahavi, Dan. “Second-Person Engagement, Self-Alienation, and GroupIdentification.” Topoi 38, no. 1 (2019): 251–60. ———. “You, Me, and We: The Sharing of Emotional Experiences.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 22, no. 1–2 (2015): 84–101.

5 Commanding, Giving, Vulnerable What Is the Normative Standing of the Other in Levinas? James H. P. Lewis and Robert Stern Introduction As everyone knows, at the heart of Levinas’s work is the apparently simple idea that through the encounter with another person, we are forced to give up our self-concern and take heed of the ethical relation between us. But, while simple on the surface, when one tries to characterize it in more detail, it can be hard to fit together the various ways in which Levinas talks about this relation and to identify precisely what he took its normative structure to be, as this is described in a number of apparently different ways that are not obviously compatible or equivalent, such as “command,” “call,” “summons,” “demand,” and so on. In this chapter, we intend to focus on these different characterizations and show what makes them different, while also endeavoring to find a way in which Levinas’s conception may nonetheless be fitted together into a coherent account of the face-to-face encounter that is at the heart of his ethics. To keep this discussion within reasonable bounds, we will mainly focus on Totality and Infinity (hereafter TI).1 We will begin by considering the different normative terms used to characterize the encounter in that text and show how they are conceptually distinct from one another; we will then offer a way to read Levinas’s position to nonetheless show how these different normative relations can be fitted together into a stable position. As an illustration of the variety of normative transactions that Levinas mentions in connection with the encounter between subject and other, consider the following passage: Let us for the moment attend to the sense which the abstractness or nudity of a face which breaks into this order of the world involves, and the overwhelming of consciousness which corresponds to this “abstractness.” Stripped of its very form, a face is paralyzed in its nudity. It is a distress. The nudity of a face is a denuding, and already a supplication in the straightforwardness that aims at me. But this supplication is an exigency; in it humility is joined with height. The

102  James H. P. Lewis and Robert Stern ethical dimension of visitation is thereby indicated. A true representation remains a possibility of appearance; the world which strikes against thought can do nothing against free thought—which is able to refuse inwardly, to take refuge in itself, to remain precisely a free thought before the true, to return to itself, to reflect on itself and take itself to be the origin of what it receives, to master what precedes it through memory. While free thought thus remains the Same, a face 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. Consciousness loses its first place. The presence of a face thus signifies an irrecusable order, a command, which puts a stop to the availability of consciousness. Consciousness is called into question by a face . . .  But the calling into question of this wild and naïve freedom for itself, sure of its refuge in itself, is not reducible to a negative movement. The calling into question of oneself is in fact the welcome of the absolutely other. The epiphany of the absolute other is a face, in which the other calls on me and signifies an order to me through his nudity, his denuding. His presence is a summons to answer. The I does not only become aware of this necessity to answer, as though it were an obligation or a duty about which it would have to come to a decision; it is in its very position wholly a responsibility or a diacony, as it is put in Isaiah, chapter 53.2 From this passage—taken not from TI but from an essay first published three years later, in 1964, “Meaning and Sense”—we have italicized a handful of terms which each characterize something of the normative dynamics at play between self and other. Those mentioned here include distress, supplication, height, order, command, call, calling into question, welcome, epiphany, and summons. Our starting point is to note that, prima facie, there is some tension between these different characterizations, and there is a good deal of ambiguity about what Levinas might mean by several if not every one of these concepts. As a result, anyone reading Levinas is confronted with an interpretative challenge. Does the other present the subject with ethical obligations by issuing a command or by making a plea? Is it the other’s height that is revealed as an epiphany to the subject or rather their vulnerability? And so on. In fact, the list of ways of characterizing the normative relation that are exhibited in this passage does not yet complete the full range of such relations that can be discerned in TI. Two others that we will consider as important options to be delineated are the notions of teaching and giving. What we propose to do is to offer a schematic way of distinguishing between this variety of concepts that Levinas deploys. The hope is not only to show how each is different from the others, but also to animate the relevance of each to Levinas’s understanding of the self-other

Commanding, Giving, Vulnerable 103 encounter. Before concluding, we will offer some criteria for adjudicating how the various concepts so distinguished might make sense of Levinas’s ethical outlook.

The Dimension of Height First, then, Figure 5.1 on the next page is a chart that maps a selection of Levinas’s normative concepts. The remainder of the next two sections of the present chapter will be devoted to explaining Levinas’s normative concepts in accordance with this schema. The broadest and most fundamental distinction that we propose as a helpful one to separate some of these concepts is that between the other standing as authoritative over the subject versus the other standing before the subject without authority. This is charted as the division between 1 and 2 in Figure 5.1. Generally speaking, Levinas uses the term height to denote the other’s authority that the subject is struck with in the encounter. As such, the left-hand side of our chart represents the manifestations of the other’s “dimension of height.” Having said that, it is worth noting that the concept of height is itself a rather complex one in Levinas’s vocabulary. When it first appears in TI (Levinas 1969: 35), the metaphor of the “dimension of height” seems to represent an epistemic relation between the subject and the ungraspable alterity of the other. There, the sense in which the other is “Most High” (ibid) is that they stand beyond the realm of what the subject can fathom, which is an epistemic relation akin to that between a subject and some high up object, perhaps dazzlingly close to the sun, too far off to be seen, toward which the subject can only crane their neck and squint. This epistemic sense of the metaphor of height contrasts with another sense that Levinas gives to the same term—the sense of practical authority. Here, the other is “high” because to look up to them is for the other to stand in some normative relation of authority over the subject. As a metaphor for practical authority, the notion of height captures the subordination of the subject to the other who issues commands and who is entitled to hold the subject to account and to cast judgment. This is what Levinas has in mind when he invokes the concept of height in the passage quoted previously, as a consequence of the “exigency”—that is, the demandingness—of the other’s supplication. So, to be clear, the left-hand side of the chart represents the other’s dimension of height, but only in this practical sense. The epistemic sense of height is also relevant to the other’s normative standing, but in connection with the right-hand side of the chart, to which we will return later. Focusing on the left-hand side for now: part of what Levinas thinks is characteristic of the encounter between the subject and the other is that the subject is struck by the other’s height qua practical authority.

Figure 5.1  Levinas’s Normative Concepts

Commanding, Giving, Vulnerable 105 In keeping with Levinas’s methodology—which involves offering a phenomenological description of the experience of interpersonal interaction at the same time as making normative claims about the nature of interpersonal relations3—this impression of the other’s authority is supposed to ring true to experience at the same time as revealing an important component of interpersonal ethics. In this case, that component is that just as one can be impressed by a stranger’s authority to cast judgment or to make demands, so the other does, in fact, stand in this relation of authority. In Levinas’s view, the height that the other appears to have is not merely an appearance, but an enduring feature of the normative landscape. What complicates matters, though, is that there are a number of contrasting ways that this authority might be cashed out, and it is not obvious that they are all compatible with one another. A basic distinction between two species of authority is that between what one might call reasoncreating authority and reason-holding authority.4 The former kind of authority is just the power to intentionally create obligatory reasons for another person.5 This is the authority that a parent might typically have to instruct their child to, say, go to their room or that which a sergeant might have to order soldiers into combat or that which an employer typically takes themselves to have to direct their employees’ work. It is in this spirit, apparently, that Levinas says in the quoted passage that the face of the other “signifies an irrecusable order, a command” (see also Levinas 1969: 201, 214). Naturally, the content of the command is not meant to be anything so trivial as the orders of the parent, sergeant, or employer. If the face of the other commands, then it commands the subject to heed the other’s interests and their needs and to act morally with these considerations in mind. And if the other is understood as possessing this kind of authority and as deploying this authority by issuing ethical commands in the heat of the interpersonal encounter, then it follows that the moral obligations that are commanded did not bind the subject prior to the encounter—because to command is to create a new obligation. This interpretation of Levinas—as positing a power in the other to bring new moral obligations into existence—requires some further qualification. Specifically, even if it is right to read Levinas as meaning something subtly different by the term “command” than what he means by the term “demand,” he clearly does not mean “command” in exactly its ordinary sense. Commands, in the ordinary sense, are intentional acts. Indeed, this is crucial to their normative structure. But the idea that the face of the other—not the other themselves—issues a command to the subject suggests that Levinas does not have quite such an intentional transaction in mind. To encounter the face of the other is to experience their alterity. To speak of this alterity as making a command is evidently a somewhat metaphorical expression since the face is not the kind of thing that entertains intentions. But even supposing that the notion of

106  James H. P. Lewis and Robert Stern command is understood somewhat metaphorically, there remains the possibility that Levinas may indeed be suggesting that ethical obligations are created in the moment of the encounter by virtue of the authority that the other has over the subject. Such a possibility contrasts quite sharply with the construal of the other’s authority as reason-holding. Reason-holding authority is just the entitlement to hold another person to account for some obligation that they face independently of this particular exercise of authority. Accordingly, one might think that if there is a legitimate role for the police, then it is to hold citizens to the law, where the reason any given citizen has to obey the law is—putatively—separate from the fact that the police will enforce it. Similarly, the referee in a boxing bout has this kind of practical authority: to hold fighters accountable to the rules of the sport, which the boxers ought to treat as obligations, but not to create new obligations or to change the rules. It is in this spirit, we suggest, that Levinas describes the other as having the practical authority to call the subject into question, to make demands of the subject, and to judge the subject. In these components of his account of the encounter, the subject finds themselves confronted with a shocking force, one that holds the subject to a set of standards— moral standards—that hitherto had not so much as occurred to them. It is in being held to account, all of a sudden, that the subject is torn out of their naïve, self-interested practical perspective (Levinas 1969: 43, 76, 85, 88–89). The characterization of the normative standing of the other as involving reason-creating authority implies a picture of moral reasons as being the sort of thing that can be brought into existence by the actions of agents (or at least by the face of the other). In contrast, if the other’s normative standing is just one of reason-holding, then this implies a different picture of the nature of moral reasons: a picture in which the system of moral reasons exists independently of any agent’s actions. This difference can be understood as one in the direction of the relation of dependence between moral reasons and the other’s authority. If the other has reason-creating authority, then the normative force of moral reasons to heed the other’s interest depends on this authority. On the other hand, if the other instead has reason-holding authority, then this authority consists of the entitlement to insist that the subject heeds such moral reasons, and so the authority is partly dependent for its force on the prior normative force of those moral reasons themselves. As such, it is compatible with the other having reason-creating authority that they may also have reason-holding authority (though not entailed by it: legislators are not automatically police officers). And yet the notion of reasonholding authority provides the resources to make sense of the other’s practical authority—their dimension of height—even if one wanted to avoid interpreting Levinas as attributing to the other the power to create new moral reasons.6

Commanding, Giving, Vulnerable 107 Hopefully, this clarifies the difference between the idea that the face of the other commands and the idea that it merely (but authoritatively) states the moral reasons that confront the subject. What has not yet been clarified, though, is what difference there might be between the various expressions that Levinas uses to invoke the other’s reason-holding authority: that is, between the other as demanding, as judging, and as calling into question. Such differences, if there are any, are faint. But one might nonetheless want to parse apart the notion of the other as a mere agent of the moral law—i.e., as a demander—from the notion of a judge who has a particular privileged status to scrutinize the subject’s conduct, past and present. Whereas encountering a force that will hold one to account for one’s immediate duties may induce a certain kind of transformation in the subject, this might not be quite as far reaching as the transformation brought about by an encounter with the more holistically penetrating eyes of a judge. Indeed, this appears to be a difference to which Levinas was sensitive in TI. All the normative concepts that might be grouped below 1.2 in our chart are instances of what Levinas calls “the summons.” Or, to be more precise, there may be two senses of summons at play in TI—a legalistic sense and a common parlance sense—and the entries under the 1.2 branch of our chart exemplify the legalistic sense of the summons. That is to say, if the other is taken to have a standing of reason-holding authority, then part of the fallout of the subject’s encounter with the other is that the subject is summonsed to give an account of themselves. The common parlance sense of “summons,” which contrasts with this, is that rather than being summonsed—as to appear in court—the subject has simply been summoned—as in beckoned or called—to take their place in the public domain of responsible action and intersubjective deliberation. Certainly Levinas does think that one consequence of the encounter is that the subject is summoned in the common parlance sense—that the subject is summoned to responsibility is one way of expressing the transcendental significance the encounter has for the subject. But it is quite ambiguous which kind of transaction (or combination of transactions) on the bottom tier of our chart give rise to this summoning, in Levinas’s view. By contrast, as stated, the legalistic summonsing is a product of the other’s reason-holding authority, and this warrants a moment’s further exploration. The encounter with an other who demands may be sufficient to explain the dawn of the subject’s sense of responsibility. Just recognizing the authority of the other to make these demands—which recognition is, as Levinas emphasizes, inescapable in the encounter—entails recognizing the legitimacy of the obligations, adherence to which is being demanded. And once the subject is committed to a system of obligations constraining what they may legitimately do, they are landed, irrevocably, with a self-conception as a responsible agent. So simply by demanding, the other

108  James H. P. Lewis and Robert Stern summonses the subject to regard themselves as responsible, which means being prepared to give an account, a justification, of their actions.7 However, the encounter with an other who judges presents a summons that goes further. As Levinas says in TI (244), “Judgment is pronounced upon me in the measure that it summons me to respond,” and, consequently (245), this “call to infinite responsibility confirms the subjectivity in its apologetic position.” The “apologetic position” at issue is a stance the subject takes of taking responsibility not just for their immediate conduct with regard to the interest of the particular other before them, but for their whole life. The summons of the judge is a holistic summons to regard one’s every deed as such that it must be accounted for—or for which one must give an apology. Thus, both the demander and the judge are standings that might “call into question” the subject’s conduct and thereby summons the subject to account for themselves. Insofar as there is a difference between them, it is one of degree, where the former can be understood as calling the other to account in the particular scenario of the encounter and the latter as calling the other to give an exhaustive—impossibly extensive—apology for all of their life. As such, in a sense, the other as judge entails the other as demander, but the entailment does not run the other way around. To be sure, the role of the other as demander is not redundant in this picture because it lends Levinas’s theory the resources to give a modest explanation of the accountability relation that is instantiated in the face, without hanging this explanation on his further and quite distinct ambitions to explain the formation of the subject’s self-conception as scrutinized by a judge to whom they owe an apologia of their life. It is important to keep these explanations to some degree separate because one may well be more plausible than the other, and they may rest on quite different foundations. This completes our attempt to delineate and explain the notions of the other as commanding, demanding, and judging, which together comprise the other’s dimension of height (in the practical rather than the epistemic sense). As suggested earlier, with regards to each of these standings, Levinas’s claims are twofold: that the other appears to the subject in the encounter as though they have such a normative status and that they actually do. However such phenomenological and normative claims are to be appraised, we have shown how these characterizations are sufficiently conceptually distinct that they can stand or fall independently. The task now will be to similarly demarcate the nonauthoritative normative standings that Levinas variously attributes to the other.

The Dimension of Depth In the long passage quoted previously, the face of the other was described as a distress and a supplication. Other similarly nonauthoritative statuses are invoked in TI, including the other as “destitute” (75, 215), as

Commanding, Giving, Vulnerable 109 making an “appeal” (181, 194), and as a “nudity” that appears as an “always positive value” (75). And a particularly well-known line draws some further, similar comparisons with the needy, vulnerable, and lowly (215): “The Other who dominates me in his transcendence is thus the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, to whom I am obligated.” Quite explicitly, then, Levinas means to contrast the dimension of height with an alternative, indeed opposite, side of the face; let’s call it the dimension of depth. Noticeably, then, the dimension of depth, like that of height, is multifaceted. A first strand of this dimension to be picked out is the other’s standing as a giver,8 to whom the subject is indebted. Whilst the debt that arises might be associated with a power more akin to practical authority, the giving in the first instance is not. There are points in TI and elsewhere at which Levinas implies that the generosity with which the subject must respond to the other is called for by the openness that the other first presents to the subject.9 By doing so, the other treats the subject as a responsible being and thereby hauls them into the stage of their mature, morally responsible agency (and enables their escape from what Levinas calls the il y a). (Here, then, is another possible way to explain how the other summons the subject in the common parlance rather than the legalistic sense.) What the other gives is their directed attention, and the benefit this brings to the subject is immeasurable. Consequently, one might think that, on the basis of this transformative gift, the subject owes it to the other to recognize them in like fashion. Such recognition involves acknowledging the other’s moral significance and seeing their needs and interests as opportunities to give something in return. As such, the other’s standing as a giver generates a host of reasons for the subject to act in the other’s interest, but without positing any authority in the other to command or demand adherence to such reasons. As a nonauthoritative source of altruistic practical reasons for the subject, the other’s standing as giving (2.1.1 in our schema) is akin to the other’s standing as supplicating (2.1.2). Like that of giving, the standing of supplicating creates reasons for the subject to heed the other’s interest— reasons that in both instances are created by virtue of the interaction between subject and other. But whereas the standpoint of giving generates a debt from the other’s own transformative gift to the subject—the gift of the attention that enables the maturation of the subject’s responsible agency—the standpoint of supplication, by contrast, involves no such giving. This is clearly a quite separate normative relation that forms a part of Levinas’s description of the encounter. The thought is that when recognizing the face, the subject cannot help but see the other’s expression as communicating a call for help. The content of the communication may be described in a number of ways—most commonly by Levinas as a supplication, an appeal, or an imploring—but it seems that he could just as well also use terms such as a request, a plea, or an entreaty. Whatever

110  James H. P. Lewis and Robert Stern subtle connotative differences there might be within this clutch of normative concepts, they plausibly share the same basic structure, which is one of creating a reason that did not exist prior to the communicative act, and where the reason created is grounded not in the practical authority of the other to create it, but in some combination of the other’s need and the subject’s own volition. If the other supplicates, then, by virtue of their communicative interaction with the subject in the encounter, they create a reason for the latter from, as we are calling it, a position of depth. A qualifier is required here that mirrors the one made earlier regarding the idea of the face making a command. The ordinary concept of requesting (where that is a representative of this whole class of normative transactions grouped at 2.1.2) is an intentional kind of reason-giving. Indeed, as was true of commands, the reasons successful requests create are partly grounded in the requester’s intention to create a reason for the requestee and the latter’s recognition of this very intention as reasoncreating.10 But, again, the face is not the kind of thing that entertains intentions, and so Levinas’s use of such concepts as request, or supplication, are somewhat metaphorical. To be sure: the point is not that one cannot communicate requests (or commands for that matter) using one’s facial expressions alone; surely one can. But Levinas’s phenomenology is supposed to be a general one about the nature and normative dynamics of interpersonal encounters as such. Thus, the normative standing that Levinas attributes to the face should not be a standing that is only occupied on those occasions when the other actually intends to appeal to the subject for help and makes this appeal through their facial expression. Neither should the standing of commanding be thought of as occupied only when the other intends to express a particular command by their facial expression. Indeed, since Levinas thinks that these dimensions of height and of depth are presented together in the face of the other, it is hard to see how either of them could be meant as actually intended commands or requests. How could a face communicate a specific command and a specific supplication at the same time? And yet, as before, there remains a metaphorical sense in which Levinas may well think that the other makes a request: they may occupy a status in relation to the subject in the encounter that is such that the very presentation of the face nonauthoritatively creates a reason for the subject to heed the other’s interest, where that reason depends on that communicative interaction. We have mentioned that the reason created by the supplication of the other may be partly grounded in the other’s need. This is true, but supplications (and requests, etc.) are not just statements of neediness. Above and beyond this, they are transactional attempts to create reasons. The final category in our schema of normative standings that Levinas attributes to the other is the presentation of the other’s neediness precisely without that further transactional dimension. This component of the phenomenon of the encounter enjoys a special emphasis at various

Commanding, Giving, Vulnerable 111 crucial points of TI, such as the famous line quoted previously, which likens the other to a stranger, a widow, or an orphan. Independently of any requests or appeals, the very fact that the other is vulnerable and needy is revealed to the subject in the encounter, along with the concomitant normative fact that this vulnerability and neediness matters. On this line of thought, the subject is confronted with the fact of a source of (noninstrumental) value wholly outside of their own life and ends, and it is the acknowledgement of this exterior value that straightforwardly gives rise to the altruistic reasons that had previously been absent from the subject’s egocentric practical outlook. Some care is required here in marking the difference between the normative standings of supplication (2.1.2) and vulnerability (2.2.2). We have said that the former creates a reason only by virtue of some communicative transaction between subject and other, whereas the latter does not require such a transaction. This is correct in the sense that the communication of the supplication is intrinsic to the normativity of the supplication, whereas the fact that the other is vulnerable and needy would give rise to normative reasons for the subject (in an externalist sense),11 even if this vulnerability were not revealed to the subject. But, having said this, it should be noted that there is also a communicative aspect to the revelation of the other’s vulnerability in the face. Levinas does not describe the subject as hitting upon this remarkable fact of the other’s value of their own accord, under the subject’s own initiative. Rather, the fact of the other’s destitution (for that is synonymous in this vocabulary with vulnerability, with need, and with one of Levinas’s senses of the term “nudity”) is taught to the subject by the other. The realization of the other’s moral worth and need is an “epiphany” that the other plays an active role in delivering.12 One way of understanding the distinctive normative move captured in 2.2.2 is therefore as an epistemic transaction between the other and the subject, in which the other teaches the subject of their (the other’s) very own moral worth, their vulnerability, and their neediness. In this regard, Levinas speaks of “the coinciding of the revealer and the revealed in the face, which is accomplished in being situated in height with respect to us—in teaching” (Levinas 1969: 67). So here at the end of our survey of concepts we return to a notion of height, not in the practical sense associated with the left-hand side of the chart, but in an epistemic sense. The other has the height of a teacher, of one with a lesson to disclose. Terms with an epistemic ring to them—disclosure, revelation, teaching, epiphany, conversation—occur frequently in TI (28, 51, 62, 89, 171, 204). It seems to us that the significance that Levinas puts on this epistemic aspect of the encounter can only make sense if that which is being conveyed epistemically is some normative fact or some conjunction of normative facts that form the basis of a whole practical outlook. Specifically, what the other teaches, what is revealed and disclosed to the subject in their

112  James H. P. Lewis and Robert Stern epiphany is a (set of) normative fact(s) about the other: that they matter and not in a way that is instrumental to any of the subject’s own ends. No other kind of fact could adequately fill the important role that Levinas has carved out for the learning that goes on in the encounter. The final task that remains in the explanation of our schema is to discuss the (in)compatibility and dependency of the possible ways of explaining the other’s normative standing within the dimension of depth. In the next section, we will turn to some general reflections on the compatibility and dependency of the dimensions of height and depth in Levinas’s ethics, in light of our schematic clarifications. Strikingly, the notion of the other as giving is starkly independent of any of the other normative standings that we have discussed. Suppose for a moment that the transcendental gift that the other gives could be sufficient to generate the entire plethora of altruistic moral reasons as a debt that the subject owes the other. If this much is granted, then the normative force of the other’s gift does not require that the subject see the other as either high and authoritative or low and needy. Such statuses are irrelevant to the normative power that might be created simply by the other’s gift: their generosity does all the work. Furthermore, just as the other as giving does not require any other normative standing in order to make sense, neither does it entail or preclude any other.13 That is, just because it was the other whose generously given recognition made the subject into the morally mature responsible agent they are, it does not follow that the subject must therefore see the other as having the standing to demand that the subject pay their debt. It could be that only God or only the subject’s conscience or only the state have the practical authority to hold the subject to account to repay the debt of the other’s gift; the mere fact of being the giver does not necessarily endow the other with such practical authority. And, similarly, if the subject is indebted to the other and must (seek to) repay this debt by heeding the other’s interest, this does not require the subject to see the other’s interest as mattering intrinsically, in the sense that we have suggested comprises the “vulnerability” option in the schema (2.2.2). Rather, it would be sufficient for the subject’s response to the gift that they recognized the other’s life as mattering—even if, from the subject’s point of view, the other’s life mattered only because it both gave rise to the subject’s own agential capacities and constituted interests and needs that the subject can assist as a normatively fitting response to their debt. To value X only because it benefits Y is to value X instrumentally, so the other’s standing as giving does not require the subject to value the other’s life and ends non-instrumentally. The rational relations between supplication (2.1.2) and vulnerability (2.2.2) are more complex. On the face of it, it seems that the normative force of the other’s supplication is straightforwardly dependent on the recognition of the intrinsic worth of the other’s life and their neediness, i.e., on their vulnerability. This raises the question of whether the other’s

Commanding, Giving, Vulnerable 113 standing as supplicating is redundant—that is, whether it adds anything to the normative relations between subject and other that are already established by the subject’s recognition of the other’s vulnerability. This question amounts to wondering what significance there might be to the very asking that the other communicates through their face. This is a murky issue. There are grounds for going either way: to think either that the asking for help adds nothing, is normatively inert, or that it is a crucial feature of the ethical relation. Let us briefly animate both sides. On the one hand, there is the view that once the subject is committed to the non-instrumental value of the other’s life and ends, and also to the fact that the other is in need in ways that the subject has the power to alleviate, nothing further is required to generate—from the subject’s own perspective—strong reasons to act in the other’s interest. Indeed, in a pro tanto sense, the reasons such commitments generate could be infinite, as Levinas says they are. They could be infinite in the sense that once one is committed to the value of another’s life, there are an indefinite number of ways that the flourishing of their life, and the alleviation of danger and suffering from it, could be enhanced by the subject’s actions. Even if one were to wholly devote oneself to a particular other at the expense of every other practical motivation, one could only do so much to help them: more would remain to be done. And since one can never be sure that one has reached the limits of one’s capacities—either in the intensity of one’s effort or the efficiency of one’s expenditure of that effort—one can never rule out the possibility that one has not only failed to do all that needs to be done, but that one has also failed to do all that one can do, or could have done, to aid the other. This line of thought is further augmented with a view of requests (and supplications, pleas, etc.) according to which agents have the power to create new reasons for one another to do things by making requests, only with regard to a certain set of actions. Namely, requests can only be efficacious in creating new reasons if the action being asked for is not already an obligation of the requestee’s and known to be one by both parties. This view maintains— quite plausibly—that if an action is already mandatory for an agent, then there is no way that further pro tanto reasons in favor of the action could affect the balance of reasons for or against doing it. Such is the nature of mandatory reasons (says that view). On the other hand, though, is a view that stresses the relational quality that the other’s vulnerability takes on in the ethical relation between subject and other in the encounter. This view stresses the immediacy of the other’s status as a source of reasons for the subject in particular. The encounter with the face does not involve the extrapolation of the subject’s particular obligations toward the other from the recognition of general, agent-neutral moral reasons that would apply to anyone. Rather, the experience of seeing the other is one of finding oneself locked in a special relationship with the other, where one’s reasons to act in the other’s

114  James H. P. Lewis and Robert Stern interest have the directed, personal flavor of what Michael Thompson calls “bipolar obligations.”14 Thus, on this view, the role of the other’s supplication is crucial to the resulting normative landscape. The supplication by the other to the subject transforms the other’s vulnerability from a general source of agent-neutral reasons for anybody into a specific source of reasons for the other in particular. Rather than just having a reason to help the other because that would be a good thing, the supplication gives the subject a reason to help the other for the other’s sake, where the other, in supplicating, has put themselves in the hands of the subject. The supplication turns the other’s vulnerability into the subject’s problem. This defense of the relevance of supplication may seem convincing, but from our point of view, the tension between the two lines of thought just presented remains an undecided issue. After all, the bipolar, directed quality of the reasons stemming from the other’s vulnerability might just as well be explained by the fact that the other teaches (or reveals or discloses) this vulnerability to the subject. Such an epistemic relation of teacher and student might be sufficient in this regard, in which case, again, the notion of supplication would seem superfluous to the entire affair. Having presented this corner of the dialectic, it will suffice to leave the final answer open for present purposes. And with that, we conclude our schematic survey of the normative standings that Levinas variously attributes to the other in the encounter. What remains is to offer some framework for judging how far these concepts can all be fitted together and where this piecing together must conform to some other constraints of Levinas’s ethical worldview that have so far eluded our discussion.

Putting Things Together Here are two criteria that should plausibly be met by any account that calls itself a Levinasian ethics. First, it should in some way redeem Levinas’s promise in the first sentence of the preface to TI (Levinas 1969: 21): it should show that we are not “duped by morality.” This means offering some explanation of the grounds of a moral worldview that could form the basis of a defense against at least some form of moral skepticism.15 Second, the resulting moral worldview should explain the moral significance of the other’s otherness: that is, their ungraspable infinity, or as it is otherwise described, their alterity. In short, a Levinasian ethics might be thought of as one that shows that moral reasons are not mere appearances; they are real, and those moral reasons exist for the subject because of the infinity of the other.16 What these criteria helpfully illuminate is how the dimensions of height and depth might be related in Levinas’s broader outlook. Or, at least, they help to get clear on why Levinas’s view includes both of these dimensions.17 The criteria help in this way because it seems, at least at

Commanding, Giving, Vulnerable 115 first blush, that each dimension can contribute to the fulfillment of only one criterion. The dimension of height might offer a successful place to explain the ethical significance of the infinity of the other, but by itself it cannot hope to give a satisfactory defense of morality against any form of skepticism (let alone the specific kind of debunking skepticism that we think is the relevant concern). On the other hand, the dimension of depth can be seen to provide some resources to defend morality from this debunking species of moral skepticism, but it has a fundamental problem in incorporating any sense of the other’s infinity. Up to this point, the goal of this chapter has been not to commit to any particular reading of Levinas but to show what kinds of interpretation are possible and what some of the consequences of those interpretations might be. In claiming now that the dimension of height can make sense of the other’s infinity, but not of morality’s credibility, and in also claiming precisely the reverse about the dimension of depth, we are departing from our impartial methodology. In the remaining paragraphs, we will give some backup to these claims. To be clear, though, our interest is not so much in defending this particular interpretation of Levinas (though we do support it), but in showing, by example, that it would be possible to fit some of the concepts that we have delineated here together into a coherent Levinasian ethical picture. First, then, let us elaborate on the sense in which the dimension of height can incorporate the infinity of the other into the ethical picture. Earlier, we showed the boundaries between different species of practical reasons and gestured towards some of the implications of notions of practical authority for the metaphysical status of moral obligations. What we did not do was discuss what might ground the other’s practical authority, if the other is indeed entitled to make commands or demands or judgments over the subject. Levinas’s answer to this question is that the other’s authority is self-evidently grounded in their height over the subject, which is an aspect of the other that the subject cannot possibly deny while in the grip of the face-to-face encounter.18 At this point in his account, therefore, the practical and the epistemic senses of the dimension of height become intimately entwined. It is because the other strikes the subject as ungraspable and endowed with this epistemic height that they are felt also to have the practical height, the authority to judge the subject, hold them to account, and perhaps make moral commands. In this manner, the dimension of height makes some practical sense of the other’s infinity. This does not get Levinas any further, however, in answering morality’s critics. For as long as the authority to generate reasons and responsibility is based solely on what the encounter feels like for the subject, the possibility that the subject is being duped by morality will remain a live concern. And in Levinas’s writings, there is no other ground for this practical authority than its mere overriding obviousness in the stern face of the

116  James H. P. Lewis and Robert Stern other. So this dimension alone is feeble in the face of any brand of moral skepticism that is of concern to Levinas. By contrast, the dimension of depth does offer one particular resource to contribute to an answer to this particular kind of moral skeptic. If the subject’s moral worldview is understood in a moral realist fashion as built upon knowledge of some fundamental moral facts, then a relevant line of skeptical resistance is that which doubts whether the beliefs the subject forms about putatively fundamental moral facts could ever be well founded. To be clear, this is a challenge from moral epistemology, rather than the kind of moral skepticism that for some other reason denies the existence of moral facts. That is, rather than denying that moral facts exist, the skeptic in question denies that anyone would be able to form justified true beliefs about them, even if they do exist. For instance, one might worry that rather than being appraisals of moral truths, our moral beliefs are products of our inclinations (cf. Hume) or our societal framework (cf. Nietzsche). In response to this, in the mood of his dimension of depth, Levinas offers a story of how such beliefs are formed in a way that avoids this moral-epistemological challenge. The fundamental moral belief in question is that there is a source of value outside the subject’s own life and ends, namely the life and ends of the other. The salient features of the skeptical challenge for our purposes are twofold. First, there is the threat that one cannot rule out that one’s axiological convictions are formed not by a reliable cognition of moral facts out in the world, but rather by influence from one’s inclinations or one’s social environment, by interpellation into the ideology of one’s society.19 Second, there is the worry that such moral beliefs never have the correct proper object. That is, moral beliefs are never formed when the subject has in mind the value itself that the belief is purportedly about, but always rather with some material object or other inappropriate proper object in mind. But the parts of Levinas’s account of the encounter grouped under the dimension of depth (specifically 2.1.2 and 2.2.2) resist this challenge. They do so by showing one way that moral beliefs can be formed in a shock, indeed an epiphany, which because of its very surprisingness seems on the face of it not to be a belief caused by one’s inclinations or social influences. Rather, the belief formed as a result of the teaching of the other looks at least prima facie to be caused by a sudden attunement to exactly the proper object of such a belief: namely the other’s moral worth, which is disclosed in their vulnerability. This may well be a fruitful application of Levinas’s theory. A problem, though, is that the other’s otherness cannot figure in the moral cognition of being struck by the other’s supplicating vulnerability. This is because if the encounter is understood as—most importantly—an episode of a special kind of cognition, then the object of that cognition must, of course, be the sort of thing that is not only in principle fathomable to the subject, but indeed something that is in fact fathomed by them. Thus, the other’s

Commanding, Giving, Vulnerable 117 infinity, which is unfathomable ex hypothesi, cannot be a part of the subject’s thoughts that plays a role in explaining the ensuing well-founded foundational moral convictions—and so instead comes to figure on the other side of the equation, under the dimension of height. So much for our very brief sketch of how some of the parts carved out here might be pieced together into a recognizably Levinasian ethics. To reiterate, the main goal of this sketch has been to illustrate the possibility of such a piecing together.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have offered a schematic way of understanding the differences between the range of normative standings that, at various points, Levinas attributes to the other in the encounter. We have shown that the other might have the standing both to command and to demand, where the latter alone presupposes the independent existence of a moral order. We have also shown that if the other has the status of a giver, and if this is thought to be sufficient to explain the ethical relation between self and other, then all the other standings Levinas mentions in the dimension of depth appear quite superfluous. In that light, it is perhaps judicious that Levinas in fact avoids speaking of the other as a giver in this sense— see note 8. We have further offered a lens through which the subtle difference between the supplication and the revelation of the vulnerable other can be appreciated. Nonetheless, in the last substantive section of this chapter, we have sketched one way—perhaps among several—that some of Levinas’s core concepts can be brought together into a recognizably Levinasian ethics. In our interpretation, the encounter with the other provides a grounds for ethics by showing how moral beliefs could in principle be well founded. The fact that in the encounter the subject is struck by the other’s vulnerability in an epiphany will partly allay the worry that we are duped by morality. But this defense against moral skepticism can be combined with a subsequent view of the other—in their unfathomable infinity—as having the practical authority to hold the subject to account for adherence to the imperative moral reasons that arise from the recognition of their moral value and their neediness. In this sense, there is a distinctively Levinasian way, and a distinctively Levinasian rationale, for putting together the two main normative dimensions (of height and depth), thereby giving Levinas’s ethics a coherence that it might otherwise seem to lack.20

Notes 1. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).

118  James H. P. Lewis and Robert Stern 2. Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987), 96–97. 3. Michael L. Morgan, Discovering Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), chapter 3. 4. See Robert Stern, “Divine Commands and Secular Demands: On Darwall on Anscombe on ‘Modern Moral Philosophy,”” Mind 123 (2014): 1095–122. 5. For an account of how it might be possible for someone to intentionally create new obligatory reasons for another person, see David Enoch, “Giving Practical Reasons,” Philosophers’ Imprint 11 (2011). 6. For a discussion of some possible meta-ethical problems with positing in people the power to make moral commands, see Mark Schroeder, “Cudworth and Normative Explanations,” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 1 (2006). 7. This possible line of interpreting Levinas thus pitches him as advancing a similar view to that of Stephen L. Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). For further discussion, see Robert Stern, ‘Levinas, Darwall, and Løgstrup on Second-Personal Ethics’, in The Oxford Hanbook of Levinas, ed. Michael L. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 303–20. 8. In TI, the terminology of gift and generosity are usually employed in the other direction, with the subject as the one doing the giving, e.g. 205. There is nonetheless an interpretation of Levinas’s account according to which the transformation that the other engenders in the subject is itself a kind of gift with normative implications. For a reading of this sort, see Sarah Horton, “The Joy of Desire: Understanding Levinas’s Desire of the Other as Gift,” Continental Philosophy Review 51 (2017): 1–18. Horton also makes clear (7) that these normative implications generated by the other’s “gift” of transforming the subject are not derived from any sense of reciprocity that would be in tension with Levinas’s commitment to the asymmetry of the relation between self and other. 9. Consider, for example, page 51 of TI: “To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity.” 10. See James H. P. Lewis, “The Discretionary Normativity of Requests,” Philosophers’ Imprint 18 (2018). 11. A consideration is a reason in an externalist sense if that consideration counts in favor of an agent undertaking a certain action, irrespective of whether the agent in question knows about or is motivated by that consideration. Although it should be noted that there are some variants of internalism that would count the other’s vulnerability as a reason for the subject to act in the other’s interest even before the subject has come to recognize this vulnerability, on a counter-factual basis: that if the subject were to acknowledge the other’s vulnerability, then this consideration would motivate them to act in the other’s interest. 12. Levinas at one point describes the other’s gaze as that which actively brings about the subject’s epiphany (Levinas 1969: 75). By contrast, he normally uses the term “teaching” in connection with the other’s act of revealing their height and infinity, rather than their vulnerability. But one should not read too deeply into the fact that in his vocabulary the notion of teaching seems to have more to do with the other’s height than their depth. After all, Levinas takes these two dimensions to be inseparable sides of the same coin. There

Commanding, Giving, Vulnerable 119 are terms that seem to be connected only with height, such as the other’s infinity being taught by the other as Lord and Master and occasioning the subject’s generosity and hospitality. But these concepts cannot be understood in isolation from the dimension of depth. For example, it is only because the other is not only infinite but also vulnerable that it makes sense for the subject to respond to their teaching with the gift of generosity and hospitality. So even though he tends not to put things in such terms, there is a Levinasian sense in which the other’s vulnerability is part of what the other teaches the subject. 13. It should be noted that some gift giving does only succeed if the normative standing of the giver is recognized by the recipient. If I refuse your tokens of affection, then you have not given them at all. But not all gift giving is like this. For example, it is possible for a gift to be given anonymously, in which case it can be given successfully without any recognition of giver by recipient. The interpretation of Levinas as saying that the other gives to the subject should be understood as more analogous with this latter, anonymous gift giving, rather than the former sort, which is conditional on recognition. 14. Michael Thompson, “What Is It to Wrong Someone? A Puzzle about Justice,” in Reason and Value: Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz, ed. R. Jay Wallace et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 339. 15. It is a “debunking” kind of moral skepticism that is a relevant concern for Levinas, rather than a “why be moral?” kind, which is not. For more on that distinction, see Robert Stern, “Moral Scepticism, Constructivism, and the Value of Humanity,” in Kantian Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 91–94, and for a consideration of Levinas in the light of this distinction, see Robert Stern, “Others as the Grounds of Our Existence: Levinas, Løgstrup, and Transcendental Arguments in Ethics,” in Transcendental Inquiry: Its History, Methods and Critiques, ed. Halla Kim and Steven Hoeltzel (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 181–208. Another point at which Levinas mentions this concern with moral skepticism is TI, page 202: “What we call the face is precisely this exceptional presentation of a self by a self, incommensurable with the presentation of realities simply given, always suspect of some swindle, always possibly dreamt up.” So again, as in the preface, it is a relevant consideration for Levinas that the ethical significance of the encounter with the other could be illusory. While discussing page 202 in TI, it is also incumbent on us to note that the preceding sentence to the one just quoted makes a point that seems at first blush to be at odds with a claim that we make in the present chapter. We claim that Levinas can be read as saying that in the face, the subject encounters the value of the other. However, on page 202, Levinas says, “The presentation of being in the face does not have the status of a value.” So, at first blush, this is indeed textual evidence against our proposed reading. However, it is quite clear from the context of the passage that what Levinas means here by “the status of a value” is something like the status of a socially constructed fact, a truism to be passed around from one person to the next, but which could turn out to be nothing more than a societal prejudice. That kind of socially constructed fact resides, Levinas says, in “the ambiguity of the true and the false which every truth risks—an ambiguity, moreover, in which all values move” (Levinas 1969: 202). And certainly, for Levinas, the ethical significance of the other the subject encounters in the face is nothing of this sort. It turns out, therefore, that Levinas’s claim here sits quite comfortably with our reading for while the other’s ethical significance is not a mere value in the sense that Levinas has in mind, it is, of

120  James H. P. Lewis and Robert Stern

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

course, a kind of value in another sense. That is, this significance, which the subject directly encounters in a way that cannot be immediately doubted, is such that it warrants valuing attitudes of concern and is such that the subject is motivated and warranted to act in its interest. On a more neutral conception of the term than the one Levinas uses at this point in the text, this is just what it is for something to be a value. This second criterion is controversial. A particularly important recent interpreter of Levinas is Diane Perpich, who would reject this criterion. Perpich claims that “there is no ethical ‘because’ generated by the face; it is not because the other is rational, or feels pain, is vulnerable, or is a fellow human being that I come to owe him or her ethical consideration” (Diane Perpich, “Levinas and the Face of the Other,” in The Oxford Handbook of Levinas, ed. Michael L. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 243–58.) However, we think that the emphasis that Levinas gives to his explanation of ethics as arising from the encounter with the face warrants interpreting him in such a way that both our criteria are satisfied. It may be that an account like Perpich’s that eschews one or both of these criteria does ultimately prove defensible, but this will be because such an account possesses merits that successfully outweigh the interpretative cost of forgoing our criteria. The point for now is just that in any event, failing to meet these criteria is an interpretative cost. We are not claiming here that this is the only way to understand in Levinasian terms why he appeals to both “height” and “depth.” For example, it can be argued that the reason that both the dimensions of height and depth are required in Levinas’ account is that only when both are included can Levinas explain the asymmetry of the ethical relation, where the fact that the moral reasons to act in the other’s interest are not reciprocal between subject and other is an independently important plank of his outlook. Alternatively, it could be said that both these dimensions are required to maintain the “alterity” of the other, who thus cannot be conceived as simply “the same” as the subject and where the oscillation between height and depth is a significant element in the subject’s inability to arrive at a stable and fixed categorization of the other. Rather than raising an overt criticism to such lines of interpretation, we are simply offering an alternative way to explain why both height and depth belong in the account. It should be noted that, as we are speaking here about the authority invested in an individual, it can be argued on Levinas’s behalf that this cannot come merely from the dimensions of “depth” as, while such dimensions can provide grounds for care, they cannot in themselves provide grounds for such individual authority. This is a notion associated with Marxism and critical theory in general, but particularly Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–86. We are grateful to the editors of this volume for their very helpful comments on a previous draft, and also to Diane Perpich, Matt Prout, Simon Thornton, and Daniel Viehoff.

Bibliography Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation).” In his Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 127–86. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971.

Commanding, Giving, Vulnerable 121 Darwall, Stephen L. The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Enoch, David. “Giving Practical Reasons.” Philosophers’ Imprint 11 (2011). Horton, Sarah. “The Joy of Desire: Understanding Levinas’s Desire of the Other as Gift.” Continental Philosophy Review 51 (2017): 1–18. Levinas, Emmanuel. Collected Philosophical Papers. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987. ———. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Lewis, James H. P. “The Discretionary Normativity of Requests.” Philosopher’s Imprint 18 (2018). Morgan, Michael L. Discovering Levinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Perpich, Diane. “Levinas and the Face of the Other.” In The Oxford Handbook of Levinas, edited by Michael L. Morgan, 243–58. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Schroeder, Mark. “Cudworth and Normative Explanations.” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 1 (2006). Stern, Robert. “Divine Commands and Secular Demands: On Darwall on Anscombe on ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’.” Mind 123 (2014): 1095–122. ———. “Levinas, Darwall, and Løgstrup on Second-Personal Ethics.” In The Oxford Handbook of Levinas, edited by Michael L. Morgan, 303–20. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. ———. “Moral Scepticism, Constructivism, and the Value of Humanity.” In his Kantian Ethics, 90–105. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. ———. “Others as the Grounds of Our Existence: Levinas, Løgstrup, and Transcendental Arguments in Ethics.” In Transcendental Inquiry: Its History, Methods and Critiques, edited by Halla Kim and Steven Hoeltzel, 181–208. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Thompson, Michael. “What Is It to Wrong Someone? A Puzzle About Justice.” In Reason and Value: Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz, edited by R. Jay Wallace, Philip Pettit, Samuel Scheffler and Michael Smith, 333–84. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Part II

Ethical Metaphysics

6 The Concept of Truth in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity Michael Roubach

The notion of truth plays a vital role in Levinas’s thought, though ­arguably, it is less central than the notions of the other,1 ethics, and time.2 For example, it plays an important role in the way Levinas demarcates his stance from other philosophical positions, such as those of Husserl, Heidegger, Buber, and Derrida. The goal of this chapter is to offer an account of the Levinasian notion of truth, focusing mainly, though not exclusively, on Totality and Infinity.3 My decision to focus on Totality and Infinity rests on two considerations. Not only does truth seem to be more central here than in Levinas’s other major works, but, more importantly in my view, it contains the key to understanding the meaning and role of truth throughout Levinas’s thought.4 The first part of the chapter presents an account of the conception of truth that emerges from Totality and Infinity, with reference to other writings by Levinas.5 The second part compares the Levinasian conception to conceptions of truth developed within the analytic tradition and, in particular, the relatively recent functionalist conception of truth, which has interesting affinities with Levinas’s position. The principal discussion of truth in Totality and Infinity appears in the chapter entitled “Separation and Discourse.” The context of this discussion is the separateness of the I, the conscious being of the cogito. Although this conscious being is related to the other through the idea of the infinite, it is not dependent on the other. Levinas tells us that truth is only possible by virtue of the I’s separateness: “Truth presupposes a being autonomous in separation” (Levinas 1979: 61). Why does Levinas posit such a close link between truth and separation? Several reasons are implicit in the text. First, truth is distinguished from being. Being is the realm of the identical, whereas truth is not necessarily characterized in terms of identity. Were truth so characterized, truth would not be distinct from falsity or error (60–61). Secondly, separateness is a feature of truth insofar as truth is often seen as a relation between incommensurable things: between meanings of sentences, on the one hand, and things or states of affairs, on the other. A third connection between truth and separation, and specifically, between truth and the I’s separateness, is that the pursuit of truth is based not on need, but on desire. This desire for

126  Michael Roubach truth, and Eros in general, ensue from the separateness of the one who desires from that which is desired.

Truth and the Other Given the close link between truth and separation, what are the characteristics of truth? One of the main characteristics of truth is that truth is related to the other: “Truth is sought in the other” (Levinas 1979: 62). This seeking of truth in the other is connected to language: “Truth arises where a being separated from the other is not engulfed in him, but speaks to him” (62). Speaking, which Levinas characterizes as the context in which justice is pertinent, is “a face-to-face approach, in conversation” (71). The relation between truth and the other has two aspects: 1. Truth is sought in the other through speech—that is, through language—because the primary purpose of language is communication. Language is also the locus of truth. Hence, one’s relation to an other is the basis for truth. 2. The desire for truth is satisfied through the erotic relation with the other. How should this link between truth and the other be interpreted? One option is to argue that establishing the truth about something requires the other’s point of view; a single perspective does not suffice. This interpretation of Levinas’s position on truth sees it as motivated chiefly by epistemic considerations and as arguing for an intersubjective conception of truth and knowledge. As we will see, this interpretation is conducive to linking Levinas and certain analytic conceptions of truth. Another way to interpret the relation between truth and the other is to see the role of the other as deepening, or even creating, the separation that is necessary if we are to arrive at truth. On this reasoning, the other’s role is not to help overcome separation, but to engender separation: separation cannot be achieved or sustained without the other. Without the other, truth is in danger of collapsing into a totality—namely, thought’s identity with itself—undermining the distinction between truth and that to which it relates.6 Truth entails that the two sides remain absolutely separate while related to each other; it does not eliminate the complete independence of the related sides. The links between truth and the other involve two interrelated matters: ethics and language. I will now discuss the ethical dimension of truth, and then discuss the connection between truth and language.

Truth, Justice, and Ethics According to Levinas, the relation between truth and the other is primarily ethical. One aspect of the ethical dimension of the link between truth

The Concept of Truth in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity 127 and the other is reflected in the notion of discourse. Discourse is not characterized, Levinas tells us, in terms of what it thematizes, but in terms of the addressee whom the speaker faces. Levinas speaks of facing the other in discourse as “justice.” The existence of rhetoric, i.e., the possibility of manipulating the addressee, highlights an aspect of the other’s role in discourse that has bearing on the nexus of truth and the other. Another aspect of the relation between ethics, justice, and truth concerns the relation between truth and understanding, comprehension, knowledge. For Levinas (as for many other thinkers within the Continental tradition) truth is closely linked to epistemology, not only in the sense that truth is one of the traditional conditions for knowledge (defined as justified true belief), but also in the sense that truth itself is often interpreted in terms of justification, and not always clearly differentiated from it.7 According to Levinas, a consequence of this position is that truth as justification is based on self-examination and a certain distrust of oneself (Levinas 1979: 82). Levinas claims that there are two main modes of doubting or distrusting oneself: one is related to fear of “failure”—that is, error—and the other to guilt. Hence self-doubt can be either epistemic or ethical (83). Both are modes of critique of one’s spontaneity and freedom. Levinas argues that the second type of self-doubt, ethical selfdoubt, is more basic than, and a precondition for, the first. The meaning of justification, which is primarily ethical, is prior to justification’s epistemic import: “the freedom that can be ashamed of itself founds truth” (83). We are conscious of shame in the presence of the Other. The relation to the Other is manifested in desire, not in knowledge. Why does Levinas maintain that ethical self-doubt has priority over epistemic doubt? An answer to this question is found in Levinas’s interpretation of Descartes’s position in Meditations on First Philosophy. Levinas begins by arguing that the doubt in the first Meditation, which is doubt about the certainty of our knowledge, and motivated by the quest for truth (Levinas 1979: 88), presupposes the idea of a perfect being, discussed in the third Meditation. This is a standard reading of the Meditations. Levinas now adds that the relation to the perfect being (the Other) should not be interpreted in terms of knowledge of that being, since such knowledge presupposes precisely that which is being subjected to doubt. This is the famous circularity of the third Meditation. Rather, the relation to the perfect being, to the idea of the infinite, should be interpreted in terms of desire, the basis for which is ethical: namely, the separateness of the Other. This ethical imperative of maintaining the separateness of the Other is thus the basis for the possibility of doubt about our knowledge of the world and, in light of the premise, discussed earlier, that knowledge and truth are closely linked, doubt is a condition for truth. Whether truth has been attained can always be doubted, since it is separate from us. Levinas’s discussion of Descartes can therefore be interpreted as providing a link between the God of the third Meditation and the correspondence theory of truth, which Descartes accepted.

128  Michael Roubach

Truth, Language, and Speech For Levinas, truth is closely connected to language: “The relation of truth . . . rests on language” (Levinas 1979: 64). A plausible account of the link between truth and language is the classic stance, according to which truth is ascribed to propositions, that is, to the semantic content of sentences. But Levinas argues that this position in itself cannot guarantee the independence of the things that are supposed to correspond to propositions, namely, states of affairs. In order to preserve the separation required by truth, the role of language in truth should not be based exclusively on correspondence. Language’s other role, he contends—the role that guarantees the requisite separation—is to serve as an expression of the Other.8 On this reasoning, separation from the Other, which is principally ethical, is the basis for language and truth. How is language related to the Other’s speech? In Levinas’s view, language links the self to the world: “The very objectification of truth refers to language” (99). Language, being the communication of meaning, is primarily spoken. The relation of the I (the same) to the world is not a relation of silent observation, but is mediated by language as speech (91). According to Levinas, the basic role of language as speech is teaching (98). Vis-à-vis language, the primacy of teaching in the relation to the other can be clearly seen in the parent-child relation: the parent teaches the child not only about the world, but also language itself. According to Levinas, this relation to the other through language “can only be moral” (99). The reason is that accepting truth, accepting things as they are, requires some limitation of my freedom. Without limitations on my freedom, I cannot encounter the world as it is in itself, namely, as separate from me. There are some things that are beyond my will. Limitation of the will cannot be fundamentally epistemic, because according to Levinas, we do not encounter things that we cannot identify as having a certain nature, and therefore, as Levinas puts it, we cannot encounter things that are not reducible to sameness. At this point, the objection might be raised that we indeed encounter epistemic obstacles all the time: we are often mistaken in our beliefs. Levinas’s answer to this objection goes back to his interpretation of Descartes, discussed earlier. In order to realize that we are mistaken, we need to have the idea of perfection, an idea that arises in the moral context, not the epistemic.9 The limits on my freedom are moral in the sense that freedom is called into question by the Other. Language therefore helps to establish truth’s dependence on the relation to the Other: that is, on justice (99). This is also why, for Levinas, “the locus of truth is society” (101). Given the close link between language and the Other, we can understand the relation between the face of the Other and truth. An important aspect of the face of the Other is its expression: “the face brings a notion of truth which, in contradistinction to contemporary ontology, is not the

The Concept of Truth in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity 129 disclosure of an impersonal Neuter but expression” (51). The face of the Other as expression is the “condition for theoretical truth” (51) since truth in general, and theoretical truth in particular, is ascribed to propositions or sentences, which make up language, and language is, first and foremost, the expression of the Other. As Levinas puts it: “Truth can be only if a subjectivity is called upon to tell it” (245).

The Place of Truth in Totality and Infinity It follows that the Other is a condition for truth. The face of the Other as expression is the basis for language, and language is the basis for truth. Although it seems that the link to the Other is fundamentally ethical, and the ethical dimension is not characterized in terms of truth, in Totality and Infinity truth is nonetheless germane to the basic level of the Other: “the respect of this metaphysical exteriority . . . constitutes truth” (Levinas 1979: 29). Metaphysical exteriority must pass through the Other, through intersubjective space in which the Other is superior. This superiority renders the intersubjective space curved: “this curvature of intersubjective space inflects distance into elevation; it does not falsify being, but makes its truth first possible” (291). The Other is exteriority, and my responding to the Other first produces truth (291). Before proceeding to the possible links between Levinas’s conception of truth and conceptions of truth put forward in analytic philosophy, let me summarize my characterization of Levinas’s conception of truth in Totality and Infinity. Levinas emphasizes the divide between meanings and things. He accepts the correspondence theory of truth, which takes truth to be correspondence between propositions and things as they are. Language is the site of truth. Language is also intersubjective: its basic feature is discourse. As such, it requires the Other. Yet to preserve intersubjectivity, the other must be completely separate from the self. This separation is ethical. It is achieved by ethical limits on the self visà-vis the Other. Levinas therefore contends that the intimate connection between truth and language has two main aspects: truth as the correspondence between propositions and things, and truth as the expression of the Other. Two additional features of Levinas’s conception of truth are the close relation between truth and knowledge, and between truth and the pursuit of truth.

Levinas’s Conception of Truth and the Analytic Tradition Levinas’s notion of truth in Totality and Infinity is situated within the phenomenological tradition. Its main context is the Husserlian and Heideggerian notions of truth. Husserl understands truth as “the full agreement of what is meant with what is given as such.”10 The appropriate interpretation of the relation between the Husserlian and Levinasian

130  Michael Roubach notions of truth, I suggest, is to see Levinas as presenting the conditions for truth as agreement in the Husserlian sense. This agreement is not simply the equivalence between that which is intended and that which is intuited. In order for there to be agreement, there must first be a clear separation between intention and intuition: “intentionality, where thought remains an adequation with the object, does not define consciousness at its fundamental level” (Levinas 1979: 27). Adequation requires separation, and this separation is not a feature of intentionality, but rather, it is a feature of the ethical as characterized earlier. This understanding of the Husserlian notion of truth is diametrically opposed to the Heideggerian view. Heidegger inquires into the conditions that enable intention to be fulfilled by intuition; he thus seeks some sort of mediation between intention and intuition. He contends that this mediating element is truth as disclosedness, which is necessary for intention to be directed toward something; the intended object can then be given in intuition.11 On my reading of Levinas, he argues, contra Heidegger, that a separation between intention and intuition is essential if there is to be fulfillment of the intention.12 Other important contexts where Levinas alludes to this idea of truth as requiring separation include his discussions of Descartes and of the notion of truth in Jewish sources: for example, his citation of the Psalmist in Totality and Infinity (245). Can Levinas’s conception of truth in Totality and Infinity be related to the discussions of the notion of truth in the analytic philosophy tradition? On the face of it, there is a considerable distance between Levinas’s conception of truth and the various construals of truth within the analytic tradition. The central axis of the analytic tradition’s discussions of truth is the relation between truth and logic. The laws of logic are the cardinal constraints on truth. One of the key tasks of a theory of truth in the analytic tradition is to devise a stance on truth that does not fall prey to the Liar paradox.13 Nevertheless, some of the issues raised by Levinas can be connected to treatments of truth in the analytic tradition. Both Levinas and the analytic tradition see truth as intimately linked to language. There is a consensus within the analytic tradition that truth is attributed to propositions or sentences, a view also upheld by Levinas. Both would concur that an account of truth should provide an account of the meaning of linguistic expressions. Another possible point of contact between Levinas and the analytic tradition is the question of truth’s normativity. Many analytic philosophers claim that truth is a norm for belief. One characterization of this norm is that a proposition should be believed if and only if it is true.14 Another phrasing, which is closer to Levinas. is that from the first-person point of view, answering the question “Should I believe that P?” is inseparable from answering the question “Is P true?”15 One of the questions raised regarding the normativity of truth is whether it mandates a specific conception of truth. Some philosophers argue that a correspondence

The Concept of Truth in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity 131 theory of truth is needed if truth is to serve as a norm for belief. Others argue that the normativity of truth can be maintained even if we uphold a different conception of truth. A related issue is the connection between truth and epistemic justification: is truth completely distinct from justification, or are the two closely linked? A salient motivation for adopting the correspondence theory of truth is to avoid the identification of truth with justification. On the correspondence theory, a sentence or proposition is true if it corresponds to reality, regardless of whether or not we have knowledge of that correspondence. Another possible interface between the analytic tradition and Levinas’s conception of truth concerns the pursuit of truth. Why should truth be pursued? In the analytic tradition, the usual answer is that the goal of the pursuit of truth is knowledge. This suggests a further question. What conception of truth best supports the pursuit of truth? The usual answer is that the correspondence theory of truth provides the best support for the pursuit of truth. Before going further in my comparison between Levinas’s notion of truth in Totality and Infinity and positions developed within the analytic tradition, it is important to stress that many philosophers working in the analytic tradition reject the correspondence theory of truth (and other substantive theories of truth) and prefer to minimize the role of truth (for instance, by downplaying the link between truth and normativity). Of the various positions developed within the analytic tradition, a few seem to have a prima facie affinity with those espoused by Levinas in Totality and Infinity. I will consider, in turn, possible affinities with Donald Davidson’s account of truth and meaning, the social epistemology approach put forward by Moran, and the functional conception of truth.

Levinas and Davidson Davidson’s well-known account of truth seems to have some affinities with the Levinasian conception. According to Davidson, one of the central roles of truth is to provide a framework for the interpretation of language. What a sentence says is closely linked to its truth conditions. Davidson contends that language is a means of deliberate communication: we intend to communicate specific content with the help of sounds or letters. How is a speaker of a language to be defined? Clearly, one utterance does not render someone a speaker of a language, but rather, “speaking a language . . . requires that each speaker intentionally make himself interpretable to the other.”16 In Davidson’s view, the norm for linguistic competence is not determined by the community of speakers, but by “the intention of the speaker to be interpreted in a certain way.”17 Meanings of sentences are defined in terms of truth conditions. Davidson maintains that the correspondence theory of truth raises many problems, and hence he does not take the objectivity of truth conditions to be grounded in correspondence between sentences of a language and

132  Michael Roubach reality. For the purpose of establishing what sentences mean, the relation between the speaker (the first person) and a second person (the listener) is crucial: “before anyone can speak a language, there must be another creature interacting with the speaker.”18 Communication requires coordination between the interacting parties and the thing (the object or event in the world) about which they are communicating. Davidson describes the relation between these three apexes as triangular.19 Communication is based on a process of triangulation. To sum up Davidson’s position, the locus of truth is language, whose primary role is communication, which depends on a process of triangulation between a speaker, a listener, and the object that is spoken of. There are several affinities between Davidson’s and Levinas’s respective conceptions of truth. Both uphold a close link between truth, language, and understanding. For Davidson, as for Levinas, the intentions of the speaker are central to language. In my view, the most interesting point of contact between their positions has to do with the role of the other in language, meaning, and truth. Davidson’s notion of triangulation has, as Michael Fagenblat suggested, a definite affinity with Levinas’s approach.20 It is compatible with some aspects of Levinas’s conception, such as his claim that “the object is presented when we have welcomed an interlocutor” (Levinas 1979: 69). Yet there are also important differences between Davidson and Levinas. The Davidsonian process of triangulation assumes a certain symmetry between the speaker and the other with whom the speaker is interacting. These are two perspectives, neither one of which takes precedence over the other. For Levinas, however, the Other is not a means for attaining truth as a relation to things, but rather, the relation to the Other is the very exemplification of truth. Levinas rejects the idea that the I and the Other are in a relation of communion vis-à-vis truth (251).21 For Levinas, objectivity requires the Other as the one who calls into question my possessions, my things, my world (76). Levinas speaks of the epiphany of the Other, whose ethical call (for example, the call of the widow and the orphan), calls into question my possession of things. According to Levinas, then, the Other is not a point of view symmetrical to my own (291). For if I am to recognize the Other’s perspective, I must first accept him as Other. This recognition is essential to separation of the Other’s perspective from my own. From the Levinasian point of view, Davidson’s triangulation method faces the problem of establishing a perspective that is separate from my own, the problem of recognizing—from my own perspective—other perspectives.22

Trusting the Testimony of the Other Davidson’s idea of triangulation posits a symmetry between my perspective and the perspective of the other with whom I interact. Together, we

The Concept of Truth in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity 133 reach true beliefs about the world. But the triangulation model is not the only model of social epistemology. Another model invokes the testimony of the other. On this model, there is asymmetry between myself and the other, because I have no way to verify this testimony. The role played by testimony can be interpreted in various ways. On the interpretation that is closest to Levinas’s position, the role of testimony cannot be reduced to any specific content or evidence. Accepting the testimony of an other has an additional aspect: the assurance that accompanies it. This position is developed by Richard Moran. According to Moran, human testimony has special features that, contra Hume, cannot be reduced to evidence.23 Moran contends that it is the other’s responsibility to me that creates the bond between me and the other, between a hearer and a speaker, and induces me to believe what the other has attested to. This is similar (though not identical) to Levinas’s view that the self’s bond with the Other is created by its response (namely, taking responsibility) to the call of the Other. The difference is that, whereas Moran maintains that it is the other (the speaker) who has a responsibility to give reliable testimony, Levinas contends that it is the self. This difference may help address a challenge that Moran’s position faces: the objection that there need not be any special bond between the hearer and the speaker for the former to trust the word of the latter, and even someone who hears the speaker by chance may trust her word.24 That is, there need not be any special bond for the listener to trust that the speaker is telling the truth. And indeed, according to Levinas, responsibility is an attitude on the part of the listener toward the speaker’s words. The listener does not have to be approached directly by the other in order to feel responsible for her. Another difference between Moran and Levinas is that Moran limits himself to the question of the other’s testimony, whereas Levinas asks the broader question of how the other can be recognized as an Other. His answer is that this recognition must be ethical. Only after the ethical bond between self and other is created is it possible to forge an epistemic bond. Moran argues that the epistemic bond is based on ethical notions such as responsibility and trust, but according to Levinas, the epistemic bond does not necessarily hold in the same direction as the basic ethical bond between self and Other.

The Functional Notion of Truth The link between social epistemology and the status of testimony, on the one hand, and a theory of truth, on the other, is indirect. As we saw earlier, for Levinas the epistemic and ethical aspects of truth are both integral to a theory of truth. In the analytic tradition, however, they are very often separated. But even within the analytic tradition, there are exceptions to this separation. One such exception is the relatively new conception of truth known as the functional concept of truth. The idea is that different

134  Michael Roubach domains can have different notions of truth. For example, one might uphold a correspondence conception of truth in the material realm and a coherence conception of truth in mathematics. The main advantage of this functional approach is that it enables the correspondence theory of truth to be retained, despite its unsuitability for mathematics and ethics, in realms for which it is suitable. Given that, on this approach, there are different notions of truth for different domains, a question arises. What unifies the different notions of truth? Why are they all called “truth”? Michael Lynch, one of the leading proponents of the functional concept of truth, has defended four “truisms,” as he puts it, that articulate the features of truth that are common to the various notions of truth that fall under the umbrella of the functional conception: truth is objective, truth is a good, truth is a goal worthy of inquiry, truth is inherently worth caring about.25 These features are, Lynch contends, integral to the notion of truth, and not external or supplementary, as most stances within the analytic tradition aver. Lynch’s conception of truth is similar to Levinas’s in several respects. Lynch, like all analytic philosophers, takes truth to be ascribed to sentences or propositions, as does Levinas. Levinas’s views on the links between truth, exteriority, and the other, though not as straightforward as Lynch’s truisms about truth, can be interpreted in a manner compatible with the truisms. In light of this compatibility, Lynch’s version of the functional conception of truth might seem to be a plausible framework for unifying the different aspects of Levinas’s notion of truth discussed earlier. Moreover, Levinas’s position can, conceivably, be taken to allow for different notions of truth in different realms: truth in ethics and truth with respect to physical entities. Nevertheless, there are disparities between Levinas’s alterity-based position and Lynch’s functional theory of truth. One such disparity is that Levinas appears to endorse the correspondence theory of truth, whereas Lynch argues that different conceptions of truth (correspondence, coherence, etc.) are possible. Indeed, the principal motivation behind the functional theory of truth is to allow diverse conceptions. A variant of the functional conception of truth has recently been put forward by Gila Sher. On her approach, the correspondence theory of truth can be interpreted in several different ways.26 Sher mainly focuses on mathematical truths. According to Sher, their truth is based on correspondence with the formal structure of reality. Since it is premised on the correspondence theory of truth, Sher’s variant of the functional theory of truth seems to be more promising as a framework for explicating Levinas’s approach to truth than the functional theory proposed by Lynch. Another feature of Sher’s theory of truth concerns the basic features of truth. These, unlike Lynch’s truisms, are premised on the correspondence theory of truth. The two main features of truth as correspondence are immanence and transcendence. Immanence is defined thus: “one basic mode of human thought

The Concept of Truth in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity 135 relevant to knowledge is directing our mental gaze at some thing(s) and attributing some property (relation, state, etc.) to it (them).”27 The idea is that, in order to attribute truth to a thought, this thought needs to be apprehended and to be about something. An additional requirement of truth is transcendence: “we transcend a given thought, or domain of thoughts, in order to reflect upon it, ask and answer questions about it, set norms or standards for it, challenge it, attribute properties to it, and so on.”28 The examination of a thought is a part of the meaning of assigning truth to it. The requirements of immanence and transcendence for truth as correspondence suit Levinas’s conception well. The main difference is that, according to Levinas, the transcendence required for truth can be achieved only by the Other as ethically conceived. According to Sher, the transcendence required for truth need not be so radical (in her terminology, it does not require a God’s-eye point of view), but can be achieved by the individual who apprehends the thought in question. In conclusion, Levinas’s notion of truth in Totality and Infinity is highly complex, and it seems difficult to see how its different aspects can be integrated into a single, cohesive notion. As suggested here, however, there is reason to think that with the help of positions developed within the analytic tradition (particularly Moran’s testimony-based conception and Sher’s conception of truth as correspondence), the various features of truth discussed in Totality and Infinity can be melded together to yield a coherent picture of Levinasian truth. The contribution made by Levinas’s Totality and Infinity is that it brings all these aspects of the notion of truth together and shows their interconnections.

Notes 1. I will follow the English translation of Totality and Infinity in translating “autre” as “other” with a small “o,” and “autrui” as “Other” with a capital “O.” Levinas does not explicitly explain this distinction, but it can be articulated thus: the other is a general notion that is opposed to the same; the Other is specific, it is opposed to the I. For example, the face is the face of the Other, not the other. 2. The secondary literature attests to the fact that truth is generally taken to play only a minor role in Levinas’s thought. To the best of my knowledge, Levinas’s conception of truth is discussed in just two articles: Silvano Petrosino, “L’idée de vérité dans l’oeuvre d’Emmanuel Levinas,” in Emmanuel Levinas: L’éthique comme philosophie premiére, ed. Jean Greisch and Jacques Rolland (Paris: Cerf, 1993), 103–30 and Leslie MacAvoy, “Truth and Evidence in Descartes and Levinas,” in Current Continental Theory and Modern Philosophy, ed. Stephen H. Daniel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 21–35. Petrosino argues that the notion of truth plays a central role in Levinas’s thought. He bases this view on Levinas’s “Truth of Disclosure and Truth of Testimony,” trans. Iain MacDonald, in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University

136  Michael Roubach Press, 1996), 98–107. MacAvoy’s article discusses the relation between truth and evidence in Totality and Infinity and compares it with the Cartesian position. Although the issues it discusses are similar to some of the questions considered in the present chapter, there is relatively little overlap, since MacAvoy restricts her focus to a comparison with Descartes. 3. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1979). 4. There are also some important differences between Levinas’s conception of truth in Totality and Infinity and his later position, for example, in “Truth of Disclosure and Truth of Testimony,” originally published in 1972. In my opinion, the later conception of truth is less expansive than that put forward in Totality and Infinity. The later position links the notion of truth to ethics, but not to metaphysics and to truth as correspondence, unlike the account of truth in Totality and Infinity. 5. The importance of truth for Levinas’s thought in the Totality and Infinity period is attested to by the role it plays in “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” as well as in Levinas’s discussions of Buber and Derrida. See Emmanuel Levinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 47–59; Emmanuel Levinas, “Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge,” in Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith (London: Athlone Press, 1996), 17–35; Emmanuel Levinas, “Jacques Derrida: Wholly Otherwise,” in Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith (London: Athlone Press, 1996), 55–62. The article on Buber was written in 1958, around the same time as “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity.” I thus think it is safe to conclude that during the period when he wrote Totality and Infinity, the notion of truth played a key role in Levinas’s thought. 6. On truth as identity, see Levinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” 48. 7. In his article on Buber, Levinas asserts: “The theory of knowledge is a theory of truth. It asks . . . [h]ow can absolute being manifest itself in truth?” See Levinas, “Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge,” 17. 8. In Levinas’s later terminology, the basic relation between language and truth is the saying, not the said. 9. One might, of course, raise the objection that requiring the idea of perfection is a very strong condition, and prefer an account of error or inadequacy that does not impose such a requirement. 10. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. John N. Findlay (London: Routledge, 2001), 2, 263. Husserl’s notion of truth is central to Levinas’s early book, published in 1930, on the notion of intuition in Husserl’s thought, Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. André Orianne (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995), since the agreement in question is agreement between an intention and that which is given in intuition. 11. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), §44. 12. In philosophical notes written between 1948 and 1961, Levinas says that his opposition to Heidegger pertains chiefly to the primacy Heidegger ascribes to the notion of truth; see Emmanuel Levinas, Oeuvres I: Carnets de captivité et autres inédits (Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2009), 416. These notes attest that it was important for Levinas to critique Heidegger’s notion of truth. In his early work on intuition in Husserl, Levinas’s stance is fairly close to the Heideggerian conception on which intuition as fulfillment requires a preconception of the notion of Being; see Levinas, The Theory of

The Concept of Truth in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity 137 Intuition, 89. Levinas’s position in Totality and Infinity can be described as spelling out the conditions of the separation between intention and intuition and not, as in Heidegger’s thought, the conditions of the fulfillment of intention by intuition. 13. The paradox is the outcome of sentences such as “This sentence is a lie.” If the sentence is a lie, then it is true that it is a lie, and hence it is true. But if it is true, then it is not a lie, and hence, it is false. The paradox arises from the sentence’s attribution of truth to itself. In the analytical tradition, one of the main aims of a theory of truth it to avoid the paradox. 14. Pascal Engel, Truth (Chesham, UK: Acumen, 2002), 128. 15. This phrasing is suggested by Nishi Shah, “How Truth Governs Beliefs,” Philosophical Review 112 (2003): 447. 16. Donald Davidson, “The Second Person,” in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 115. 17. Ibid., 116. 18. Ibid., 121. 19. Ibid. 20. Michael Fagenblat, A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas’s Philosophy of Judaism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 163–64. 21. The rejection of this position is also evident in Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995), 95. Levinas targets the Heideggerian position that connects truth to Being-with-Others, i.e., takes it to be the outcome of a collective enterprise. 22. This is the problem discussed by Husserl in the fifth Cartesian Meditation. Levinas’s philosophy offers an ethical solution to this problem. 23. Richard Moran, “Getting Told and Being Believed,” in Epistemology of Testimony, ed. Jennifer Lackey and Ernest Sosa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 275. 24. On this critique of Moran and on the different positions regarding testimony, see https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/epistemology-social/. 25. Michael Lynch, True to Life: Why Truth Matters (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2004), chapter 1. 26. Gila Sher, “Forms of Correspondence: The Intricate Route from Thought to Reality,” in Truth and Pluralism: Current Debates, ed. Nicolaj J. L. L. Pedersen and Cory Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 157–79. 27. See Gila Sher, Epistemic Friction: An Essay on Knowledge, Truth, and Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 163. 28. Ibid., 166.

Bibliography Davidson, Donald. “The Second Person.” In Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, 107–22. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. Engel, Pascal. Truth. Chesham, UK: Acumen, 2002. Fagenblat, Michael. A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas’s Philosophy of Judaism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962. Husserl, Edmund. Logical Investigations. Translated by John N. Findlay. London: Routledge, 2001. Levinas, Emmanuel. Existence and Existents. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1978.

138  Michael Roubach ———. “Jacques Derrida: Wholly Otherwise.” In Proper Names, translated by Michael B. Smith, 55–62. London: Athlone Press, 1996. ———. “Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge.” In Proper Names, translated by Michael B. Smith, 17–35. London: Athlone Press, 1996. ———. Oeuvres I: Carnets de captivité et autres inédits. Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2009. ———. “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity.” In Collected Philosophical Papers, translated by Alphonso Lingis, 47–59. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987. ———. The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Translated by André Orianne. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995. ———. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1979. ———. “Truth of Disclosure and Truth of Testimony.” Translated by Iain MacDonald. In Basic Philosophical Writings, edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi, 98–107. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996. Lynch, Michael. True to Life: Why Truth Matters. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. MacAvoy, Leslie. “Truth and Evidence in Descartes and Levinas.” In Current Continental Theory and Modern Philosophy, edited by Stephen H. Daniel, 21–35. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005. Moran, Richard. “Getting Told and Being Believed.” In Epistemology of Testimony, edited by Jennifer Lackey and Ernest Sosa, 272–306. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Petrosino, Silvano. “L’idée de vérité dans l’œuvre d’Emmanuel Levinas.” In Emmanuel Levinas. L’éthique comme philosophie premiére, edited by Jean Greisch and Jacques Rolland, 103–30. Paris: Cerf, 1993. Shah, Nishi. “How Truth Governs Belief.” Philosophical Review 112 (2003): 447–82. Sher, Gila. Epistemic Friction: An Essay on Knowledge, Truth, and Logic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. ———. “Forms of Correspondence: The Intricate Route from Thought to Reality.” In Truth and Pluralism: Current Debates, edited by Nicolaj J. L. L. Pedersen and Cory D. Wright, 157–79. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

7 Levinas and the SecondPersonal Structure of Free Will Kevin Houser

“[There is] an ethical relation constitutive of freedom itself” “[T]he structure of free will becoming goodness.”1

Emmanuel Levinas spent a career arguing that we are not “duped by morality.” Central to his argument that we are not duped by morality is another: that we are thoroughly duped about freedom. Levinas insists nearly everything we think about free will is wrong. We posit a solitary “active power.” Levinas speaks of sociality and passivity. We valorize autonomy and sovereignty. Levinas insists our will begins as heteronomy and that freedom is a form of “humility.” We see free will as an individual possession or power, which each person might possess. Levinas insists freedom is not a property or possession but a special kind of social process—an ongoing second-personal relation wherein we face and free one another. This third point alone, if true, might account for traditional free will literature’s unbroken record of explanatory failure. For if the smallest unit of analysis for the explanation of freedom isn’t a person but a relationship, no analysis of free will, understood as an asocial ability, pre-ethical property, or privately wielded power can possibly succeed. But our dupery about freedom is not exhausted by these miscellaneous mistakes. The root problem of which all other errors are symptoms is that we have mis-framed the problem of freedom’s moral significance. Traditional philosophy frames free will as a condition for moral responsibility: If we are not free, we cannot be morally responsible. Levinas insists this is backward. It is not the case that we are able to be morally responsible because we are free. We are able to be free because we are morally responsible. There is a moral responsibility for others—a commission or calling toward others and away from ourselves—by which we are freed. I begin with Levinas’s claim that common notions of a free nature are “contradictory.” A diagnosis emerges. The contradiction arises because our idea of freedom as something an individual might possess entails something strange: That a free being must not only be free from an

140  Kevin Houser “external” nature. Its own being or nature is something from which it must also be free. To clarify this liberating inner distance “between the I and itself,” I consider two criticisms launched by Levinas. In the first, Levinas claims the Kantian “primacy of freedom,” which associates this inner distance with first-personal consciousness, leads to explanatory and ethical disaster. Amidst Levinas’s second criticism—that of Heidegger’s “primacy of being”—Levinas suggests what it would be to be free of it. He argues that what puts the free being “at a distance from its own being” is a primal ethical relation—a relation of primal concern for others that distances each being from its constitutive self-concern. Levinas calls this distance “disinterestedness.” In disinterestedness, I no longer have an “essence” in the sense that I am no longer “of the essence” to myself. I am pushed from my first place by your power to interest me “before” I do—what Levinas calls the original apres vous. All subsequent exertions of my power must traverse or trespass this still more primal concern for you. Free will is thus not the expression of a primal first-person prerogative that a “law of freedom” must subsequently contain. Rather, what strikes the will as its most private and primal ability expresses this earlier, second-personal, altruistic architecture. I close by suggesting love as a model of Levinasian freedom. In love, I am called out and distanced from my self by the lover. Yet I nevertheless seem to be willing at my freest, though it is both unclear and unimportant which lover’s will has been enacted or expressed. I’ll frame the following with three brief notes on method. The aim of this chapter is a better understanding of Levinas’s ethics-first approach to well-known problems with freedom of will. So part of the initial task is to remake the connection between more familiar accounts of free will and Levinas’s demanding and metaphor-heavy claims about it. In the same way Robert Bernasconi asks “What is the Question to which ‘Substitution’ is the Answer?” I here ask, “To What Problems in Free Will Literature is Levinas’s Account a Possible Solution?”2 Because Levinas often offers answers to problems that are not clearly framed, I’ll spend a good deal of time providing framework which renders his solutions recognizable. Second, in keeping with this purpose, I will initially avoid relying solely on Levinas’s own language. This works in favor of Levinas’s account, since attempts to at first speak of free will without ethical language will reveal patterns of explanatory failure that attend or haunt such attempts. Third, Levinas’s overarching explanatory commitment is ethical reductionism. So the argumentative strategy in use will be what Levinas calls “reduction,” wherein a basic ethical relation (“responsibility”) is shown to provide the central structuring features of human life. The challenge: because these relational structures are the conditions for everyday first-person experience, their ethical nature is missed by casual consultations with first-personal consciousness. Freedom appears as the possibility condition for ethics.3 But Levinas “reduces” free will to an

Levinas and the Second-Personal Structure of Free Will 141 expression or enactment of an ethical relation. The claim here is strong. Levinas not only purports to show us that our deepest relation to one another (ethics) is a necessary developmental condition for being free. He claims that what traditional metaphysics isolates and mistakes as firstpersonal freedom just is an ongoing expression or enactment of our deep, second-personal, and ethical condition.4

1.  The Contradictions of “Free Nature”5 Before considering Levinas’s second-personal account of free will, we should first ask whether we need one. And before we ask whether we need one, we might first ask whether “free will” is a salvageable concept. Levinas for his part not only finds questions about the nature of free will problematic.6 He thinks that when we ask in standard metaphysical fashion, “What is the nature of freedom?” we ask “a question contradictory in its terms.”7 Identifying the terms of this contradiction is made difficult by a pervasive equivocation. When we ask of free will “What is its nature?” “nature” does triple duty. Nature is the world or environment in which the free will is free. At the same time, nature (often conceived of as aimless, mindless, or mechanical) is that from which the free will is free. These two uses of “nature”—as what the free will inhabits and what the free will inhibits or overcomes—combine to comprise a third: It is the nature of free will to be free of the nature in which it lives. It is the nature of free will to operate in, and also upon, a nature from which it has freed itself. “The nature free from nature” is the nature of free will.8 Granted, metaphysics arising from these equivocations on “nature” are often dualistic, obscure, and panicky. But it isn’t clear that this awkward fit between free will and nature is contradictory.9 However, as Levinas tells it, standard accounts of free natures involve not one but two seemingly unnatural gaps. In navigating the freedom-related equivocations on “nature,” it is important to keep apart the interpretation of these gaps that Levinas is criticizing and his own account of them. It is also important to get right which gap Levinas believes to be the most important one. In the case just mentioned, free will seems to inhabit or exploit “a yawning gap, ‘play’ (un jeu’) between it[self] and being.”10 This first divide is between a determined “outer” nature and a seemingly private “inner” one. The “nature” from which I am free is something like the physical world and its laws, or the aimless, un-­individuated il y a. I direct my own steps through the world and its uniform and mechanized regimen, free to make my own way despite the onward and all-encompassing march of necessities of which I am unaware—­ necessities described by “the physics, psychology, and s­ ociology” said to “govern life . . . behind life’s back.”11 My being is besieged. But I retain an ability or inner authority that remains unviolated. And my actions

142  Kevin Houser are distinguished from natural events by their origins in this alternative source of causality. But Levinas insists standard free-will metaphysics posits a second and more startling gap. There seems a second sort of nature from which I must free myself. As Levinas puts it, a free “humanity must irrupt into Being”— but not only into being as such. For humanity must “irrupt . . . [in the being] of men too, insofar as they are themselves simple worlds.”12 That is: The free being not only finds itself at a distance from being in general. It also “must find itself at a distance from its own being.” This is the key, he says, to understand how such a being “is not in nature.”13 I am free from “outer” nature. This is free will’s first “freedom-from.” But my inner nature is an additional “nature” that I must be able to shake off or abandon if I am to be free.14 But why does Levinas think that to be free I must be free from my nature? And if I am free from my nature, how can it be mine? And if it is my nature to be free from my nature, how can it also be my nature that is free? Taking the first question first: Why think freedom means “the I finds, at a distance from itself, the I itself”? What might this even mean? To get clear on what moves Levinas to make such a claim, we can conceive of this relation—the relation between being a free self and a being free from its self—in a more familiar form. Suppose I ask whether it is my nature to be free. As just noted, this means I am somehow free from nature and its mechanisms. However, with freedom from nature in general secured, a second question arises: Can I also be free from my nature? Freedom from “outer” nature secures the separateness of my nature from nature simpliciter. But more seems needed to affirm that my personal nature is not a mere product of whatever structure, dispositions, or inclinations happen to be mine. If I am free, I do not simply “happen upon” my nature. I have a hand in it. Crucial to my freedom is that I can take in hand the matter of who I am. Unlike natures such as rocks and cats whose freedom is exhausted in the uninhibited expression of an unchosen nature, I also enjoy a freedom to choose the nature I express.15 16 What is at stake is not merely the freedom of actions but the freedom of persons—not just free acts, but free beings. Reasoning in this way, the thesis of free persons seems to commit us to something like the following: Whatever I might be, I am contingently who I am. I am necessarily always a self. But I am not any particular self necessarily. I must necessarily be some one. But there is no particular someone I must be. There is reason to think that this is our working conception. Who I now am—my identity—we take to be someone whom I can conceivably denounce and with whom I can decline to identify. There may have been a past actor whom I (perhaps ruefully) identify as myself—for example, the rude or undisciplined me of 30 seconds ago. But identifying this person as me has little to do with whether I identify with that self. And this

Levinas and the Second-Personal Structure of Free Will 143 distinction isn’t merely a gloss on the division between my consciousness of my past and present actions. For I might very well decline to identify with my present act and my present self. My self, if free, is thus something from which I find myself distanced and from which I am able to distance myself. As a result, it seems I can make self-forming choices—one of which is to dismantle, decommission, or deform my present self.17 So free will as a power of self-formation supposes an identity I am free to choose or form. But insofar as it does so, free will also supposes an identity from which I am in principle free. Granted: I am always who I am. But as free, at no point is who I am who I have to be. For me to be free, I must, of course, be. But I am not bound to my self. I am not bound to be me.18 But this good news—that I am free enough from myself to freely form myself—is also bad news. The good news: I am the one who is free and so not bound to be me. The bad news: This loose or “gappy” relation to my self also means I cannot be bound to my freedom. Given the gaps, there is something deeply wrong with thinking two things at once: Thinking of freedom as my power to freely detach from my own nature and, at the same time thinking that freedom is something to which my nature is inextricably attached. My nature and my freedom both look like things to which I am naturally attached. But if the second gap is right, my nature is precisely that from which my freedom requires me to be able to detach. To be free is to enjoy this detachability. If I am free, my identity cannot also be inalienable. I must be able to alienate it. But then whose ability to alienate is this? Whose could it be? It seems an ability that, by its peculiar nature, resists the very idea of anyone having it. By thoughts like these, Levinas helps us discern in these possessives of free will a contradiction in our conception of it.19 The idea of free will that is contradictory is the idea of free will as privately possess-able. If I have, as a private property, a perpetual power to be someone other than I am; if I can be someone else in profound moral and psychological ways; if I can construct a second nature that contrasts so radically with the first that everyday phrases like “That is no longer who I am!” and “He is a completely different person!” are more than metaphor—then I do not conceive of my freedom as necessarily fused to any substantive conception of who I am right now. Quite the opposite. My “I” must be alienable. If it is to be properly mine, I must relate to it freely. To relate to my nature freely, I must be able to prise myself from it. And if I can be free from it, I must not be fused to it.20 If what it is to be free is to not be fused to one’s self, no self can be thought of as fused to its freedom. If I can free myself from who I am, then I am not who I am necessarily. And if it is a mistake to think that I am necessarily me, then it is a mistake to think of my freedom as necessarily mine. Note the strength of this conclusion. This is not merely to say I am not necessarily free and sovereign. It is not merely to say that I am not necessarily the sovereign one, or that, having had sovereignty, I might

144  Kevin Houser be overthrown. It is to say more: That, qua free being, I am necessarily not able to secure my sovereignty. My sovereignty involves, in its very structure, a standing vulnerability. A robust conception of freedom as a singular sovereignty thus requires that we reject any necessary and indissoluble relation between such sovereignty and any stable and singular self.21 If part of the conception of freedom is that my substantive “I” is someone from whom I am always free to part, then no “I” that I am or could be can ever have my freedom as a private and inviolable property, from which it cannot be parted. The contradiction of freedom understood as private possession is stark. Freedom’s nature, tradition supposes, is to be someone’s. Yet it seems that from the same traditional conception, freedom is by its nature something no one can have. To be free I must in some way be free from my own nature. So it is the nature of freedom that it cannot be my nature to be free. And this argument goes through for everyone.

2. Korsgaard and the Primacy of First-Personal Consciousness We’ve taken up Levinas’s claim to find something contradictory in mainstream free will philosophy. In order to exist, free will must be someone’s; yet if it exists it can be no one’s. Such was the argument. Since the trouble seems to arise from the idea that freedom requires a “distance within,” an escape from it will require further investigation into just what this inner distance is. If it is to be more than metaphor, we must ask, “What sort of distance is this?” “What ‘makes’ or creates it?” Also: “What is this distance between me and my being made of? And “How can free beings be a combination of both being and a gap in being? What could it mean to be such a composite or hybrid of presence and absence? How can the nature of a free being be ‘made of’ both being and of distance?” To set up Levinas’s extraordinary ethical answers to these questions, I’ll draw a basic contrast between two explanatory roads to take. One way to explain freedom is to take first-person consciousness as a starting point, then explain freedom and ethical relations to others as a result or expression of it. This is the strategy taken by Kant. The second option— Levinas’s option—completely inverts this Kantian order. It denies that, in our understanding of freedom, first-person consciousness should be first. It instead begins with basic human relations, then explains, in terms of this relation, first-personal consciousness, distance, and freedom. The “intelligibility of [free] beings . . . only becomes possible when ethics . . . is taken as the starting point.”22 I’ll begin with the first and more mainstream Kantian option, whose considerable explanatory and ethical troubles generate demand for a more Levinasian view.

Levinas and the Second-Personal Structure of Free Will 145 Levinas speaks of those committed to “the traditional primacy of freedom.” To this primacy he stands adamantly opposed.23 Kant, he believes, is this sort of traditionalist. So a clear and accessible Kantian picture will help us see what this primacy is and why it is bad. By looking at the Kantian picture, we can see what Levinas wants his own view not to be. Christine Korsgaard’s oft-discussed The Sources of Normativity is an admirably clear picture within this freedom-first tradition. In Sources, Korsgaard, a Kantian, sets out to find the source of all normativity— i.e., the source of all obligation, all “oughts,” all ethics. She professes to find this source in “the structure of reflective consciousness,” whose chief feature is “reflective distance.” Normativity, freedom, and reason arise from this distance inherent to “the thinking self.” Our inclinations are not only something we act on or act out, Korsgaard reasons. They are also something we look at and contemplate. We are not mere conduits for inclinations. We are conscious of them. We see them “at a distance.” As conscious beings, we are no longer “close enough” to be simply pushed around by them. I can thus stand apart from and look upon my inclinations, and “call them into question.” We appear as free from our inclinations, thanks to the contemplative distance inherent to conscious awareness. Korsgaard reapplies this distance argument about inclinations to identity. Just as there is a distance between my inclinations and those inclinations of which I am merely conscious, there is a distance or gap between the self of which I am conscious and the self that I am. And having found my self at a distance, the normative questions that arose in my conscious engagement with inclinations, re-arise in my conscious engagement with me. Just as I can decline to identify with an inclination of which I am conscious—i.e., can refuse to endorse it, act on it, or “make it mine”—I can likewise look at my present identity and refuse to endorse it. Because who I am is not only something I am but something of which I am conscious, who I am is always someone from whom I can distance myself and with whom I can decline to identify. I am me, but at the same time I am someone from whom I can take and keep my distance. My self is “out there” to ask questions about. So I can call my self into question. This modified Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP)—this Principle of Alternative Identity, which declares that I need not be who I am— means not only are my action free, I am. Because I am to myself an object of consciousness, and so something from which I am distant, I not only make choices; I am made by them. My I is a matter of choice. Korsgaard even gets from this consciousness-and-freedom-first picture a claim about the primacy of freedom in ethical relations.24 For whatever self or identity I produce with my freedom, I have (even if not professed) performed my identification with my free self. And because I identify with, or value, my freedom no matter who I am, I must value freedom, no matter whose it is. To value my freedom as such is to value yours.

146  Kevin Houser Possessives here—questions of “Whose freedom?”—are ethically irrelevant. Thanks to rational or deliberative distance from my self, I am a being who can critique itself. As free, I can stand back, question, and critique all purposes, with one exception: I cannot critique the liberating distance that makes critique possible. I cannot call into question the value of freedom. This appears to get us the two gaps. The first is the distance from the “outer” being or nature, which approaches as inclinations. The second is the gap between “the I and itself,” achieved through reflective distance. Will this do the trick? Is this distance, bound up with being conscious of something, the inner distance we are looking for? Is this the right kind of distance to produce the right kind of freedom? Does this approach show that the structure of consciousness is sufficient to provide us our freedom and the ethical responsibility relations that this freedom is supposed to make possible? Levinas acknowledges the allure of appealing to consciousness here.25 But he insists this is precisely the wrong account of the relevant inner distance. To show why he finds this an explanatory failure, I’ll express his views as a critique of Korsgaard’s attempt. One way Korsgaard’s account would drive us to Levinas’s alternative is if, in her account of first-personal consciousness as the source of normativity, freedom, and reason, we found Korsgaard has borrowed normativity from outside consciousness in order to make sense of it. Levinas could show that Korsgaard quietly borrows normativity or obligation at the outset of her story of the inner distance of consciousness and that without doing so she cannot tell it. And Korsgaard does float a very strong thesis about the effect of the distance of consciousness upon us: that seeing things from afar is the origin of all normative questions and founds the authority of all normative and moral critique. But as Crowell points out, even in the case of inclinations, Korsgaard does little to show that a distance or detachment modeled on mere reflective awareness renders us reflective in the normative sense: the sense or mood of being reflective.26 The distance of consciousness does not by itself produce conscientiousness. Representational consciousness does not yet bring with it the right kind of “re.” I am not driven to re-vise either my inclinations or my self simply by virtue of repeated viewings. Literal revisions may make possible, but do not alone oblige, a project of revising my self. Having a reflective eye does not require or yield an “I” that is self-critical. It may be that “the structure of our minds” makes not only thought but “thoughtfulness possible.” But this is a far cry from saying the structure of consciousness not only enables but inspires and obliges us to be thoughtful.27 Yet the rest of her account hangs on this point. “[F]reedom . . . is to be explained in terms of reflective consciousness.”28 Korsgaard’s claims about freedom and reason rest uneasily atop this consciousness-first explanation of normativity’s source. So if she has

Levinas and the Second-Personal Structure of Free Will 147 the wrong explanation of consciousness and its distance, she will have the wrong story of normativity, reason, and freedom as well. A second bit of evidence that Korsgaard needs more normativity than she can get from first-personal consciousness is found in related struggles with an objection in Sources (Cohen’s Mafioso objection).29 The trouble arises from Korsgaard’s claim that because all authority begins in autonomy, each individual can only be obliged by reflectively endorsing a rule. Thus “reflection [is what] leads us to morality.” Yet she acknowledges a sufficient “course of reflection may never be taken.” Thus, the question arises: If we need to reflect in order to be obliged by morality, what “leads” us to reflection? Whence the pre- and extra-moral obligation to reflect? In her response, she claims that this meta-mandate arises “from [reflective] activity itself.” That is, I am critiqued by reflection itself for failing to engage in it with sufficient frequency and enthusiasm. The norms constitutive of the activity not only grip me while I am doing it. They can reach out and rightly demand I keep doing it.30 “Be reflective!” or “Be reasonable!” arises from the shape or structure of reflection. Levinas, for his part, agrees there is an ongoing imperative to take my distance, stand back, consider, be reflective. Reason itself, he argues, is a perpetual response to such a command.31 But again, he disagrees that reflection itself is where this command comes from. Reflective distance doesn’t demand that I distance myself. The structure of reflection can’t require we continue to reflect.32 So it is reasonable to suppose the command to distance myself from my self isn’t issued by reflective distance.33 It is also reasonable to seek for this command an alternative normative source. Finally, not only would Levinas claim Korsgaard’s consciousness-first account of freedom and normativity rests on a reflective distance that is insufficiently critical. He will predict that, having insisted all normativity arises from within first-personal consciousness, Korsgaard will face undue pressure to carry out a project of normative containment—i.e., of cramming all normative activity without remainder inside of it. She tries to do so. Strains appear. Most intriguing is what the Levinasian skeptic might call “the second-personal relational structure within” to which Korsgaard constantly appeals. “Within” the first person there is, she says, relations between “the thinking self and the acting self”; the phenomenal and the noumenal self; the self legislating and legislated for; the self ruled and the self suborned; the self critiqued and the self that critiques; the self who passively finds itself at a distance and the self who actively takes it; the I of which I am conscious and the conscious I; and the consciousness that spontaneously posits the I and the spontaneous free I which that same consciousness posits.34 The sheer number of pairings required to complete her picture of first-person consciousness suggests the procrustean nature of her project. In summing up this situation, she is led into almost-Levinasian lyricism about the second-personal structure

148  Kevin Houser inside the first. (“[Ethics] must arise within me rather than between two; yet for [it] to arise, that one must be two.”35) Second-personal structures dominate all of her close descriptions of first-personal consciousness.36 So though Korsgaard insists “reflective consciousness establishes these relations,” her actual account of autonomy looks a lot like heteronomy. We should be hesitant to start our story of the gap between the I and itself with first-personal consciousness if, in describing it, we find its most powerful proponents speaking the language of second-person-like relations already active and normatively charged. The proper tu quoque or counter-challenge from Korsgaard to Levinas at this point—and the challenge going forward—is to ask what it means to say “second-personal” in this context. Isn’t this to posit two conscious persons? If so, then aren’t we placing first, at the beginning of our explanation of the proposed heteronomy, persons? If so, in what sense has Levinas shown that the fundamental structure of the free firstperson is relational first? Doesn’t he need two autonomous persons to have a second-personal relation?37 Levinas’s explicit answer will appear in a few pages. But since the objection smuggles in a substantive individualist thesis of first-personal consciousness, it is important to foreshadow what, given his relational theory of freedom, Levinas will have to say about it. Korsgaard’s account of the ethical “I” begins with an individual already at a reflective distance from all objects of consciousness. From this generic distance, common to all objects and subjects, she derives the inner distance of a singular self from its self. Her troubles in doing so suggest we seek an alternative. One such alternative: Perhaps Korsgaard got the two kinds of distance in the wrong explanatory order. Perhaps the distance indigenous to reflection as such doesn’t explain my distance from my self. Instead, a prior distancing of myself from my self explains both why I am reflective and why I ought to be. A hint about how this reversal might work appears in Levinas’s suggestion we reorder two expressions: being conscious of one’s self and being self-conscious. The former starts with the spectator’s distance which, if Crowell is right, proves insufficiently critical. The model of selfconsciousness suggests that it isn’t reflection that enables us to be critical; rather, what comes first, and leads us to be reflectively, is a standing subjection to criticism. The original distance of the I from itself isn’t an effect of our power to identify ourselves as reflective beings. It arises as a socially induced reluctance to identity with our selves. The primacy of self-consciousness induced by others also presages a change away from the autonomist’s link between reflection and will as power. My first identity isn’t a solitary being with powers that I reflectively direct. Such an I presupposes one more primal, socially entangled, seen, and singled out. From here we get at least a general idea of how to recover some of Korsgaard’s missing normative resources. The sociality suggested by

Levinas and the Second-Personal Structure of Free Will 149 this alternative appeal to self-consciousness could explain the distance “between the I and itself” normally attributed to conscious reflection and, at the same time, provide a normative source for the requirement to reflect. We also get an idea of the explanatory breadth of this reversal. Levinas thinks the best way to botch the study of conscious beings is to mis-order in our explanations these two nominally similar p ­ henomena— one of which takes the structure of first-personal conscious-of as its primitive, the other, the irreducibly social structure of shame.38

3.  Kant and the Primacy of Freedom Given this, we ought not begin our account of first-personal consciousness with the model of reflective consciousness. We ought not take up this visionbased mode of distance as the key to our relation to our selves and our freedom and suppose our normative spade turned. Rather, given Korsgaard’s difficulties, along with the contradictions in common conceptions sketched earlier, “It is not illegitimate . . . to ask ourselves whether, beneath the gaze of reflective consciousness understood as self-­consciousness . . . we have arrived too late to trace freedom back to what lies before it.”39 There is something normatively insufficient about the kind of distance Korsgaard starts with. Such a starting point is “too late”. So perhaps the relevant distance or “dis-engagement . . . is not that of reflection.” But Levinas’s critique of freedom’s primacy is not purely—or even primarily—explanatory. There is also the ethical effect of this starting point.40 Levinas’s reservations here are not his usual complaint against Kant: that Kantian respect is premised on the “primal disrespect” of stripping off the “other-ness” of persons down to their “impersonal [rational] structures” purportedly relevant to ethics, leaving only a discoursedestroying “humanity of interchangeable men.” The problem here is different. It is that Kant places first-personal power at the center of his ethics.41 Despite its equity and reciprocity, it is an ethics of will and of power.42 And as a response to this objection, the moral law is no help.43 For the law is not in place as a check or limit on this primordial power but to ensure the full enactment and expression of it. The point of the “law of freedom” is the rule of freedom. The law unleashes an un-self-conscious freedom whose prerogative is prior to law. The moral law is, for Levinas, in this sense not deeply moral but tactical. Its normative question is “How should this freedom be wielded so as to be maximized?” It has nothing to say to the humbler question, “Who am I, that I should wield such remarkable power?” For Kant, it is simply a fact that I do so. So the moral law doesn’t get in the way of, or impose upon, my freedom. It only insists that freedom get out of its own way—i.e., that it “not impose upon itself.” On Levinas’s reading of him, this primal prerogative of freedom is not only built into Kant’s account of what the law is. It is essential to Kant’s explanation of my respect for it. The law exhilarates and appeals

150  Kevin Houser to me as “a help to my causality.” In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant describes how “the sole moral feeling” infuses me with a sense of “­elevation”—an immunity from all powers outside me which I cannot recognize as arising from me and which I therefore cannot recognize as arising from my power. “The will,” Korsgaard tells us, “chooses to act on the moral law for the sake of maintaining its freedom.” Morally speaking, freedom is for the sake of nothing. Free will ceaselessly wills its own freedom. This is the only law of freedom. The one thing freedom is and ought to be willing is itself. Yet if it is right to say that Kant thinks that lawful limits on freedom still have only limitless freedom as their ultimate end, and this “limitation alone is held to be tragic . . . and constitute scandal,” then Levinas’s harshest ethical criticism is in the main correct: In Kantian morality, “the spontaneity of freedom is not called into question.”44 Indeed, the entire edifice of Kantian ethics exists in order to preserve and extend this spontaneity, as if the moral law were, in the end, not a challenge to the will and its power but the most judicious and consistent way of letting it loose.45 Levinas’s comments on this point are atypically harsh. He ties this kind of moral theory to his critique of Heidegger’s primacy of being, and accuses not only Heidegger but Kant of metaphysical and meta-ethical Hobbesianism.46 This objection by Levinas is also affirmed by earlier analysis. For not only does the Kantian claim contradict much of what we know Levinas will eventually say. It also seems an instance of the contradiction we derived, with Levinas’s help, from the standard conception of free will. The upshot of that analysis was that insofar as I wish to be free, I must, so to speak, hold my freedom lightly. I must accept I am, in principle, powerless to ensure I persist as free. All I can do is wield “my” power as though it were not, or were barely, mine. What I can not do is wield it as though I had a right to it. Quite the contrary. My sovereignty over my self hinges on my sovereignty not being secure. And this insecurity of my sovereignty isn’t a failure of my freedom to be genuine, but evidence that genuine sovereignty isn’t securable. Thus, the very common conception that Kant purports to analyze balks at his central ethical claim that the free will “wills its freedom.” The opposite is true. I cannot stay free and will that my freedom be always my own. Being free somehow requires a reluctance to say “mine” of freedom, as if being free begins not in a pride for its powers but “in [a] shame freedom feels for itself.”47 There is one nonactivity definitive of the free being: being willing not to be free. And this willingness has the status of proto-principle. Contra Kant, the one who wills to be free ought not will its own freedom. Contra Korsgaard, the free being ought not identify itself with a freedom forever its own. So what Kant is missing here, in my reading of Levinas’s reading of him, is the deep tie noted earlier—the tie between being free and this perpetual questioning of my right to be so. Kant has, thinks Levinas, missed the fact that “freedom is, in itself, arbitrary,” mere “brutal spontaneity”

Levinas and the Second-Personal Structure of Free Will 151 and is therefore not only not the basis for ethical justifications, but “precisely what is to be justified.”48 Thus, while Kant is right to tie freedom to morality, freedom as the basis for morality is misplaced. The moral good is not an expression or enactment of freedom’s still more primal goodness. And if freedom is not in some way always already good, the moral law is not to be congratulated for setting it free. So the Kantian mis-order of explanation yields ethical failure, the seeds of which we saw in Korsgaard.49 If we begin with an unquestionable firstpersonal consciousness—a consciousness that, as the source of all critical standpoints, cannot be critiqued—and if freedom proceeds from this un-critique-able consciousness, then we end up with a “spontaneous freedom of [an] I” who is “unconcerned with its justification” but should be.

4.  Freedom Inverted We now have at least two problems to work out. The first is the contradiction that still surrounds the idea of freedom as possession—as possibly mine. To this we now add an ethical worry about whether it ought to be. Differently put: To the problem of explaining freedom badly, we now add the badness of the primacy of freedom. But the combination of these two issues—freedom’s possession and its normative primacy—together suggest a way forward. First, given these two worries, we can give a better reading of several of Levinas’s most difficult formulations on the subject. More specifically, we can see why these formulations, though seemingly aimed at a free will somewhat familiar, consistently invert traditional metaphysicians’ most basic characterizations of it. If we keep close to mind his criticism of freedom’s explanatory and ethical primacy, we can see what might motivate Levinas to describe the ability attributed to the free will as a set of inabilities still prior. In countering the notion of “freedom as will” or “freedom as power,” Levinas’s talk of inability is expressed in his preferred term of art: passivity. Applied to freedom, this profoundest passivity has the following content: Insofar as I have whatever powers freedom can give, I “have” them in a special way. For the ability granted by freedom seems inextricably linked to an inability to get it from myself or keep it for my self. Freedom is something which a lone “I” is unable to obtain and impotent to secure.50 Levinas puts this point about freedom and passivity in several more concrete ways. One thing to which I am passive is the inner distance under discussion. What comes first in freedom’s explanation is not a power to take distance, but the presence of the distance to be maintained, closed, or taken. While Levinas rejects freedom as an original power, grip, or “hold” on the self, he reinstitutes it as a distance within it. As seen earlier, this inner “gap” or distance is central to the relation between the freedom to rule over one’s self and the freedom from one’s self, which the former power seems to presuppose. In order to fully rule the self, one must somehow

152  Kevin Houser be separable from the self over which one purports to rule. One needs “a gap,” “space,” “separation,” “distance,” or “difference” from one’s self to be its ruler. We’ve seen this is not a reflective distance.51 So though we don’t yet fully know how to think about it, we know how not to. And we know we cannot (and perhaps ought not) close it. What we do know is what prompts the gap—some kind of basic sociality—and what the gap is between: “the I and itself.” Second, Levinas treats our ability to be free in terms of the inability to be free from a deep form of questioning. In keeping with the first analysis, we cannot, and ought not, close the question “Whose freedom is this?” The importance of this showed up in the discussion of Kant as the need to question “the naïve right” or conatus-like right of way of freedom. To be free is for me to be sufficiently detached from my own being so that I can always question whether I should be this way—to the point that I can consider whether or not I should continue to be. Moreover, I am not merely free and also questioned. To be in question—being-inquestion—is what it is to be free.52 I exist as free subject only as subject to questioning—and my freedom is what is in question. As free, my first position “is a deposition” to which I am always already exposed, which I can neither avoid nor bring to an end.53 Third, what goes for position goes for possession. Just as my position in freedom hinges on a prior deposition, my “ability” to possess freedom hinges on a prior “dis-possess-ability.” I am able to be free only because I am unable to fend off with any finality the question of whether this is—or should be—my freedom. And freedom necessarily fails to be mine. This again matches a feature also discernable in non-Levinasian analyses. The absence of this check in the Kantian case, wherein nothing keeps me from saying of it, mine, adds something important. It suggests that the inability to possess freedom is not merely a negative capability or incapacity, but good. Something is good about the distance between me and my self, which prevents me from willing and fully possessing my freedom. Something is good about my being-in-question, my disposition, my dispossession. My inability is not just a metaphysically regrettable fact. It is not just an unfortunate incapacity. It is an inability that, when weighed against otherwise in-principle unquestionable powers, compares favorably and does so on ethical grounds.54 So far we have the non-primacy of freedom, freedom’s connection to inner distance of the free being from its self, the conversion of the powers and abilities of being free to a set of inabilities, and the sense there is something ethically good about this distance. Now, with a strong sense of what Levinas will not and cannot say, what is his positive account of freedom? Given these guidelines regarding free beings, what is his explanation of what it is to be free? A simplification here may be helpful. We can split the question of being free from the question of being simpliciter. Perhaps moving to a more

Levinas and the Second-Personal Structure of Free Will 153 substantive account of being will provide a better grasp of what it is for free beings to have a distance from whatever being or bits of being appear to be theirs. So: In regard to the kinds of beings about whose freedom we are asking, and setting aside concerns of freedom for a moment: What is it to be?

5.  Disinterest and the Primacy of Being For all his critical intent, whenever Levinas speaks of being, he largely takes up the notion of being found in Heidegger. And Heidegger designates Dasein as a being concerned with its own being. By this, Heidegger does not mean that there are beings who are, and are also, concerned for their being. He doesn’t mean we are beings who all have or possess this concern. The language of possession, which implies an alienation, is insufficiently intimate. Rather, the concern for our own being is constitutive of the mode of existence at issue.55 To be, for Heidegger, just is both to care about one’s being and to be the being cared about. Of course, the same accusation Levinas levies against Kantian freedom can—and is—brought to bear against Heidegger. But the addition of this second error of primacy lends clarity. For Heidegger here offers another relation to “the one-self” that is not based on consciousness but concern.56 Yes, there is still a parallel: just as a primal concern to be free is problematic, there seems to Levinas something equally untoward about a primal concern for the self.57 But with this added primacy in place, it follows that if Heidegger is right about being and Levinas is right about freedom, one thing a free being is free from is this primordial concern for its own being. The free being is marked out as being free from its being. And this freedom from its being now takes concrete form as a primal lack of concern for it. To be free from being of this Heideggarian kind is thus to be free from a driving concern for one’s own being. And this just is freedom from one’s being; for one is no longer driven to enact or express this apparently constitutive or “natural” concern. So while a Heideggarian being that is free in this way may indeed have or possess amongst its many everyday interests a concern for itself, to say of a being of this kind, “That being is free!” is to speak of a mode of existence wherein the usual self-concern, even if present, is not primal.58 Instead of deep care for one’s being acting as the motivational mainspring for free existence, it is instead the absence of this existential self-concern which defines the free being. Taking up this Heideggarian model as the being from which Levinas thinks we are free suggests we rethink the relation between the enumerated features of free beings previously listed. For his use of a conception of being in which a care for, and not consciousness of, one’s being is primal and constitutive (i.e. “primitive”) indicates Levinas does not want us to think of the structural notion of distance and the disinterestedness of

154  Kevin Houser the free being regarding its self and its freedom as two separate features at all. He does not want us to think of a free being as merely free and disinterested in its own being. Rather, he wants us to transpose our usual talk out of the spatial metaphors of metaphysics and into an ethical register.59 He wants us to recognize that talk of “space,” “gap,” or inner play indicates that, at the center of the free being, we find an “ec-centrity” or ex-centricity—i.e., a being that continually fails to place its own being at its center.60 Being free, for Levinas, precisely is this ongoing “failure.”

6.  The Primacy of the Other There already seems something far more astonishing and good than a conscious being regarding itself from a distance: that at the center of a being who is free we find an a priori lack of self-regard. And this has the marks of a constitutive disposition. A free being isn’t a subject who has a particularly admirable and voluntary practice of “being disinterested” or being humble. Rather, where a free being is a distance “between an I and its own being,” a free being—a subject—is structurally made of this withdrawal from asserting its identity, is made of this “humility,” is not a practitioner of actively putting aside its interests, but is “made of disinterestedness.” Such a mood seems to “first hollow out . . . an impossible inward-ness.”61 The free being is an “incessant emptying of its being.”62 Far from being drawn from the interiority and privacy of consciousness, “the interiority of the mental is perhaps originally this.”63 This is, of course, only a negative characterization so far—a characterization we want to keep while hoping to avoid “the void of nonbeing.”64 And we still want a fuller answer to “Whence this distance?” and “What is it filled with or made of?”65 Of course, Levinas is quite clear what, or rather who, provokes in me this distance between me and my interests—what disinters me from them: namely, you do—you as “the Other.” It is being faced by the Other that introduces this “tremor,” “trauma,” “disruption,” “distance,” or “interval” into my being. And what it is to be a being is to live out a perpetual response to this profound and consciousness-founding social interruption. For the Other’s much-discussed impositions are likewise inter-positions. They cut across, and into, individual beings. The Other “introduces into me what was not in me.”66 The Other introduces into me the “not-me”—but introduces more. The model of a first-personal being involves a being not merely alienated—not merely a hybrid of being and not-its-being, full of its self over here and elsewhere empty. The I, for Levinas, is not merely self-occupied and un-occupied by itself. It is preoccupied by an Other’s “presence”—a “presence” from which I cannot get enough distance from to make merely or objectively present to me. The Other— you—do not merely engage in negating or dis-placing but in ­re-placing my self as my primal interest. In this matter of who, in f­reedom, is

Levinas and the Second-Personal Structure of Free Will 155 first—of who, in freedom, has primacy—“the structure of my freedom is completely reversed,” where this reversal is not merely an inversion but “an ­extra-version.”67 In a proper account of the free being, there is a de-positioning or dispossession, wherein “the I loses its first place.”68 Because we are all already confronted by an Other—are always already faced—the free “I” is not, to itself, its “own-most.” It can’t be. For “[t]he I, facing the Other, is freed from itself.”69 The first person is thus marked out by the startling fact that it is “posited from the first as de-posed.” The person in the first-person “standpoint” is dis-positioned in such a way that it is not first to itself. Speaking structurally, the language of gaps and distance “in” a being isn’t quite right. Between my being and my concern for my being, between my self and my interest in me, is not empty. It is only empty of me. You are there. And only a belated explanatory narcissism supposes that where I am not filling the space in me, there must be nothing or no one.

7.  Levinas’s Solution to the Contradiction This may seem to treat freedom in a way that immediately threatens it. It certainly puts our relationship, which Levinas calls “proximity”—a relation where the other is “nearer” to me than I am—on a seemingly delicate basis of non-reciprocal dependency.70 For recall the original problem: We needed, to be free, a distance to prevent us from being driven by, or bound to, “our” nature in such a way that we had nothing to do with whether what counted as our nature was ours. Yet you seem “mine” in just this way. I cannot choose to be rid of you. As Levinas says, I am your “hostage.” And this puts me at a pass: for I cannot afford, qua free being, to be free from you. To actively free myself from the Other seems as impossible as Kant’s notion I can freely establish my own freedom “in a choice not made in time.” For I cannot afford to be free from you if I am freed by you. If, by some radical empathy, it is you disrupting my unchosen constitutive concern for me and interposing or substituting the concern constitutive of you, and if I only gain my freedom through this substitution of being qua concern, then I cannot, in principle, free myself from this concern—which is to say, you. Your unchosen interpositionings within me produce the distance needed to ensure I am not possessed by my nature but am sufficiently alienated to consider it a mere possession. Your “proximity to me” or “presence” within me constitutes my conditions of choice.71 I cannot be done with you, because I can’t be an “I” without you. I only escape the tyranny of spontaneity by your inter-positioning. Were I not deflected from my original position I would, Levinas argues, have no reason to exist reflectively. And only through this heteronomy do I attain autonomy. Given this, even to aspire to take, from you, my distance—to take and keep my distance—would pose problems of metaphysical ingratitude.

156  Kevin Houser Levinas claims there is something like a gratitude—a “metaphysical desire” for another, by any being who is free. As a free being, I cannot be by myself. So “it is not [existentially] good for a man to be alone.” For it is the fact that I am not first to myself—that, with respect to your being and its concern, I place a poor second—which distances me from my self and allows me not to simply act out or ventriloquize an unchosen nature (our original worry) but to leave me and (perhaps) freely return. The possibility of “somewhere within” to go where I am not is what permits me to be my “own” person—a point Levinas insist upon all the way back to On Escape. To possess my self requires I am freed of myself—am, from my self, alienable. Hence, my ability to be me freely rests on an inalienable relation to you. The condition for possession, he says, in another dramatic turn of phrase, is “obsession.” So my loss is also my gain. My identity is not an inevitability, but a free association. And if my very powers of self-possession and selfhood run through your proximity, I also am not a self “soon enough” to cast you aside through an act of conscious will.72 In this way, we see playing out, in a different and thoroughly interpersonal space, the paradox of possession seen earlier.73 There was something that prevented me from clutching my freedom for myself, such that, if I did get to it, I would somehow “get too close to it” and lose it. Seen from the first person, I had to maintain, for reasons that then were not conceptually clear, this astounding balancing act of being and being in question, of abilities and inabilities, of activity and passivity—all as though my freedom were something that was mine but I could not have. But the problem wasn’t with this basic conception of the paradox at all. That part, Levinas thinks—the part about possession—was right. The paradox of freedom as mine was posed correctly. What was wrong was to begin with it as mine, or as a feature of my consciousness, as though my power were not instead an ongoing empowerment, made possible by a pre-reflective sociality. The under-defended “traditional” methodology precluded that my freedom had a source other than itself or its owner. It precluded what theists rightly insisted: the idea that my freedom was given to me. It was the over-meager solipsist’s set of explanatory resources I was allowed that tempted me to either abandon the concept or warp it beyond recognition in the name of saving it. So it is not freedom but individualist presumptions about the proper range of the predicate “free” that is the problem. Just as Korsgaard was forced to make her first-personal consciousness work overtime to do the work of two, the explanatory burden upon my freedom, put upon it when it is treated as though it were a property of mine, made it look like no one could “have” such a property. Here, however, we can see, through the division of labor an ethical metaphysics of freedom allows, why the analysis failed. I did not and do not have freedom. But this doesn’t mean I am not freed, nor that I can’t be freely.

Levinas and the Second-Personal Structure of Free Will 157 What we have, then, is a second-personal story of the freedom of a first-personal being, though with a caveat about “person.” For if this is right, Levinas isn’t describing intersubjectivity, but a social structure that produces the subject via this extraordinary “inter.” He describes a circulating sociality wherein the borders between the I and the Other are always maintained but constantly shifting—a relation sustained “without this distance destroying this relation, and without this relation destroying this distance.”74 The drive to try to yank the story one way or the other— i.e. either to abolish the inwardness of persons, or to treat this as already inter-personal isn’t right. For the foregoing sections show how and why “to say that subjectivity begins in the person, that the person begins in freedom . . . is to blind oneself to the secret of the self.”75

8.  The Loving Will In lieu of a concluding summary, I’ll propose and briefly explore a broad interpretive model for Levinasian freedom: the loving will. My aims in offering it are to provide a means of resituating discussions of personal freedom so as to avoid some of the problems just discussed, to further intertwine the problem of the free I and the free will, and to make more intuitively available the as-yet-largely-untapped explanatory resources Levinas offers on this subject. Closing this way will also allow me to gesture at some of these resources that, for reasons of space, the foregoing discussion touched on either too lightly or not at all.76 This will also close out the ethical reduction aspired to on the first few pages by connecting this analysis of the liberating sociality of Levinas’s ethics to more concrete and familiar phenomena. Suppose I am in love—I am in love. Keeping the explanatory point of the exercise in mind: What is being, in love, like? Where does willing and being willing fit into it? And in what way might the answers to these questions help orient Levinas’s often-difficult discussions of this relation between ethics, freedom, and being? To start simply: Love is a call. I am called out by love toward another and away from my constitutive self-concern. Yet this estrangement within me from me is not by itself important to me.77 It isn’t merely negative—isn’t sensed as an emptiness.78 I am decentered. I am no longer the center of my self. But this decentering, too, is not, first, negatively registered. My disposition and dispossession bring not a sudden absence but an inner fullness. And love’s eccentricities are expressions of my own ex-centricity, a loss I in no way regret.79 This call away from my self is also undergone as a call to myself—as if what it was to be me was to respond to this call. And this enhanced sense of me, which arises at the very moment the I and its proudest possessives are most in abeyance, arises then because the call is second-personal. I am called out, “carved” out, and summoned to a singularity I could

158  Kevin Houser not give myself. The lover demands I come forth. And from out of being or nature—the background with which I would otherwise forever be fused—I step out, like a statue beckoned by the artist from the stone. But what about this step? What about will? When I step out, am I freely willing? And what happens to the freedom of my will after I step? The Levinasian picture we have been considering turns this around. Levinas’s questions encourage a prior worry about the I that never steps. For the I who never steps out from itself has none of the distance from itself so vital to what it is to be an I at all. It has no relief from being—and so is neither an I nor free. The two go together. Were I not to step, my existential self-concern, built into mere being, remains unbroken.80 I am still stuck in the stone. But if I do step out and so am distanced from my self, the chain of custody of my primal, unchosen self-concern is broken. I am no longer bound to express myself—a distancing of me from my being which was the key requirement of willing freely, even on the asocial model with which we began.81 And even if later I respond to my self, I do so “across” or “through” you. Even if I make the journey back to “the dear self,” I do so only as an indirect response to an earlier call from someone dearer and nearer. Suppose now, under these conditions of circulating and intermixed concern, I act. Which of us willed? Who was willing? Whose constitutive concern or power was expressed through me? Whose will? In the context of love, such questions aren’t just hard to answer. They should be. When all is well in love, they are even hard to ask.82 The beloved questions my self-possession and, in this sense, “calls into question possession itself.” But by calling me out, the beloved also continually creates the condition for the very distance from my self which constitutes the structure of my will.83 And this condition for my freely willing does not appear as a constraint upon it.84 That the first person and its freedom consist of this being second to oneself: this is Levinas’s essential point about the ethical structure of freedom. He sees, as the very structure of the free I, not a pre-individuated primordial consciousness, capacity, or ability eager to assert itself, but an après vous that opens up an inner architecture so original, intimate, and altruistic, that we cannot ask—and do not care to ask—whether it is my will “or thine” which is done.85

Notes 1. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 206; Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 58. 2. Robert Bernasconi, “What Is the Question to Which ‘Substitution’ Is the Answer?” in Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. Simon Critchley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Levinas and the Second-Personal Structure of Free Will 159 3. Many purport to deny this incompatibilist formulation (that if we aren’t free we aren’t responsible). But most belie their denials by “elbow-room responses”—i.e., by claiming we need a lot less freedom than we thought to be responsible. And such endless re-weightings of each end of the conditional isn’t to reject it but affirm it. Debates here also stall out quickly, since by the time the compatibilist is done clarifying the incompatibilist’s ostensive meanings with infinite intellectual good will (clarifications of the form “If by ‘free’ you mean what you clearly do not mean”), the incompatibilist no longer recognizes the revised meanings of “freedom” and “responsibility” as theirs. 4. Though he sometimes speaks of will separately, when speaking of freedom, Levinas does not systematically treat “freedom” and “free will” as fundamentally separate ideas. So I will use them interchangeably at first, offering a basic distinction between them by chapter’s end. I will use “moral” and “ethical” interchangeably throughout. 5. Levinas does make a distinction between “self” and “I.” Nevertheless, I’ll here take liberties with the distinction for strategic reasons—to avoid limiting the usage to his own too soon. As to “too soon”: I want to avoid the fate of a discouraging amount of secondary literature, which begins by adapting the distinctions Levinas makes due to his commitment to an ethical metaphysics—and so fails to demonstrate the independent explanatory merits of moving traditional explanatory language in an ethical direction. 6. Levinas’s conceptions of freedom of the subject and freedom of will are distinct. But it is a mistake to suppose that, in his view or in what I am calling the common conception, the freedom of the latter does not hinge upon the freedom of the former. The relation between these two notions will become clearer as the discussion proceeds. 7. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 70. In a much later (1984) essay, “Ethics as First Philosophy,” Levinas is still noting the “strange and contradictory concept of a finite freedom.” Levinas Reader, 77. 8. “Man as man would have the right to an exceptional place in being . . . one that was exterior to the determinism of phenomena . . .” Free will consists in “[t]he right to a position protected from the immediate order of necessities inscribed in the natural laws that command inert objects, living things, and thinking beings of Nature.” (Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous Thinkingof-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav [New York: Columbia University Press, 1998], 156.) 9. In a number of these citations, Levinas is not speaking of freedom directly. He takes note of this dislocation, space, or distance, not as a feature of freedom, but as a result of moral responsibility, with which we are confronted in a relation with others he calls facing. I’ve truncated these quotes to focus on the manifestation or “effect” of moral responsibility—one of which is freedom. So the abbreviations are not censoring Levinas but drawing out the suspense in his story—a story which, in his essays especially, he tends to tell in a rush. 10. Levinas, Levinas Reader, 238. 11. Ibid., 239. 12. Ibid., 231, emphasis mine. 13. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 209. 14. How separate and additional these two natures are varies depending on specifics of the view being addressed. Here the Kantian will differ from the Heideggarian. But Levinas’s account acknowledges and addresses at length what he takes to be the commitments of both.

160  Kevin Houser 15. This will later be tied to responsibility. “It’s a lion—that’s what it does” won’t work in the same exculpatory way as “It’s just Kevin—that’s what he does.” 16. The latent power to produce a new or second nature finds its most extreme expression in conversion, initiated by a repulsion by the self for the self. (A hitman becomes a priest or vice versa.) For this reason, “It’s my nature” or “That’s just who I am” isn’t exculpatory. Appeals to my nature as something fixed most often function not as an explanation but as an excuse. In the use of such phrases, I seem to be identifying myself, at the very moment I should be taking my distance—i.e., should be refusing to identify with my self. 17. Robert Kane calls these “SFAs”: self-forming actions. He also sometimes calls these “torn decisions”—though the decision does the tearing, and it is the decider who is torn. The Significance of Free Will, Oxford University Press, 2003. 18. To keep things intelligible and not jump the gun, I will not adhere to Levinas’s eventual uses of I, self, and ego, until Levinas’s full outlook is laid out. The key distinction here is that between le soi and le moi—between the self and the ego. (See Bernasconi, 2002) 19. Borrowing Barbara Herman’s distinction. There is a second contradiction that appears in Levinas’s criticisms of Heidegger—a contradiction in the free will. But there is insufficient space to discuss it. 20. Or confused with it—a point to which, as we will see, Levinas repeatedly returns. 21. For instance, Levinas, Entre Nous, 50. 22. Levinas, Levinas Reader, 231. 23. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 302. 24. Levinas takes views like Korsgaard’s to be the default view of “Western philosophy.” “The reduction of subjectivity to consciousness dominates philosophical thought.” Emmanuel Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 83. 25. Levinas often warns us of philosophy’s casual supposition about its epistemic starting point. “Being-at-a-distance of what is contemplated” is “easily take[n] as a model of disinterestedness” but shouldn’t be. Levinas, Entre Nous, 60. This is part of the program to disentangle “objectivity and transcendence”—the distinction between which in Totality and Infinity he calls “a general guideline for all the analyses of this work.” Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 49. 26. Steven Crowell, “Sorge or Selbstbewußtsein? Heidegger and Korsgaard on the Sources of Normativity,” European Journal of Philosophy 15, no. 3 (2007): 315–33. 27. Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 92. 28. Ibid., 97, emphasis added. 29. Ibid., 167–88, 257–58. 30. What drives her to this difficult position is her insistence that the space of reflection and the capacity to reflect are insufficient by themselves to issue or institute moral critique. For in order to attach moral critique to Cohen’s family-loyal felon, the felon must do something: he has to reflectively endorse that such a critique of him is from him. Only then is it properly his. But, as she notes, he may never be sufficiently reflective. What then? Korsgaard’s answer is that the Mafioso does not escape moral critique because the power to reflect itself arrives with a mandate more primal still: that one ought to

Levinas and the Second-Personal Structure of Free Will 161 continually reflect. This imperative arises from “the activity of reflection” itself, which “has its own rules” (257). What Korsgaard is fishing for here is a source of normative critique which, while itself not yet moral, will enable the Mafioso to be subject to moral criticism for failing in his obligations. From the bare capacity to reflect (in the right way) arises a command to continue to do so, until the proper stopping point is reached. 31. I am here trying to keep reason out of it—though I’ve dealt with Levinas’s views on distance, reason, and reasons at length in Kevin Houser, “Levinas and Analytic Philosophy: An Ethical Metaphysics of Reasons,” in The Oxford Handbook of Levinas, ed. Michael Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 32. Helpful to distinguish here is the “must” of constitution and the “must” of command. Being reflective “requires” distance as a definitional matter, just as to be a bachelor one “must” be male. But one gets no requirement issued from reflection to take reflective distance, any more than one gets, as a bachelor, a mandate to be male. The question isn’t whether Korsgaard’s account tends to elide this distinction. It does. The question is whether it needs to. 33. Levinas sees that the distance has to always already be taken in order for us to be aware of it. He inverts the order of the consciousness of the distance with the distance required for consciousness by his citation of the biblical inversion of the soul’s original response to God, reading Exodus 24:7 as “We will do and then we will hear.” 34. A typical passage of this kind: “The acting self concedes to the thinking self its right to government. And the thinking self in turn, tries to govern as well it can. So the reflective structure of human consciousness establishes a relation here, a relation which we have to ourselves. And it is a relation not of mere power but of authority. And that is the authority that is the source of obligation.” Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, 104. The distance that concerns Levinas is, as we will see, indifferent to the distinction upon which Korsgaard hangs so much: that between thinking and acting, the theoretical versus the practical. The distance necessary for both is the same in both cases. “The famous suspension of action . . . said to make theory possible depends upon a reserve of freedom which does not abandon itself to its drives, which . . . keeps its distances.” But the same sort of inner distance is required for, and presupposed by, disinterested thought. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 82. 35. Full quote: “All duties are grounded in duties to the self. Yet duties to the self are only intelligible if there are two aspects to the self . . . [D]uties must arise within me, rather than between two; and yet for them to arise that one must be two. The idea of the reflective character of human consciousness, together with the thesis that obligation springs from [within], explains why it has to be this way.” Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, 104, footnote 16). 36. Other miscellanea are also suggestive and recommend against starting with consciousness. Michael Morgan cites a telling passage in which she says there is no good reason to suppose “a Kingdom of Ends” could not be “a Kingdom of two.” 37. Levinas would say that what stalls out most “second-personal” material in analytic philosophy is that the answer given to this question is “Yes.” Of this second-person-research-stalling “yes,” Darwall is a paradigm case. Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 38. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 84, 86, 303.

162  Kevin Houser 39. Levinas, Entre Nous, 142; Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 84. On this question, Kant famously punts. It is only traceable to itself—to “a choice not made in time.” 40. I here exposit what I take to be Levinas at his toughest, with respect to Kant. My point is not to insist Levinas’s criticism is right on all points, but to be right about Levinas’s criticism. 41. Again: even in discussing Kant, I am not here distinguishing between variants of “ethics” and “morals.” 42. Korsgaard writes of this in Sources (158–60), noting the lineage of freedom traces back to “a will to power.” 43. This is why “the freedom of the I is neither the arbitrariness of an isolated being nor the conformity of an isolated being with a rational and universal law incumbent upon all.” Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 252. 44. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 83. 45. Even if, due to Reason, “freedom does not resemble the capricious spontaneity of a [more raw or original] free will” this does not impress Levinas, since the fact remains that “in the last analysis . . . sovereign reason . . . [is] the manifestation of a freedom” such that “nothing other limits it” (Totality and Infinity, 43). 46. Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 57. 47. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 86. 48. Ibid., 84. 49. Is this explanatory primacy? Kant says in Critique of Practical Reason that “how this consciousness of freedom is possible cannot be further explained.” But the point Levinas repeatedly makes is that this is to mis-situate not only freedom but consciousness. Consciousness of freedom and self is already bound up with the very distance which is the core of Levinas’s ethical explanation of freedom. So Kant’s starting with freedom as a necessary posit of practical conscious misses the liberating distance that consciousness presupposes. 50. Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, 55. 51. Levinas, Entre Nous, 60. 52. As Levinas, re-tasking Heidegger’s hyphens, puts it, free beings are not beings who are, and also are in question. Rather, being-in-question is fundamental and foundational to what it is to exist freely. Being-in-question is the mode of existence (or more carefully, the persistence) of free beings. For instance, Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, 82. 53. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Springer, 1991), 127. 54. “The [primacy of the] ethical relation [is] opposed to [ontology], which identifies freedom and power.” Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 47. 55. “The persisting in being [is] interestedness.” Beings are “a persistence in essence, filling up every interval . . . that would interrupt its exercise.” Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, 111. 56. Crowell, “Sorge or Selbstbewußtsein?” 57. The closeness and distance between his comments on Kant and Heidegger vary in this context. He recognizes they have different notions of freedom. But he sometimes generalizes the notion of freedom, such that he sees no ethically relevant daylight between them. Both “maintain the autarchy of an I . . . despite every relation with an other.” Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 45–46.) 58. For Heidegger, when things are present, our relation to them is no longer “primal.”

Levinas and the Second-Personal Structure of Free Will 163 59. Levinas ties the other features noted to disinterestedness explicitly: “[T]he de-posing or de-situating of the ego, is the very modality of dis-interestedness.” Levinas, Entre Nous, 50. 60. “[T]he essence of being as ec-centricity.” Levinas, Levinas Reader, 244. 61. Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, 74.; Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 149. 62. Ibid., 91. 63. Levinas, Entre Nous, 143. 64. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 87. 65. Levinas asks rhetorically of this distance, “Does it come from a being filled with concern for its own being?” Levinas, Levinas Reader, 239. 66. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 203. Or more abstractly: “the Other in the same.” 67. Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 55, 169. 68. Levinas, Entre Nous, 144. 69. Ibid., 87. 70. “[T]he way the other disturbs me—that is, is close to me.” Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 168. “Proximity is not a consciousness of proximity . . . [but] an event that strips consciousness of its initiative, that undoes me and puts me before an Other.” Levinas, Entre Nous, 59. Also: I’ve tried not to rely too heavily in this essay on the notion of responsibility-for. But “the proximity of a neighbor is my responsibility for him.” Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 168. I go into this in great detail elsewhere. (Kevin Houser, “Facing the Space of Reasons,” Levinas Studies 11 (2017)). 71. Levinas avoids standing structure talk as “reification”—“Western” philosophy’s besetting sin. Here he speaks of the ethical relation operating to free us as “metaphysical movement”—a movement that is a dynamic relation that nevertheless reliably persists (e.g., Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 35, 89, 196). 72. Levinas often transposes spatial distances into temporal ones. Levinas’s notion of diachrony is here hard at work. 73. Another possible metaphor: I am only properly re-bound to my being and my freedom after the chain of custody is broken. 74. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 41. 75. Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, 94. 76. Informing this suggestion are Levinas’s notions of freedom in question, investiture, ordination, election, and substitution. I am also going to speak hyperbolically here, in part in deference to Levinas’s habit of doing so, in part because I think, as he does, that exaggeration/oversizing is helpful in bringing key and fundamental features to the fore. 77. The more importance it has, the less love I am “in.” 78. Unless the lover suddenly withdraws. Then “emptied” is exactly right. 79. I am drawing (again) from Levinas, Levinas Reader, 244. 80. “Richard loves Richard./That is, I am I.” 81. The discussion here hasn’t extended to the third party excluded by such second-personal love. But the impact of the third party is as another secondpersonal relation. “The difference that opens between the ego and itself, the non-coincidence of the identical, is a fundamental non-indifference to men.” Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 149. 82. Perhaps the presence of the question “Whose will is this?” is like the presence of the hammer in Heidegger or constant talk about a relationship in a relationship: a failure of the un- or -pre-conscious competence of the lovers. 83. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 163, 173.

164  Kevin Houser 84. Even perception seems shorn “shorn of its egoism.” I do not see for myself what the lover sees, I see for the lover—or maybe from them. (“Ethics is an optics.”) 85. “The other does not limit [my] . . . freedom,” but “calling it to responsibility, it founds and grounds it.” Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 197. The Other is “an interruption or rupture of the perseverance of beings in their being, of the conatus essendi.” Yet it generates “the dis-inter-estedness of goodness . . . indicat[ing] the absolute of the social, the for-the-other which is probably the very delineation of the human.” Levinas, Entre Nous, 158.

References Bernasconi, Robert. “What Is the Question to Which ‘Substitution’ Is the Answer?” In The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, chapter 11, edited by Simon Critchley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Crowell, Steven. “The Existential Sources of Normativity.” In Normativity and Phenomenology, chapter 11, 239–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. ———. “Sorge or Selbstbewußtsein? Heidegger and Korsgaard on the Sources of Normativity.” European Journal of Philosophy 15, no. 3 (2007): 315–33. Darwall, Stephen. The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Heidegger, Martin, John Macquarrie, and Edward Robinson. Being and time. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1962. Houser, Kevin. “Facing the Space of Reasons.” Levinas Studies 11 (2017): 121–48. ———. “Levinas and Analytic Philosophy: An Ethical Metaphysics of Reasons.” In The Oxford Handbook of Levinas, edited by Michael Morgan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Kane, Robert. The Significance of Free Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Kant, Immanuel, and Lewis White Beck. Critique of Practical Reason. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1956. Kant, Immanuel, and Mary J. Gregor. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Korsgaard, Christine. “The Activity of Reason.” Presidential Address Delivered Before the One Hundred Fifth Annual Eastern Division Meeting of The American Philosophical Association in Philadelphia, PA. Delivered 29 December 2008. ———. “Morality as Freedom.” In Creating the Kingdom of Ends, chapter 6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. ———. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Levinas, Emmanuel. Basic Philosophical Writings. Edited by Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. ———. Collected Philosophical Papers. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998.

Levinas and the Second-Personal Structure of Free Will 165 ———. Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other. Translated by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. ———. The Levinas Reader. Edited by Sean Hand. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. ———. Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981. ———. Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998. ———. Totality and Infinity. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Michael L. Morgan. Discovering Levinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Wallace, R. J. Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.

8 Personal Knowledge Sophie-Grace Chappell

Personal Knowledge1 [A]ll mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another . . . No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. (John Donne, Meditations XVII) This speaking to the Other—this relation with the Other as interlocutor, this relation with an existent—precedes all ontology; it is the ultimate relation in Being. Ontology presupposes metaphysics. (Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et Infini 39, French edition; my own translation) No sane person can take seriously the suggestion that our knowledge of other minds is merely hypothetical. However weak our evidence that others have minds may be, it is plainly outrageous to suggest that we might, for this reason, give up our commitment to the minds of others . . . Our commitment to other minds is, I would like to propose, not really a theoretical commitment at all. We don’t come to learn that others think and feel as we do, in the way that we come to learn, say, that you can’t trust advertising. Our commitment to the minds of others is, rather, a presupposition of our life together. In this respect the young child, in her relation to the caretaker, is really the paradigm . . . the child has no theoretical distance from her closest caretaker. The child does not wonder whether Mummy is animate. Mummy’s living consciousness is simply present, for the child, like her warmth

Personal Knowledge 167 or the air; it is, in part, what animates their relationship. Mummy’s mind and Baby’s mind come to be in the coochy-cooing directness that each sustains towards the other. If one wants to speak of a commitment to the alive consciousness of others here, one should speak not of a cognitive commitment but, rather, of a practical commitment. (Alva Noe, Out of our Heads 32–33)

I Donne says “No man is an island”; I’ll argue that no human starts out an island. Each of us at least begins as a piece of the continent, a part of the main. Insofar as we ever come to be anything like “entire of ourselves,” this is a learned and socialized achievement, an achievement, moreover, that is necessarily built upon our prior status as parts of the main. In a slogan, individuality presupposes relationality. The theme is Levinasian, but the tradition from which it emerges goes back well beyond Levinas’s work. This chapter explores not only Levinas but also his predecessors in that tradition. A venerable and remarkably persistent tradition in philosophical anthropology, dating back at least to the 17th century and still going strong today, has things the other way around: relationality presupposes individuality. This tradition says that each human is an island, at least to start with, and that it is only later (if at all) that we learn to build bridges to other islands. This tradition takes individuals to be prior both in the order of analysis and in the order of genesis, whereas relations are subsequent engagements entered into, or not, by these already-existing individuals. This is the view I oppose. We can call it individualism about persons. The view with which I want to replace it, which I have just described in the first paragraph, we can call relationalism about persons. What kind of theses are individualism and relationalism about persons? What kind of arguments will I be offering for the latter and against the former? One way to go is suggested by Alva Noe: it is to treat them as psychological theses and to report some relevant findings in psychology, especially developmental psychology—of which there are rather a lot. One classic text in this area is Kenneth Kaye’s in The Mental and Social Life of Babies: How Parents Create Persons. Kaye writes, for example, It surely is a miracle that the kind of creature a man and a woman can bring into the world by purely biological processes becomes (eventually) the kind of creature that possesses a mind and a sense of self, an unsurpassed intelligence and a sense of identity in relation to society . . . The evolution of the human brain alone could not have brought about mind. Symbolic representation, language, and thought could not emerge in any species, and would not develop in

168  Sophie-Grace Chappell any individual, without a special kind of fit between adult behaviour and infant behaviour . . . the argument places social processes at the very root of mental development. (Kaye, The Mental and Social Life of Babies 3) And again, later, The human infant is born social in the sense that his development will depend from the beginning upon patterns of interaction with elders. He does not enter into that interaction as an individual partner, as both the views just mentioned hold . . . infants only become individual partners gradually, as a result of those interactions. (Kaye, The Mental and Social Life of Babies 29) The way of developmental psychology is a perfectly good way of arguing for relationalism about persons. Many contemporary philosophers of mind are likely to think it is the only way. I dispute this. Or, at any rate, philosophers of mind may think the way of developmental psychology is the best way. Maybe it is, but even so, it isn’t what I’ll do here, though perhaps what I will do can be seen as corroboration of Kaye’s views from another source. As well as being theses in psychology, it is also obvious that individualism and relationalism about persons are theses in the philosophy of mind, where, roughly speaking, individualism is the view that follows naturally if you believe that the brain is identical to or constitutive of the mind, while relationalism about persons has a lot more appeal if you deny the mind-brain identity thesis. Suppose that, like me, you endorse the plainly relationalist thesis that mindedness broadly depends, at least typically, on intentional or quasi-intentional interactions among groups of individual creatures, whereas brainedness depends on some one individual creature’s combining the right genetic heritage with the right nutrients, the right environment, and the right stimuli. Then you should conclude that the conditions for having a mind and for having a brain are different, which in itself is a proof that it cannot be a truth, or at any rate not an a priori truth, that brains are identical to minds. Moreover, brains and minds are very different, which grounds a presumption that there can’t be a constitution relation between brain and mind either. In another sense, individualism and relationalism about persons appear to be theses in metaphysics, and that appearance is not completely misleading: individualism and relationalism are certainly views about what persons are. However, the case I want to make for relationalism and against individualism does not deploy the kinds of arguments most commonly found today in what we might call “pure” metaphysics—a priori deduction, inference to the best explanation and/or the simplest/ most systematic overall theory, indispensability-to-causal-explanation

Personal Knowledge 169 arguments, figuring-in-laws-of-nature arguments, and the like. Rather my argument is, broadly speaking, phenomenological (hence, a posteriori2). It is about how we experience persons, what it is like to be a person or related to persons, the place in our life-world of the notion of a person. As usual in phenomenology, a description of experience will be offered, and also as usual, the key test of this description of experience will not be whether it faces logical objections—though it had better not, of course—but whether the description rings true to experience: true to our own actual experience or true to experiences we can see as possible for us and aspire perhaps to actually have some day or true to experiences that many of the greatest explorers of these dark domains have reported or all three. Moreover, if there turns out to be some sense in which this experiential or “applied” metaphysics is at odds with “pure metaphysics,” that doesn’t bother me much.3 I’m not interested, here, in what persons are “in themselves”; I’m interested in what persons are in our common life. If there turns out to be some account of “what persons are in themselves,” e.g., a reductionist one, that conflicts with “what persons are in our common life,” for my purposes that doesn’t matter. My concern is how the experiential metaphysics goes. If the pure metaphysics goes a different way, so be it. Admittedly, I probably wouldn’t say that unless I was also pretty confident that there is no such pure metaphysics of the person. To some extent this confidence rests upon my wider tendency towards Wittgensteinian scepticism quite generally about the kind of an-sich claims that pure metaphysics tends to go in for. I know what it is to be a chess piece in a chess game, and I know what it is to be a carved piece of wood in carpentry, and I know what it is to be a carbon-based organic compound in chemistry. I’m not entirely sure I know what it is for anything to be anything in itself and aside from all contexts, which, all too often, seems to be what pure metaphysics is after. Whether or not this scepticism stands up elsewhere, it looks convincing in the case of persons. It seems that, apart from “what persons are in our common life,” there isn’t anything that “persons are in themselves.” As Nick Zangwill has been stressing in recent work, philosophers are too quick to assume that, in every debate alike, whether chemical or botanical or psychological, they are looking for the same kind of kinds—usually, something like Kripke-style natural kinds. But there is no good reason to think that the kind persons is that kind of kind. And so, aside from the social (dare I say “forensick”?) role of the notion of a person, the quest for the essence of personhood in the abstract seems to be an empty quest built around a meaningless question. In a sense, that is exactly my point here. Here we come to a third important aspect of individualism and relationalism about persons, the sense in which both are, crucially, ethical theses: theses about how we make sense of ourselves and should make

170  Sophie-Grace Chappell sense of ourselves, about how we relate to each other and should relate to each other. More about that later.

II First, here’s a bit from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Many many millions of years ago a race of hyperintelligent pandimensional beings (whose physical manifestation in their own pandimensional universe is not dissimilar to our own) got so fed up with the constant bickering about the meaning of life which used to interrupt their favourite pastime of Brockian Ultra Cricket (a curious game which involved suddenly hitting people for no readily apparent reason and then running away) that they decided to sit down and solve their problems once and for all. And to this end they built themselves a stupendous super-computer [Deep Thought] which was so amazingly intelligent that even before the data banks had been connected up it had started from “I think therefore I am” and got as far as the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to turn it off. (Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (London: Pan 1979), 125–126) Deep Thought represents a power fantasy of individualism about persons (and also of rationalism). The fantasy is that one mind all on its own, if it is clever enough, can build an understanding of the world out of nothing but its own contents, by sheer deductive horsepower—a priori and in advance of access to any data. The cleverer you are, according to this fantasy, the better you will be at this kind of deductive work: the further you will get beyond your own head and out into the world around you. In this picture, this is what cleverness is. What the tale of Deep Thought expresses—or more likely satirizes—is what I call individualism about persons, taken to the nth degree. Satire or not, it is no accident that Douglas Adams has Deep Thought start his intellectual odyssey by performing the cogito. For the picture just sketched is, in an obvious way, Cartesian. According to one standard summary, Descartes’s view is a paradigm of individualism about persons. In that summary, his view is that if we leave aside groundless and unreliable prejudice—as he proposes to—then what reason teaches us is that each of us starts, like Deep Thought, in the solipsistic predicament. Emerging from that predicament into a (rationally vindicated) shared world is, in this Cartesian view, an achievement of reason. Each of us is an individual and a reasoner before she ever reaches that shared world, and she only does reach it because she is an individual and a reasoner.

Personal Knowledge 171 Getting beyond our own heads is a feat of inference, deduction, interpretation: in short, it is detective work. Of course we get better at this detective work the more we practise it. But unless we had a basic capability for such detection wired into us from the beginning—a capacity that, as I say, we can just call intelligence—we could not get started at all. This then is the Cartesian view—which, as we shall see, need not mean quite the same thing as “Descartes’s view.” Hence, it causes some surprise that, when Wittgenstein wants to attack the individualist picture of the mind in the Philosophical Investigations and specifically—at least at first—the part of that picture that has to do with language, the author whom he quotes is not Descartes but Augustine. Here is what Wittgenstein says in Philosophical Investigations about the quotation that he uses: These words, it seems to me, give us a particular picture of the essence of language. It is this: the individual words in language name objects—sentences are combinations of such names.—In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands. Augustine does not speak of there being any difference between kinds of word. If you describe the learning of language in [his] way you are, I believe, thinking primarily of nouns like “table,” “chair,” “loaf,” and of people’s names, and only secondarily of the names of certain actions and properties; and of the remaining kinds of word as something that will take care of itself. (Wittgenstein 1953: I, 1) The picture that Wittgenstein is drawing out of Augustine is simply the application to the case of language of individualism about the mind. In this picture, a baby learns its own first language by, in effect, playing charades with its carers: the adults say a word; the baby has to guess what the word means from the context. No doubt the cleverer the baby, the better it will be at making such guesses; presumably a baby with the intelligence of Deep Thought would be phenomenally good at this game, whereas other, more ordinary babies will be rather slower. The words in question are, as Wittgenstein stresses, primarily nouns, and within the class of nouns, they are primarily the names of concrete particulars, such as people and the other physical objects salient to the baby. It is, as he says, an obvious flaw of this picture that it offers no account of how other words than nouns might be learned by the baby in the guessing game. This then is the individualist picture of language-learning, and hence of mind more broadly, that Wittgenstein is attacking. Is it the picture that

172  Sophie-Grace Chappell Augustine is defending? The quotation from which Wittgenstein draws the picture he wants to attack is from Confessions I, 8: When they named anything, and when at that name they moved their bodies toward that thing, I observed it and gathered thereby, that that word which they then pronounced, was the very name of the thing that they showed me. And that they meant this or that thing, was discovered to me by the motion of their bodies, even by that natural language, as it were, of all nations; which expressed by the countenance and cast of the eye, by the action of other parts, and the sound of the voice, discovers the affections of the mind, either to desire, enjoy, refuse, or to avoid anything. And thus words in diverse sentences, set in their due places, and heard often over, I by little and little collected, of what things they were the signs, and having broken my mouth to the pronunciation of them, I by them expressed mine own purposes.4 Certainly the first sentence of this passage says that the infant Augustine learned to correlate nouns with things by observing how adults correlated nouns with things. Does that mean that Augustine is committed here to the “particular picture of the essence of language” that Wittgenstein wants to attack, on which meaning just is thing/noun correlation, and language-learning is the detection of such correlations, that picture being, as I’ve said, the one which emerges naturally from a wider and more general individualism about mind and persons? It does not, and Wittgenstein does not say that it does. To see that, just read the rest of Wittgenstein’s Augustine quotation, after its first sentence. The second sentence is about how we come to understand others’ meanings (and their intentions—the same Latin word, velle, covers both) by seeing and understanding, not just the noun-thing correlations that they go in for, but the whole set of their bodies, the whole bodily demeanor behind these correlations, which constitutes what Augustine calls a kind of “natural language of all nations.” Or, as Wittgenstein might have expressed it, “the human body is the best picture of the human soul” (PI 1912 II, iv). And the third sentence is about how habituation into any language, or indeed into any large-scale form of human life, is not granularly bit by bit or stepwise, but a holistically cumulative process. Or, as Wittgenstein might have said, “the light dawns gradually over the whole landscape” (OC 1969 141). Overall, this Augustine quotation is strikingly Wittgensteinian. If Wittgenstein’s purpose is an all-out attack on Cartesian individualism, this quotation does not serve. Perhaps what Wittgenstein is doing here is not so much setting up Augustine in order to knock him down as displaying Augustine’s account as one that is generally interesting and plausible even though it includes, or suggests, the commitments that Wittgenstein thinks most need

Personal Knowledge 173 questioning—the threads in Augustine’s thought that he wants to tease apart from other and more promising lines. A surmise perhaps confirmed by the witness of Norman Malcolm: He revered the writings of Augustine. He told me he decided to begin his Investigations with a quotation from the latter’s Confessions, not because he could not find the conception expressed in that quotation stated as well by other philosophers, but because the conception must be important if so great a mind held it.5 Evidently Wittgenstein’s attitude to Augustine was not that of the patient and somewhat patronizing correction of gross and benighted error. The more we look beyond Wittgenstein’s Augustine quotation to its context in Book One of the Confessions, the more it is bound to strike us that on balance Augustine is far more of an ally to Wittgenstein than a target. Fergus Kerr6 draws our attention, for instance, to the sentence immediately before the passage that Wittgenstein quotes, where Augustine says that his elders did not teach him words “in a particular order of teaching, as a little later they did with the letters.” These words show that Augustine recognizes that we are drawn into the linguistic practices of our species in various ways, not just one. We may learn our letters by being drilled in the correlation of given sounds with written shapes. It doesn’t follow that we learn anything else that way. (Perhaps we learn the numerals rather similarly, though the differences are as interesting as the commonalities.) In particular, and pace the lesson that Wittgenstein says he wants to draw from his quotation, Augustine expressly denies that we learn the names of things just by being drilled in thing/noun correlations. Rather, Augustine’s story about how we learn the names of things gives a crucial role—a role that is not apparent from Wittgenstein’s quotation— to desire. Here is the rest of the Confessions I,8 sentence immediately before Wittgenstein’s quotation: My elders did not teach me words in a particular order of teaching, as a little later they did with the letters; rather I myself, by the mind that you gave me, my God, with cries and various noises and various motions of my limbs tried to express the feelings of my heart, so that my will might be complied with; but I was not able to express everything I wanted to, nor to express it to everyone I wanted to. So I considered in my memory. What most of this passage suggests—all of it except the last two words, pensabam memoria, which belong with the next sentence—is that for Augustine the key precondition of language-learning is not so much cognitive as conative. Unless the baby has the kinds of desires and impulses that human babies typically do have, one crucial prerequisite of its

174  Sophie-Grace Chappell induction into typical human sociality will be missing; it just won’t be the right kind of creature to cotton on to those sorts of sociality. Augustine’s point is that it is because he did have these desires and impulses, because in this sense his relation to other humans was what Wittgenstein would call “agreement in form of life” (PI I, 241), that it was possible for him to become a member of the linguistic community. It is only against the backdrop of that agreement in form of life that the next step becomes possible—the step introduced by the two words pensabam memoria at the end of this passage. These words lead us straight on to the guessing game described in the opening words of Wittgenstein’s quotation from Augustine, as displayed above. (For some reason Wittgenstein quotes the rest of the sentence but leaves out its first two words, pensabam memoria.) Wittgenstein famously remarks how easy it is to forget that “a great deal of stage-setting in the language is already presupposed if the mere act of naming is to make sense” (PI I, 257). Augustine would agree. That is why he does not present the guessing game part of language-learning without first putting it in the context of the kind of stage-setting that is provided by human bodies moving in characteristically human ways under the impulsion of typically human desires. Such a guessing game cannot be the starting point of language-learning; it is itself only possible against a background in which language-learning is already happening. This insistence on contextualization is not a view which Augustine rejects. On the contrary, Augustine shows that he accepts such a view in this very passage. If Wittgenstein were simply taking Augustine as his Aunt Sally for the failure to contextualize that would result if we took the thing/noun guessing game all on its own to be the starting point for languagelearning, he would be being obtuse. It seems particularly unlikely for him to have been guilty of obtuseness in the opening lines of his own magnum opus. The natural conclusion is that Wittgenstein’s relation to Augustine is not so simple and not so crassly oppositional. The guessing game picture to which Augustine is committed is one that Wittgenstein thinks is misleading if it is wrenched from its context, from its place as just one part of what it takes to become a language-using human. It doesn’t follow that Wittgenstein thinks Augustine himself guilty of this decontextualization. It is a question, anyway, whether even thing/noun correlation is really, in real life, as un-Wittgensteinian a starting point for meaning and understanding as philosophers (perhaps including Wittgenstein) often suppose. Obviously real-life guessing games of thing/noun correlation do exist. But what is striking about real cases of such games is usually their social and contextual embeddedness, not their surgical abstraction from all other contexts. Even thing/noun correlation games are evidence for the Wittgensteinian thesis that such games, while perfectly possible, could never be the starting point for understanding.

Personal Knowledge 175 Consider, for example, this, from Patrick Leigh Fermor’s beautiful book Roumeli. During his travels in the remoter parts of northern Greece Fermor, though fluent even in thoroughly demotic Greek, is gleefully challenged by a circle of friendly villagers to guess the meanings of words of a particularly obscure dialect that they all speak, and he doesn’t: the alien and the un-Greek ring of these wild syllables filled me with wonder: it was as though each villager, as a word was uttered and corroborated by the rest, was throwing a strange object on the table in a mysterious and insoluble Kim’s game. A few were immensely familiar, the linguistic equivalent of rusty penknives, bus tickets from vanished lines, flints from a blunderbuss, glove-stretchers, a broken churchwarden, the cat’s whiskers from a crystal set, a deflated million-mark note, the beer label of a brewery long bankrupt, a watchman’s rattle. Other were familiar objects misapplied. (1966, 193) Fermor and his villagers are dealing almost exclusively in nouns. (There’s no deep ideological reason for that, any more, I suspect, than there is with Augustine; it’s just that the meanings of nouns are particularly easy to use as examples when we’re talking about ostension.) So their guessing game is, precisely, a game of thing/noun correlations. But the point of my quotation is that a whole way of living comes with these correlations, one that Fermor does not know, and the villagers do. To understand even this supposedly most basic and simple part of their dialect, we need also to understand an entire world, the world of the dialect speakers. A language presupposes a form of life at every point, even in its most straightforwardly referential parts, even in its thing/noun correlations. Broadly speaking, Wittgenstein and Augustine are not opponents on our issue of relationalism versus individualism about persons, but allies. A wider and more general reading of Book One, and indeed of the whole of the Confessions reinforces this conclusion. Especially in the earlier parts of his story, Augustine goes out of his way to illustrate from his own case how all human understanding and individuality are dependent— in a variety of ways, some of which Fermor’s villagers exemplify—on a preexisting tradition: a context that is essentially structured by secondpersonal relations, and is, as they say, “always already” there whenever any individual begins to understand. The relationalist thesis that each of us, for the shaping of his or her very nature, is not just incidentally dependent on others but constitutively so is not an afterthought or a sideline in the Confessions. It is the heart of the book. The point in Book One, Chapter 8 is that this constitutive dependence holds in the case where those others are other human beings; Augustine spells the point out by focusing particularly on language. More often elsewhere in the Confessions, the point is that it also holds—and holds

176  Sophie-Grace Chappell preeminently—in the case where the other in question is God. So in one of the most famous passages of all in the Confessions (X, 8): Late have I loved you, you beauty so ancient and so novel—late have I loved you! And yet behold you were within me—and I was outside of myself; and I sought for you outside myself, and hurled myself, all misshapen, upon the shapely things that you have made. You were with me, and I was not with you; and the things that held me far away from you were things that would not exist at all, unless they existed in you. In what sense has Augustine loved God “late”? In comparison with when God has loved him—which is all along, from before the beginning of his being. God, in loving Augustine, has been present in him, and to him, even when Augustine was not present in or to himself. As he puts it elsewhere in the Confessions, God has been “closer to him than the closest part of himself, and further above him than the highest he can know” (Confessions 3.6). Augustine’s claim is phenomenological: that when he reflects clearly, what he sees in his own consciousness is the categorical and unquestionable presence of God and, at the same time and in contrast to that, the conditional and questionable presence of himself (Confessions 10.33): “But you, O lord my God, hear me and look down on me and see and pity and heal me, you in whose eyes I have become a question to myself.” There is something riddling and uncertain about his own being, which is brought to light by God’s presence, perhaps by the contrast between the categoricality of God’s being and the noncategoricality of Augustine’s. There is something in a man which even the man’s own spirit which is in him does not know. But you, O Lord, who made him, you know everything of him. Therefore I will confess to you what I know of myself; I will confess to you to what I do not know of myself, since even what I do know of myself, I know because you shine your light on me. (Confessions 10.5) Speaking of riddles, the opening two chapters of Confessions Book I set two riddles in turn. The riddle in Chapter 1 is: How can Augustine call on God, unless he already knows him? Or as we might also express it: How can Augustine start out in the individualist way from his own being and deduce from that the existence of God? Yet unless he can do this, it is pointless for him to call on a God who for all he knows may not be there at all. The answer to this riddle is that Augustine does not start out in the individualist way from his own being; he starts out in the relationalist

Personal Knowledge 177 way, from the fact that God is always already present there in and to him, and from God’s gift to him of faith. And the riddle in Chapter 2 is: If God is to “come into” Augustine, What place is there within Augustine for God to come into: quis locus est in me quo veniat in me deus meus, quo deus veniat in me, deus qui fecit caelum et terram? (What room is there in me for my God to come into? What space whereby God might come into me—the God who made heaven and earth?”) Or as we might also express it: How can Augustine start out in the individualist way from his own being, and welcome God into that being? If Augustine’s personhood is really what individualism says—a sealed and self-subsistent system of self-awareness—then how can God break into this system from the outside? The answer is that God does not need to start from the outside. He is there within Augustine’s personhood already and has been all along as a constitutive condition of that personhood: non ergo essem, deus meus, non omnino essem, nisi esses in me. Indeed, Augustine could not avoid having God within him, unless Augustine was outside the whole of the created order: quo enim recedam extra caelum et terram, ut inde in me veniat deus meus, qui dixit, ‘caelum et terram ego impleo’? On Augustine’s conception, God is not “out there” in the way that individualism about persons supposes, as a reality that we can encounter, if at all, only by working our way, like Deep Thought, from within our own consciousness to the outside. He is already present in the foundations of that consciousness. For Augustine to be an I to himself already presupposes that God is a you to him and, indeed, that Augustine is a you to God. In short, Augustine’s status as an individual person, once he emerges as such by way of the processes described in the opening chapters of the Confessions, is preconditioned by his prior and more basic status as a person-in-relation: in relation to God. I started this section by saying, in qualification of what is often read as Wittgenstein’s outright assault on Confessions I, 8 at the beginning of Part One of the Philosophical Investigations, that we need to see his Augustine quotation in its context. Well, this is its context.

III Maybe a false individualist picture of language-learning can be extrapolated from Confessions, Book I, or at least from some selections—perhaps selective selections—therefrom. But the picture that we get when we look at Augustine’s narrative as a whole is that he is a relationalist about persons and language, like Wittgenstein, not an individualist about persons and language, like the Cartesians. What is primitive, for Augustine, is never my awareness of myself. What is primitive is the relationship of awareness between me and others and, above all, between me and God. I start off as a piece of the continent, a part of the main; it is only by

178  Sophie-Grace Chappell first being a part of that main that I later learn to be “an island entire of myself,” a separate individual, as well. This is a striking enough result in itself. It is all the more striking when we reflect on one of the few beliefs that almost everyone in philosophy shares about Augustine: that it was he, not Descartes, who invented the cogito. But the cogito is the stock in trade par excellence of the individualist: think of Deep Thought again. So isn’t this strong evidence that Augustine was an individualist after all? No. Augustine presents his form of the cogito, the si fallor sum argument, in at least three places: dLA 2.3, Enchiridion 7.20, dCD 11.26.7 In each of these discussions, the argument is explicitly presented as a refutation of academic scepticism. The dCD exposition is the fullest, and it sets the argument in the context in which, I believe, Augustine really always wants to propose his version of the cogito. That context is set by one of Augustine’s key ideas, the idea that the human mind is structurally parallel to the divine mind. And indeed we recognise within ourselves the image of God—even if it is not at an equal level, indeed very far from being equal, since it is not coeternal or of the very same substance as God. Still, nothing in all God’s creation is closer to that image than this nature of ours. The image of God I mean is an image of the highest Trinity, which till this time needs to be made perfect by reshaping, so that it may be as close as possible in likeness to Him. It is an image of the Trinity because we exist, and we know that we exist, and we love this existence and this knowledge. What Augustine is offering here is a doctrine that makes mentality essentially social. For Augustine, there is no lonely, solitary mind; to be a mind is already to have relations of some sort within, whether those relations are relations of knowledge or of love or of both. For Augustine, indeed, the more internal relatedness there is within a mind, the truer a unity it is, precisely by being in this way internally related to itself. (Here it is obvious how well Augustine’s philosophy of mind equips him for defending the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.) Crucially, it is not until he has established this point that Augustine moves the argument against the sceptics. Here is how he continues: Then in these three things that I have mentioned—existence, knowledge, love—there is no falsehood resembling the truth to disturb us. For these things are not like external realities; we do not grasp them by any of the bodily senses . . . without any image-making within the mind, it is most certain to me that I exist, that I know that I exist, and that I love my existence and my knowledge. For these truths there is

Personal Knowledge 179 no threat from the Academic arguments that ask us “But what if you are mistaken?” For if I am mistaken, I exist. (Augustine, dCD 11.26, my own translation) Here it is obvious that for Augustine, the si fallor, sum argument arises against a background that is precisely not the Cartesian background of a “solitary” thinker, deducing his way out of his solitude like the computer Deep Thought. This for at least two reasons. First because, as just said, mentality is for Augustine essentially social. For him, to be a unitary individual thinker is to be a thing the essence of which is self-consciousness: something that can think and be aware of (and indeed love) itself, that can, for example, talk to itself. Thus even an isolated single mind is already, in a sense, a kind of community of thought if it exists at all. Secondly, as before, this essential sociality of mind is for Augustine something that arises in each of us only because she starts off in relation with others. Each of us becomes a mind and a person only by being “always already” in relation with other persons, both human and divine, as a precondition of her own mindedness. Personhood, in short, is not something I achieve on my own; it is a gift, the gift to me of others. To enact the si fallor sum is not to announce my own solitariness. On the contrary, it is to express what only that gift could have made me capable of expressing.

IV This being the case for Augustine’s cogito, the natural next question is whether it is also the case for Descartes’s. Some readers must be wondering if I am cueing myself up to argue that Descartes isn’t an individualist either, that the standard account of his views is all a mistake, and that he too is a relationalist about persons just like Augustine. That isn’t quite what I think we should say about Descartes, but some of it is right. For all the utter familiarity of the Meditations, it is still possible to be surprised by a rereading. Thanks to a host of culture-shaping readers and teachers, we expect to find the Meditations narrating the individualistic Deep Thought–like odyssey that I have already described: the heroic journey of a single lonely mind, equipped with nothing except its own brilliantly ingenious powers of reasoning, out of its locked-in isolation into inferred and deduced relations with God, other people, and a world. And this certainly can be what we find in the Meditations— especially if it is what we are expecting to find. But what did Descartes expect his readers to expect to find? His own culture—especially the Jansenist, counter-reformation-pietist part of it that he himself was one of the most famous sons of, alongside Blaise Pascal and Pierre Corneille—was far more aware of Augustine as a cultural

180  Sophie-Grace Chappell presence than we are today. It was not just Antoine Arnauld who could see the influence of Augustine all over Descartes’s text: that influence on Descartes is patent, for example, when we consider Augustine’s distinction in the last quoted passage between what is known by reason and what is known by sense, and his remarks about the place of phantasiae and phantasmata in this story. Before ever they reached the cogito, with its obvious reminiscence of Augustine’s si fallor, sum argument, Descartes’s intended readership would have found it entirely obvious to see the Meditations as (among other things) an extended essay on knowledge quite studiedly written in the Augustinian manner—to be sure, with updates to bring Augustinianism into line with the best Renaissance science. The fact that, today, we cannot even see Descartes’s Augustinian framework of allusion is no evidence that it isn’t there. His contemporaries saw and understood at once how Descartes’s frame of reference deliberately and studiedly subverts his text’s ironical pretension to be presuppositionless. I don’t mean these comments to add up to a rejection of one standard modern reading of the Meditations. I do mean them to suggest that that reading needs to be kept in balance with other possible readings if we are to see this paradigm of philosophy in anything like the way that Descartes meant us to see it. In our philosophical culture, the usual way to read the Meditations is as asking simply “What can I know?” I am not suggesting that this reading is wrong, but I am suggesting that it is not uniquely right. Another and equally good way is to read the Meditations as an inquiry, as it were, into the epistemic “problem of evil.” God is good, and a good God cannot be a deceiver. Yet there it is: there is deception in the world. How does that happen? And how can we avoid being deceived? We are naturally inclined to trust God; given that there is deception in the world, how trusting should we be and about what? If we do read the Meditations this second way, does that turn Descartes from an individualist into a relationalist, in my senses of these terms? In historical context, and for his contemporaries, I suspect the answer to that is yes. They would, to put it briefly, have known what he was talking about; from what he explicitly said, they would have inferred the Augustinian and relationalist context for his thoughts that he was implicitly evoking. First and foremost, they would have understood the Meditations in the way I suggest earlier, as an inquiry into the epistemic problem of evil. And they would have seen as absolutely central to Descartes’s inquiry, the relatedness of Descartes’s inquirer to God—who is, after all, as modern students often complain, an active and indeed a busy presence in Descartes’s epistemology. For even the most proficient modern readers, by contrast, the answer is likely to be no. They are likely to miss the entire background of Augustinian allusion that frames Descartes’s inquiry in the Meditations as inescapably as a modern composer’s decision to write in the style of Bach would frame his whole enterprise: inescapably, even if that composer

Personal Knowledge 181 never actually said that this was his chosen framework. Hence, they are likely to take Descartes to be doing—give or take a few quaint theological curlicues—almost exactly the same as modern inquirers into “our knowledge of the external world.” The point is not that this is an impossible reading of the text. The point is that, all on its own, it is a historically blind reading of the text and that, by focusing on only one part of what Descartes is doing in the Meditations, it seriously falsifies our overall picture of that text. In typical contemporary practice, things do not even go this well. It is not merely that most readings of the Meditations now focus on what Descartes himself would have thought of as just one way of reading his text. It is not merely that most readings fail to make sense of Augustine’s implicit presence in the background of the Meditations and thus miss an important possible understanding of the text. It is, rather, that most readings fail to make sense of God’s explicit presence in the foreground of the Meditations and thus end up with a completely impossible understanding of the text. To most philosophical readers of the Meditations now, all “Descartes’s God stuff” (as students often put it) is no more than an embarrassment. People do not know what to make of it. They abstract away from it. They try—with real heroism—to make sense of Descartes’s argument entirely without God or with some substitute, e.g., “the functional provisions of natural selection,” holding God’s place in Descartes’s structure. And this is an impossible way to read Descartes. Augustine is well understood as a relationalist because, for him, it is only within the framework of a preexisting relatedness to God that any truths at all can be discovered by the individual person. At first sight, Descartes does not seem to share this outlook: certainly, his inquiries start with the individual mind. But to borrow a distinction from Aristotle, I suggest this is more a difference in order of discovery than in order of existence. Descartes’s thesis is that, beginning from the individual mind and what “clearly and distinctly” appears to it, we can think our way not only to God as one of the objects that so appear to the mind, but also to God as (the source of) the clarity and distinctness with which any genuine object so appears. Hence, Descartes’s lumen naturale really is no more and no less than Augustine’s illuminatio: as its name suggests, it is the same thing approached differently, as it were, by ascent from below rather than by inspiration from above. Augustine stresses the primordiality of God in our consciousness; Descartes stresses the idea that God is reached by exploring the structure of our consciousness. For both, God is the precondition of our knowing any truth at all; the main difference between them is that Augustine insists on this at once, whereas Descartes insists on it only eventually. In sum, Augustine and Descartes are very alike in their approaches to truth and understanding. Certainly they are more like each other than

182  Sophie-Grace Chappell either is like modern “Cartesians,” for whom all Descartes’s talk about the place of God in truth, understanding, and consciousness is no more than dispensable traditional ornamentation. We might sum the contrasts up by saying that, for Augustine, the presence of God to me is a luminous precondition of my finding any knowledge; for Descartes, the presence of God to me is something that emerges in the course of my discovering what it is to find any knowledge—and turns out to be a precondition, albeit an implicit rather than a luminous one; whereas for modern “Cartesians,” there is just me all on my own in the world, trying like Deep Thought to find some knowledge; Descartes’s God is treated either as an insubstantial stylistic ornament (by those who want to appropriate his views) or as a substantive embarrassment (by those who want to reject them). The extent to which this modern Cartesian picture is in any sense genuinely or historically Cartesian is surely overestimated. Perhaps it is more to the point to call it genuinely Hobbesian. But is God actually a presence to Descartes, in the way that he clearly is to Augustine or again to Descartes’s much younger contemporary Blaise Pascal? I have said a lot about the similarities between Descartes and Augustine, but here, surely, is a big difference between them. Augustine’s work, especially the Confessions, is full of direct address to God; there is nothing like that in Descartes. In the Meditations, Descartes does not talk to God as a person; he talks of God as a notion. He talks to other humans, never directly to God. This contrast is real. Perhaps it arises because Descartes’s project in the Meditations is to objectify, for other humans, an essentially subjective process of “meditation”—of phenomenology—that he believes any human can go through, whereas Augustine’s project in the Confessions is simply to engage in, and speak expressively straight out of, that subjectivity. In which case the contrast will be this: that Augustine’s primary addressee is God, and other humans are implicitly invited by the Confessions to address him too, whereas Descartes’s primary addressee is other humans, for whom Descartes describes in objective and thirdpersonal terms a process that, implicitly, has the very same subjectivity and second-personality as Augustine is describing. Some critics of Descartes—notably Bernard Williams—have wondered whether the Meditations’s project of being objective about subjectivity is even coherent, and perhaps Augustine would have made something like the same point against Descartes. Perhaps he would have said that there can be no third-personal, detached describing of what is either lived as engaged second-personal experience or not known at all. A more recent philosopher who seems to have something like the same thought is Roger Scruton (The Face of God 166): Explanation by cause and effect involves the discovery of lawlike connections between events. Subjects have no place in those laws,

Personal Knowledge 183 not because they are mysterious or supernatural, but because they only exist for each other, through the web of interpersonal accountability. Look for them in the world of objects and you will not find them. This is true of you and me; it is true too of God. Physics gives a complete explanation of the world of objects, for that is what ‘physics’ means. God is not a hypothesis to be set beside the fundamental constants and the laws of quantum dynamics. Look for him in the world of objects and you will not find him.

V My next point is that, contrary to many readings including Williams’s, the subjectivity that concerns Descartes can be understood as not solely first-personal, but as second-personal too. This point is central to the reading of the Meditations that has been offered in the 20th century by Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas is a pretty well perfect example of what I mean in this essay by a “relationalist.” [C]’est par cette habitation dans l’ “autre” (et non pas logiquement, par opposition à l’ autre) que l’ âme acquiert son identité. (It is by this habitation in the Other—and not logically, by opposition to the Other—that the soul acquires its identity.) (TI Fr.219) One motto we might apply to him—if such a Christian phrase may be allowed for a self-consciously Jewish philosopher—is in the beginning was the word. Like the later Wittgenstein, Levinas takes language to be primordial and for a similar reason: because he takes sociality to be primordial and language to be the primary expression of sociality. (Also, as with the later Wittgenstein, this equation should be read right to left: Levinas has a generous conception of what language is, not a parsimonious conception of sociality.) As Levinas characteristically puts it, “meaning is the face of the Other” (Totalité et infini 206; in Lingis’s translation 227); “the face to face founds language” (207; 228). This does not just mean that previously isolated individuals are sparked into life, and into communication, when they come into contact; it means that it is the possibility of communication that underwrites the possibility of there being individual minds, reasoners, or persons at all. Language institutes a relation irreducible to the subject-object relation: the revelation of the other. In this revelation only can language as a system of signs be constituted. The other called upon is not something represented, is not a given, is not a particular, through one side already open to generalisation. Language, far from presupposing

184  Sophie-Grace Chappell universality and generality, first makes them possible. Language presupposes interlocutors, a plurality. (Totalité et Infini 73) This may begin to clarify why the subtitle of Totalité et infini is Essai sur l’ exteriorité. It is because Levinas believes that real understanding necessarily comes to us only from outside, from our encounters with the real world beyond us, and in particular with the other people in that world: “the absolutely foreign alone can instruct us” (73; enseignement, teaching or instruction, literally in-sign-ment, as it were, the writing of semantic meanings into someone, is emphatically one of Levinas’s words). Not that everything ipso facto comes right simply because one is in contact with some exteriority. On the contrary, we are always free to relate to exteriority either by trying to subjugate it to ourselves as part of our own system (what Levinas calls our “ontology”) or by entering into the endless task of actually trying to understand what always outruns our complete understanding (Levinas’s name for this task is “metaphysics”). We are free to choose whether to see philosophy as a war of conquest, or as an unending pilgrimage: we can aim at totality, or we can accept infinity. Early on in Totalité et infini, one passage of extraordinary bitter lucidity presses the charge that Heidegger’s philosophy is a paradigm of what Levinas means by ontology (Totalité et Infini 36–37/45–46): The relation with Being that is enacted as ontology consists in neutralising the existent in order to comprehend or grasp it. It is hence not a relation with the other as such but the reduction of the other to the same. Such is the definition of freedom: to maintain oneself against the other, despite every relation with the other to ensure the autarky of an I . . . “I think” comes down to “I can”—to an appropriation of what is, to an exploitation of reality. Ontology as first philosophy is a philosophy of power. It issues in the State and in the non- violence of the totality, without securing itself against the violence from which this totality lives, and which appears in the tyranny of the State. Truth, which should reconcile persons, here exists anonymously. Universality presents itself as impersonal; and this is another inhumanity. It is not hard to hear these as the words of a Jewish philosopher, who suffered as a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany, about another philosopher who flourished as a bulwark of the regime in Nazi Germany. (Consider, for a start, the characteristically Nazi word “autarky.”) If Heidegger comes under attack from Levinas because he’s a systematizer, why doesn’t Descartes? The answer is: because Levinas does not think that Descartes is a systematizer. For Levinas, Descartes is on the side of infini and not of totalité—an adherent of the view of knowledge

Personal Knowledge 185 as pilgrimage, not as conquest. For Levinas, the key to the Meditations is a relatively rarely discussed passage from the end of Meditation 3: [T]he Cartesian cogito is discovered, at the end of the Third Meditation, to be supported on the certitude of the divine existence qua infinite, by relation to which the finitude of the cogito, or the doubt, is posited and conceivable. This finitude could not be determined without recourse to the infinite, as is the case with the moderns . . . The Cartesian subject is given a point of view exterior to itself from which it can apprehend itself. If in a first movement Descartes takes consciousness to be indubitable of itself by itself, in a second movement—the reflection on reflection—he recognises conditions for this certitude. This certitude is due to the clarity and distinctness of the cogito, but certitude itself is sought because of the presence of infinity in this finite thought, which without this presence would be ignorant of its own finitude. (Totalité et Infini 210) As we might paraphrase this for analytic philosophers: it is only because we have the capacity for thought that we can think the cogito, but the capacity for thought is an instance of the capacity for language and meaning, and there can be no language or meaning without others (206; “meaning is the face of the Other”); hence, the existence in me of a capacity for thought itself already presupposes the existence of others. Moreover, conceiving myself involves conceiving myself as finite, but the thought of my finitude as possible brings with it the thought of the other’s infinity as possible. And the paradigm case of the other as infinite is the case of God. On Levinas’s reading, it is just as true in the case of Descartes as it is in the case of Augustine that reflection on the structure of our own consciousness will reveal the presence of God in the depths of that consciousness. As I myself noted earlier, Descartes is more usually understood as talking about God than to God. I suspect Levinas would concede that that is what is normally going on. But one reason why the ending of Meditation 3 is so important to his reading is because it is here, in particular, that he sees Descartes’s God as actually “face to face” with Descartes: The last paragraph of the Third Meditation brings us to a relation with infinity in thought which overflows thought and becomes a personal relation. Contemplation turns into adoration, admiration, and joy. It is a question no longer of an “infinite object” still known and thematised, but of a majesty . . . To us this paragraph appears to be not a stylistic ornament or a prudent hommage to religion, but the expression of this transformation of the idea of infinity conveyed by knowledge into a Majesty approached as a face. (Totalité et Infini 211–212)

186  Sophie-Grace Chappell

VI The point is not to argue that Levinas’s reading of Descartes is uniquely, unchallengeably correct; even the best readings of texts of any interest and complexity are most unlikely to be uniquely correct even if correct. Rather, the point of my discussion is threefold. First, it is meant to suggest the conclusion that even Descartes, paradigm individualist about persons as he is generally taken to be, can be read as a relationalist insofar as he can be read as an Augustinian (or indeed a Levinasian). On this reading it turns out that Descartes’s theism is no side issue in the Meditations. We cannot take Descartes to be the kind of modern Cartesian for whom all the God stuff in the Meditations is at best picturesque. We have to understand him, as Levinas suggests and as an Augustinian reading of the Meditations also suggests, as having a concern with God that is absolutely central to the whole of his thought. Secondly, I hope my exposition of Levinas on Descartes has brought to light what rich resources Levinas has to offer anyone who, like me, wants to defend relationalism about persons. Central to Levinas’s thought is the idea of the “face to face”: the idea that it is through personal encounter that personhood begins. And the relation, the encounter so to speak, antedates the relata: it is because we are in relationship with others that it becomes possible for us to come to be persons, not vice versa. “This relation with the Other . . . precedes all ontology; it is the ultimate relation in Being” (48). Thirdly, I hope my discussion makes it clear by this point how these reflections connect with an argument about personhood in applied ethics that I have made elsewhere. If persons depend for their very being on a preexisting relationship, then there is something deeply wrong with the usual approach to persons in applied ethics. This begins from the claim that personhood is a status that we attain by satisfying criteria of various sorts: rationality, the ability to speak, emotionality, and so on. Such an approach to personhood makes sense if individualism about persons is true: in an individualist approach, there can’t be anything wrong with just subjecting individuals to a checklist of properties they might have and seeing whether in fact they do have them. But if relationalism about persons is true, how can it make sense? If persons—and so a fortiori personal qualities like rationality and emotionality—are only constituted in the first place by the antecedent relationships in which persons are to be found, then to approach the question whether someone “counts as a person” by seeing whether they pass this or that test is to step away from the relationship that we already have with them. On an individualist approach to persons, criterialism—as I have elsewhere8 suggested we call it—looks like straightforward “scientific objectivity.” On a relationalist approach, it looks like a denial of our commitments to others; it looks, in fact, like a kind of moral offense. Acceptance of others, for the

Personal Knowledge 187 relationalist, cannot be a conclusion that we infer from a test procedure; acceptance of others means precisely refusing to submit them to such tests. I cannot both trust and love you and also wonder whether, in fact, you are alive with thought and feeling, just as I cannot dance well if I am counting steps and trying to remember what comes next. A certain theoretical detachment is incompatible with our joint mutual commitment . . . the point is not that our commitment to each other’s consciousness is beyond rational criticism. . . . The point . . . is that for a person’s mind to be thrown into doubt for us does not mean that we have lost the evidence we once possessed that assured us from a standpoint of theoretical detachment that the other was mentally present . . . that is a standpoint that we never occupy in relation to other minds (or that we occupy only rarely, in special circumstances) . . . what is thrown into question . . . is what our relationship to the other should be . . . the question of whether a person is in fact a conscious person is always a moral question before it is a question about our justification to believe . . . even to raise the question of whether a person or a thing has a mind is to call one’s relation to that person into question. And this is the point. For most of us, most of the time, our relations to others simply rule out the possibility of asking the question. For the question can only be asked from a detached perspective that is incompatible with the more intimate, engaged perspective that we actually take up to each other. (Noe 2009 33–34) “Acceptance of others,” I said: What others? The others with whom we typically find ourselves in relationship with the human form of life. That typically means other human beings because it is typically other humans who confront us in the way that Levinas describes, with the ethical authority of the other. (Other) animals can do it too, sometimes, and that fact suggests that there is something important for us to make moral sense of in the case of the (other) animals. But it also suggests that the individualist approach to these issues, i.e., the criterialist approach, is wrongheaded from the start. The question to ask is not “What properties do these creatures have, and to what degree, so that we can assess their moral status?” for that is not how we do, in fact, “assess moral status” (insofar as we do this at all, as opposed to acting on the basis of an understanding that we already have). We “assess the moral status” of any individual creature on the basis of the place in our form of life of creatures like that: what kind of good treatment do we direct at this kind of animal, and why, and what is there to be said for or against such treatment? (As this last clause shows, the test is not merely a conservative one.) It follows that to conclude that some human, perhaps

188  Sophie-Grace Chappell disabled or very young, “is not a person” on the basis that it individually lacks emotionality or rationality or the ability to speak or whatever is to make a serious moral mistake. These properties are not properties that we determine personhood by. They are properties that we look for, hope to see, and seek to nurture in those to whom we have already granted the status of persons, on quite other grounds such as—and this is the usual ground—their membership in the human species. If relationalism about persons is true, then criterialism about persons looks not just false but incoherent: it takes as a criterion of personhood what it only makes sense to treat as an ideal for personhood. By contrast, relationalism has on its side an emerging consensus: it is what fits the realistically world-centered and embedded thinking of which Levinas is a prime example in the phenomenological tradition and Wittgenstein a prime example in the anglophone tradition; it is also what fits an increasingly large body of data from developmental psychology, such as the Kenneth Kaye book I mentioned at the beginning, and from the philosophy of mind and action, where a host of relevant recent discussions are accessibly summarized in a book I have already been citing, Alva Noe’s Out of our Heads. Meanwhile, mainstream applied ethics continues to be firmly wedded to individualism about persons—and a strikingly shallow and implausible form of individualism about persons. If this emerging consensus is right, mainstream applied ethics has a lot of catching up to do.

Notes 1. Thanks for help, comments, and encouragement to Simon Blackburn, Claudia Chappell, Peter Hacker, Andrew Mullins, Adrian Moore, David Papineau, Andrew Pinsent, Raymond Tallis, and the audience at the Ian Ramsey Centre Conference “Persons and their Brains,” St Anne’s College, Oxford, July 2012. 2. A highly controversial “hence”: as Adrian Moore has reminded me, Husserl and other phenomenologists thought it crucial to insist that theirs was an a priori project. But I think the “hence” is justifiable, given a now-standard distinction between what is essential and what is a priori (a distinction that Husserl and his contemporaries did not usually make). Investigating what is essential to our experience should be the phenomenologist’s concern, since what is not essential to our experience would have no interest: it could not bring out any general or important or explanatorily important truths about our minds. However, investigating our experience’s strictly a priori features sounds like an incoherent project, at least if we gloss a priori as “knowable independently of all experience” for then it will mean “investigating experience’s non-experiential features.” It is not that experience logically cannot have such features: of course, it can; it has, e.g., logical features. The point is rather that investigating these features cannot be phenomenology, a philosophical investigation of experience (itself, and not its merely formal properties). 3. Nor will I be much bothered if there are arguments against my or any view of personhood that depend, in the way that Derek Parfit’s work has made familiar, on personality fusions or fissions, brain bisections, etc. As has often been

Personal Knowledge 189 objected to in Parfit, not knowing how to apply the concept of personhood in weird puzzle cases is not the same thing as not knowing how to apply the concept of personhood at all: here, as with many other sceptical scenarios, something like a disjunctivist strategy seems right. 4. Confessions1.8, tr. William Watts. 5. Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: A Memoir (1958), 59. 6. Fergus Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein, 2nd ed. (1997), 41. 7. In the “Fourth Set of Objections” to Descartes’ Meditations, it is the de Libero Arbitrio passage that Fr. Antoine Arnauld quotes as evidence that Descartes is not as original as he makes out. 8. Timothy Chappell, “On the Very Idea of Criteria for Personhood,” Southern Journal of Philosophy (March 2011), 49(1), 1–27.

References Alva Noe, Out of Our Heads. New York: Hill & Wang, 2009. Augustine, Confessions 397–400 AD. With a translation by William Watts (1631). Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1912. Augustine, de Civitate Dei (426 AD), de Libero Arbitrio (397 AD), Enchiridion (420 AD). All in J. P. Migne, Patrologia Latina, online at http://patristica.net/ latina/. Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. London: Pan, 1979. Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et Infini. Paris: Vrin, 1961. Fergus Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. John Donne (1572–1631), Meditations. Online at https://www.online-literature. com/donne/409/. Kenneth Kaye, The Mental and Social Life of Babies: How Parents Create Persons. London: Methuen, 1984. Levinas, Totalité et Infini (Paris: Vrin, 1961, p.219; my own translation) Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty. Oxford: Blackwell, 1969. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1953. Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: A memoir. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958. Patrick Leigh Fermor, Roumeli. London: Pan, 1966. René Descartes (1596–1650), The Philosophical Writings. Translated by J. Cottingham, D. Murdoch, R. Stoofhof. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Roger Scruton, The Face of God. London: Continuum, 2012. Sophie Grace Chappell, Knowing What To Do. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Part III

Ethics and Moral Philosophy

9 Desire for the Good Fiona Ellis

1. Introduction According to a prevalent line of thought, there is no intrinsic goodness fixed in the nature of things to which we are responsive at the level of reason and desire, and that motivates us to act morally. Those who insist upon this negative claim take it to be deeply problematic to think of reality in these terms, and one response has been to say that goodness has its source in the desiring subject. Desire in this context is no longer an intrinsically normative state which involves being attracted to an external source of value. Rather, it is a mental tendency or disposition by virtue of which we are attracted to whatever promises to satisfy the relevant desire. These are the things we call “good” (or “bad” if they fail to deliver on this score), and any supposition to the effect that goodness (or badness) belong to the things themselves is a phenomenological illusion.1 The position can be discerned in Hume’s claim that “when you pronounce any action or character to be vicious, you mean nothing, but that from the constitution of your own nature you have a feeling or sentiment of blame from contemplation of it,”2 and it is exemplified in the following words of Hobbes: Whatsoever is the object of any mans Appetite or Desire, that is it, which he for his part calleth Good. And the object of his Hate, and Aversion, Evill, And of his contempt, Vile and Inconsiderable. For these words of Good, Evill, and Contemptible, are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: There being nothing simply and absolutely so, nor any common rule of Good or Evill to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves.3 We are left with a picture according to which the world is, in itself, “motivationally inert.”4 That is to say, there is no “magnetic” goodness to attract the desires of those who apprehend it.5 This motivationally inert world is the proper and exclusive object of cognition, and cognition has nothing to do with being attracted to things. Attraction comes in only

194  Fiona Ellis at the level of desire, and desire has nothing to do with cognition, being concerned, rather, with one’s affective response to what there is, what there is being comprehended in the aforementioned motivationally inert terms. This picture goes hand in hand with the (equally prevalent) idea that an agent’s reasons for action are to be analyzed as a conjunction of a cognitive state of mind (ranging over the non-evaluative facts) and a separate desire that supplies the motivating force for a moral reason for action. On this way of thinking, desire is what makes the action attractive to the desirer, the role of reason being simply to inform us about the things and actions that will get us what we want. Reason is “the slave of the passions” in this respect and has no further role to play. This position can be disputed at various levels, and there is a serious question of how such desire could motivate a subject in the first place.6 John McDowell objects to it on the ground that there are no non-questionbegging reasons for insisting that reason and desire must be dualistically opposed in this manner—as if they are entirely separate faculties within the subject.7 The idea that the world is motivationally inert is simply the metaphysical counterpart of this dualism, and there is no independent argument for ruling out the possibility of an alternative position in which this dualism of reason and desire is surmounted—one in which a cognitive state could suffice on its own to explain an action precisely because it involves being suitably receptive to the relevant values and the normative demands they impose. As for the complaint that such a world is too “queer” to be taken seriously, the usual motive for insisting on this point involves a form of scientific naturalism that is philosophically and scientifically unsupported, and McDowell is keen to distance himself from the kind of Platonism which more properly invites such an objection, when, for example, the relevant values are divorced from anything to which we could intelligibly relate.8 McDowell’s positive approach is shared and developed by other like-minded philosophers.9 It also maps onto some analogous themes in Levinas, and in what follows, I want to clarify the relevant points of agreement, spelling out the implications for an understanding of the desire for the good and its relation to reason and to desire more generally. There will be a question of whether such a position is defensible, and I shall grant with McDowell that some standard objections are inconclusive, although it will become clear that there are points of detail that demand further elucidation. Levinasian desire is articulated from within a theistic framework, and I shall conclude by considering whether this distinguishing feature yields a more serious difficulty.

2.  Rethinking Reason and Desire The context for McDowell’s discussion of the relation between reason and desire is Philippa Foot’s critique of the Kantian idea that moral

Desire for the Good 195 requirements are categorical10—a critique that, in Wiggins’ words, aroused a new interest in the possibility of an intelligible conception of the categorical ought.11 Foot objects to the (Kantian) idea that it is irrational to question the requirements of morality, claiming that their rational influence on the will is hypothetical rather than categorical. It is hypothetical in the sense that their influence is conditional upon the presence of desires that are lacking in those who question whether they have reason to conform to them. Foot makes clear that hypothetical imperatives are incredibly diverse, and that desire as she understands it exceeds the limits of egoism. She blames Kant’s hedonistic conception of human nature for his failure to see that moral virtue might be compatible with a rejection of the categorical imperative, granting that, quite apart from thoughts of duty, one might “care about the suffering of others, having a sense of identification with them, wanting to help them.”12 She concludes that desire in this broad sense can give one reason to act morally, agreeing with the Kantian that a moral person cannot be indifferent to matters such as suffering and justice. What she objects to is the idea that morality has an independent “binding force,” which somehow bypasses our “interests or desires,” as if it is enough simply to say “You should.” She denies also that the immoral person is deficient in rationality. As she puts it, the immoral man is to be accused of villainy rather than inconsistency.13 McDowell agrees that it would be inappropriate to describe the immoral person as inconsistent. He grants also that “You should” is not enough to give someone a reason for acting14 and that recognition of the binding force of morality comes via a perspective which is colored by our desires and interests.15 So he accepts that morality is important to us, and that doing one’s duty can be a matter of doing what one wants. What he objects to is the idea that desire must function as “an independent extra component [emphasis added] in a full specification of [a subject’s reason for action],”16 as if reason is irredeemably inert, and desire is “needed in order to account for the capacity of the cited reason to influence the agent’s will.”17 The complaint is familiar from what has been said previously, for McDowell’s main objection is to the idea that reason and desire must be dualistically opposed in this manner—as if cognition must be confined to the facts as neutrally conceived, and desire is the further, non-cognitive component which moves the agent to action.18 This is what it would mean for a moral requirement to be hypothetical in the sense McDowell wishes to reject. McDowell wishes to break this dualism so as to defend a conception of reason that already presupposes the desire-involving dimension from which it is separated on the disputed position. That is to say, he is claiming that neither of these notions can be properly understood without presupposing reference to the other. This has important implications for both reason and desire for it means that reason itself can motivate (as opposed

196  Fiona Ellis to being irredeemably inert), and that there are desires which, rather than being blind impulses in the subject, involve a recognition of the good.19 It means also that we must reject the picture according to which “man is a combination of an impersonal rational thinker and a person will,” as Iris Murdoch describes the disputed picture, so as to allow that “[m]an is a unified being who sees, and who desires in accordance with what he sees.”20 This is what McDowell is getting at when he says of the relevant (“intrinsically moral”) desires that they are not intelligible independently of the moral conception of things that, according to his position, provide a moral reason for action. They are “consequentially ascribed” in this respect or, as Thomas Nagel puts it:, “[t]hat I have the desire simply follows from the fact that these considerations motivate me,” to which he adds that “nothing follows about the role of the desire as a condition contributing to the motivational efficacy of those considerations.”21 McDowell claims finally that “consequentially ascribed desires are indeed desires” and that this grants us the right to say that acting for a certain sort of reason—when, for example, one is doing what is morally required—can be a case of doing what one wants.22 By contrast, the desires that figure in the rejected position are “feelings” or “passions” that are “over and above one’s view of the facts.”23 McDowell adds that it was Kant’s fundamental aim to “deny that the motivating capacity of moral considerations needs explaining from outside, in terms of desires that are not intrinsically moral.”24

3. Interlude McDowell and Foot agree on the important points. They insist that morality has an irreducibly normative dimension, that its appreciation involves a certain kind of affective response, and that there is a way of conceiving of the relation between reason and desire that precludes the possibility of accommodating these features. For Foot the error occurs when reason is divorced from anything that could matter to us, and she reinstates the missing dimension with a conception of desire/interest which, on the face of it, involves just the kind of cognition which is so important to McDowell. As she puts it, one might “care about the suffering of others, having a sense of identification with them, wanting to help them.” McDowell would surely agree that being motivated in this moral sense does not require additional “thoughts of duty.” Much of the dispute here is terminological, but it raises important and unresolved questions about the nature and limits of reason and desire, their respective roles in the context of morality, and the implications for an understanding of desire for the good. Are there good reasons for downplaying the role of reason in a moral context? How exactly does desire motivate? And where does cognition come into the equation? If the relevant cognitive states “are not so much possessed except by those

Desire for the Good 197 whose wills are influenced appropriately,”25 then does this mean that they are themselves desires? And if they are desires, then why isn’t it overkill to insist on the presence of consequentially ascribed desires too? We can begin to tackle these questions in more depth by turning to Emmanuel Levinas.

4.  Levinas on Reason and Desire Levinas grants a distinction between desires that are intrinsically moral and those that are not, treating as prime examples of the latter the appetitive desires that are operative when we strive for food, drink, and sex. He classifies them as “needs,”26 and claims that they stem from a determinate lack in the subject which is filled by consuming or “assimilating” an object that satisfies the desire: “in need I can sink my teeth into the real and satisfy myself in assimilating the other.”27 The terminology has a pejorative tone, but the picture is not entirely negative, for we are said to “thriv[e] on our needs,” and are “ ‘happy’ for them.” Need is therefore “a happy dependence,” happiness is “the satisfaction of all needs,”28 and the search for such happiness is that by which the self begins to establish itself as such. It is “the egoism of life . . . the very pulsation of the I”29 or, as Adriaan Peperzak puts it, the “ ‘spontaneous egoism’ of animal life.”30 McDowell agrees that a proper account of humanity must give due weight to our animality, and he would have no difficulty with the idea that such desires form an important part of the picture.31 He would doubtless treat them as tendencies or dispositions—like the “feelings” or “passions” to which he refers. Levinas takes the relevant tendencies to involve (human) nature seeking to fill a lack.32 He insists, however, that the most significant category of desire is irreducible to disposition and tendency and cannot be viewed in these lack-involving terms. As he puts it, it is “not an appeal to food,”33 it “desires beyond everything that can simply complete it,”34 and it has its source in something independently valuable that attracts and “animates” the desire, and toward which it is directed. This “something” is referred to as “the Desirable,”35“the Other,”36 “the Most High,”37 “the Invisible,”38 “the Transcendent,”39 “Infinity,”40 “God”41; it has a moral and metaphysical significance which puts it on a level with Plato’s goodness;42 and we are told that desire [in this sense] is “revelation.”43 It counts as “metaphysical” in these respects,44 and it is a form of cognition, albeit one that exceeds the limits of ordinary thought to provide a more appropriate measure of its (infinite) object: The idea of the infinite, in which being overflows idea, in which the Other overflows the Same, breaks with the inward play of the soul and alone deserves the name experience, a relationship with the exterior. It is then more cognitive than cognition itself. (1993, 112)

198  Fiona Ellis The infinite is not the object of a contemplation, that is, is not proportionate to the thought that thinks it. The idea of the infinite is a thought which at every moment thinks more than it thinks. A thought that thinks more than it thinks is Desire. Desire “measures” the infinity of the infinite. (1993, 113) Talk of desire’s measuring the infinite does not mean that it involves cognition in a theoretical sense, and Levinas makes clear that its source and object must elude our attempts to comprehend it—“it is not the object of a contemplation.” So we relate to the infinite at the level of desire, albeit not as subject to contemplated object. As Levinas puts it elsewhere, “[t]he infinite is not ‘in front of me.’ ”45 He adds immediately and more positively that “it is I who express [the infinite]” and that I do so in my moral interactions with others. This is a difficult thought to grasp, but it is part and parcel of his antipathy to cataphatic theology (as if desire’s “object” can be pinned down and objectified), his rejection of the idea that such desire is acquisitive (as if its object is there to be “assimilated”), and his insistence that any knowledge we acquire in this context is practical rather than theoretical.46 As Paul Fiddes puts it, the focus is on “participation in the transcendent and not observation or objectification of it.”47 Fiddes takes this to mean that God “is not the object of desire but the one in whom we desire the good.”48 Levinas would surely grant both of these claims, albeit with the caveat that desire’s object meets the aforementioned negative conditions. Metaphysical desire is “not an appeal to food” and “desires beyond everything that can simply complete it.”49 Levinas spells this out further by saying that its object “does not fulfill it, but deepens it,”50 and that “the true Desire is that which the Desired does not satisfy, but hollows out.”51 His aim here is to capture what it is that keeps desire alive—what makes it “insatiable” to use his preferred terminology.52 It is insatiable not because its subject fails to “assimilate” the desired object—as if it is a matter of desiring an ever-elusive object. This would be to revert to the “lack” model, and would imply that insatiability is a deficiency, desire’s extinction being the aim. Rather, it is insatiable by virtue of being animated by its desirable object. As Levinas puts it, it is “an aspiration that the Desirable animates; it originates from its ‘object.’ ” All of this puts reason and desire in the closest relationship, but what more can be said about reason in particular? And how does it feed into Levinas’s understanding of a moral requirement? At one level, Levinas stands opposed to the idea that morality could be grounded in reason, and he rehearses some familiar anti-Kantian objections. “What could a being entirely rational speak of with another entirely rational being?” he asks. “How could numerous reasons be distinguished? How could the Kantian kingdom of ends be possible had not the rational beings that composed it retained, as the principle of individuation, their exigency for

Desire for the Good 199 happiness, miraculously saved from the shipwreck of sensible nature?”53 We are reminded of Foot’s worry that Kantian morality is divorced from anything remotely human. The disparaging reference to Kant’s kingdom of ends calls to mind the objections of the typical anti-Platonist—who is likewise concerned to bring morality back down to earth. We know also, however, that Levinas takes inspiration from Plato, and that he is comparable to McDowell in this respect. He grants also with McDowell that there is a conception of reason that escapes the relevant objections and that has a pivotal role to play in any viable moral framework. Reason in the relevant sense is rescued from any Kantian (or Platonist) noumenal realm,54 it is to be distinguished from that which is operative when we theorize in a non-moral context,55 and it involves being responsive to a source of value that makes normative demands onus. Crucially however—and this is part and parcel of Levinas’s anti-Kantian return to “sensible nature”—it is “founded” and enacted in the face-to-face ethical relation with the human other.56 The human other, we are told, exists “outside of the hunger one satisfies, the thirst one quenches, and the senses one allays,”57 and when I relate to her in moral terms “I am no longer able to have power.”58 I am able to have power in the sense that I can treat her as a means to my own satisfactions, or refrain from doing so simply because “conquest is beyond my too weak powers.”59 However, a moral relationship has the effect of calling into question and silencing such egoistic impulses, albeit not in the manner of a rival coercive power. As Levinas puts it, there is established “a relationship not with a very great resistance but with the absolute Other, with the resistance of what has no resistance, with ethical resistance.”60 In such a context, “I have access to an exterior being, to what one absolutely can neither take in nor possess.”61 Levinas can be understood to be describing and defending what McDowell calls a “clear perception of a silencing requirement.”62 The difference, however, is that the relevant “moral summons” is revealed only in the “sensible appearance of [the human other’s] face,63 and— second difference—there is a revelation of infinity in this interaction: “infinity presents itself as a face in the ethical resistance that paralyzes my powers.”64 This does not mean that infinity is objectified in the other’s face—as if thought is finally adequate to its object, and morality can be left behind. The point is rather that it is revealed in this very relationship: I express the infinite rather than having it in front of me.65 Levinas talks of being “fill[ed] with high thoughts”66 in this context, and insists that the idea of infinity remains within the limits of rationalism, even whilst “implying a content overflowing the container.” How so? Because: far from violating the mind . . . it establishes ethics. The other is not for reason a scandal . . . but the first teaching. A being receiving the idea of Infinity, receiving since it cannot derive it from itself,

200  Fiona Ellis is a being taught in a non-maieutic fashion. . . . To think is to have the idea of infinity or to be taught. Rational thought refers to this teaching.67 Another expression of the crucial idea that we are responsive to an external source of value in this context. And assuming that a “thought that thinks more than it thinks is Desire,” we are to suppose that, at this level of apprehension, the reason/desire distinction breaks down.

5. Clarifications It is assumed on all sides that desire has a motivating force, but there is disagreement concerning its relation to reason, obscurity surrounding its nature, and a basic question of what legitimates this assumption in the first place. The crucial distinction for McDowell and Levinas is between desires that are moral and those that are not. Appetitive desires are paradigms of the non-moral as far as Levinas is concerned, whereas McDowell focuses on the self-standing mental tendencies—“passions”/”feelings”— which are “over and above” any moral cognition on the part of the desiring subject. McDowell distinguishes such tendencies from desires that are intrinsically moral. They count as such in the sense that they involve being attracted to an external source of value and cannot be understood independently of such cognition. Levinas operates likewise with a cognitive conception of moral desire and concedes—with McDowell—to the wisdom of Plato. He is also a theist, parting company with McDowell in this respect. Levinas’s theism feeds into his response to the question of how moral desire’s motivational force is to be accommodated, for he tells us that it is “animated” by and “originates” from its (desirable) object, leaving us in no doubt about this object’s religious significance.68 He claims also that there are desires which are purely self-animated or which have their origin in the subject, as he puts it.69 These are the appetitive desires he prefers to classify as “needs”; they are felt by the subject, and their distinctive phenomenology is sufficient to explain how they motivate the desiring subject, when, for example, the feeling of hunger leads me to stuff my face with crisps. By contrast, the motivational force of the relevant moral desires is said to be explained with reference to their independently desirable objects. This is an important point, particularly in light of the Hobbesian idea that the object’s desirability is determined solely by the subject’s act of desiring, for it suggests that a desire which is selfanimating in this Hobbesian sense does not, after all, have motivational force.70 If this is so, then there is good reason for granting with McDowell that the desires that figure in moral reason-giving explanations must be intrinsically moral in his sense. But are we remotely clear about what it means to talk of desire’s object in this context? And where does any of this leave Foot’s example of the

Desire for the Good 201 person who wants to help someone because she cares about the suffering of others or McDowell’s desires, which are “consequentially ascribed”? Analytic discussions have tended to focus on the idea that desires have a logical content—one desires that p—and this has gone hand in hand with the idea that it should be possible to rewrite any sentence of the form “A wants B” as “A wants that p.”71 On this approach, desire is a propositional attitude, its object is a proposition, and the relevant attitude is that of wanting the proposition to be true.72 There are cases for which such an approach seems plausible—for example, I want that I finish this chapter by the end of the week. We might even suppose that Foot’s case of wanting to help those in need is amenable to such treatment, although there is surely a difference between wanting it to be true that I help such people and wanting to do it,73 and Foot makes clear that this latter desire must involve a sense of the worth of so acting if it is to count as properly moral. This brings us to the intrinsically moral desires with which McDowell and Levinas are concerned, and it is wholly unclear how they could be comprehended propositionally given that they involve being attracted to something independently valuable, a response for which there is no obvious or even intelligible propositional equivalent.74 Mark Platts implies that no such problem exists when, in the context of pressing the question of desire’s motivational force, he offers a defense of the propositional account before moving to the category of desire with which we are concerned. As he puts it, “desires. . . . have a logical content, and desires motivate an agent because of his view of the objects of his desires as desirable.”75 He adds that the thing to be acknowledged “is that we have many non-appetitive desires in our having of which beliefs are involved in complex ways. For us, desires frequently require an appropriate belief about the independent desirability of the object of desire.”76 I shall return to the question of whether desire’s cognitive content is best viewed in belief-involving terms. The more pressing issue concerns how the position described by Platts is to be squared with the aforementioned propositional account, which latter is all about wanting the world to be a certain way (chapter finished, people helped, etc.). A clue is to be found in the idea that these latter desires already presuppose a conception of the value of doing the relevant things—I want to finish the chapter because August is for hanging out in the sun or because I value the idea of finally getting to the bottom of these things, and I want to help this woman in distress because her suffering matters to me. McDowell’s “consequentially ascribed” desires can perhaps be accommodated along these lines, although there is equal reason to suppose that they are more appropriately aligned with the relevant (will-involving) cognitive states. This leaves some scope for the propositional account, albeit from within a framework that gives explanatory priority to the evaluative conceptions such desires presuppose and without which it would be entirely mysterious why they occurred in the first place. This explanatory point

202  Fiona Ellis is familiar from our protagonists, but there is a question of what follows for an understanding of the reason/desire distinction once it is granted that desire has an irreducibly cognitive dimension. A further and more intractable problem concerns the nature of the goodness to which we are attracted in this respect. McDowell and Levinas are keen to distance themselves from a conception of reason that is either narrowly theoretical or divorced from anything that could engage our interests, and they reject the idea that desire could only ever be viewed in non-cognitive terms. So it is denied that the distinction between reason and desire maps onto that between the cognitive and the non-cognitive, and both of them grant that desire and cognition can stand in the closest connection. McDowell insists on a distinction between the two, given his belief that reasons themselves can motivate. On position then, there can be motivating reasons, and it is wrong to suppose that only desires can perform this role. Reason and desire are to be distinguished in this respect, but the desires to be rejected in this latter context are the “feelings” or “passions” that figure in the disputed position and are to be opposed therefore to Levinasian desire and to the “consequentially ascribed” desires that figure in McDowell’s account. I have suggested that one way of dealing with these latter desires is to identify them with those we acquire on the basis of our motivating attraction to the good. But this still leaves the question of whether it makes sense to impose a reason/desire distinction at the level of the attraction itself, even whilst granting that such attraction is irreducibly cognitive. Talbot Brewer has done some important work in this context, taking as his starting point the idea that desire qua motivating attraction to the good operates within the space of moral reasoning. Thus understood, it is a dimension of our rational capacity to apprehend the good, presenting us with “an inchoate sense of how or why it would count as good to act as [the relevant desires] incline us to act.”77 More specifically, desires are “vivid and/or persistent appearances[emphasis added] of goods or reasons.”78 Not just any such appearance constitutes a desire for something can seem good, and it can seem to us that we have reason to do something even when there is no corresponding desire.79 Desires, by contrast, are “appearances with respect to which we are in some significant measure passive. Their occurrence is not wholly dependent upon our active efforts to bring into view the appearances of goodness in which they consist.”80 Such efforts involve practical judgment, and desires can conflict with judgment, when, for example, we see goods or reasons whilst judging there to be none and treat the relevant desires as misguided or foolish.81 The appearances in this latter context turn out to be deceptive, and describing these desires as misguided rather than false makes clear that they are not to be confused with beliefs. It cannot be ruled out either that such desires will persist in the face of opposing moral reflection.

Desire for the Good 203 Appearances of goodness are not bound to be deceptive, and desire in this context serves to inform and even bolster our judgments. It should be clear from what has been said that there is an equal and opposite influence from judgment to desire, although this is not to deny that there will be difficult and sometimes intractable questions concerning how best to reconcile these different levels of response.82 All of this gives desire a central cognitive role, whilst lending emphasis to features that distinguish it from other modes of evaluative cognition. The attraction it involves is peculiarly “vivid” and “persistent,” we remain to some degree passive with respect to its operations, and it provides us with an “inchoate sense of how or why it would count as good to act as [it] inclines us to act.” This inchoate sense can be influenced and refined by moral reflection—to the point where doing what is required can come perfectly naturally. Thus understood, reason is no longer an alien presence that remains severed from anything we could remotely value (Foot’s concern). On the contrary, it is something to which we are already responsive by virtue of being desiring and reflective beings. Thinking is central to Levinas’s conception of the desiring being, but he identifies it with desire, distinguishes it from ordinary thought and reflection, and takes it to involve the revelation of a moral/theistic dimension of reality to which we become properly receptive only in our moral interactions with others. Such a position flies in the face of the propositional conception of desire, and it would be problematic by McDowell’s lights, given the clear theistic overtones. He would presumably take his own position to be a panacea to such excesses—a Platonism in which goodness is brought back down to earth. We know, of course, that Levinas has similar earthly ambitions, and it is no part of his position that goodness inhabits some second, supernatural realm. On the contrary, it is embodied in our moral relations with others, such encounters providing the only way of relating authentically to God. I have argued elsewhere that there is a knife edge between their respective positions and that McDowell has good reason to take seriously this brand of theism.83 Given Levinas’s insistence that desire’s object must elude our attempts to comprehend it, he can agree with Brewer that the intimations of goodness it provides are “inchoate.” He agrees also that we are passive with respect to desire’s movement—we receive something that we cannot produce from our own resources—and that the relevant intimations have a striking phenomenology. As he puts it, my powers are “paralysed,” and he talks elsewhere of a “dazzling, where the eye takes more than it can hold.”84 Finally, it is crucial to his position that we are “taught” in this context—a “rational teaching” that concedes something to the idea—endorsed by McDowell and Brewer—that moral progress is possible. The difference, of course, is that this is all articulated from within the framework of theism, but I have said already that Levinasian theism is unorthodox, the crucial defining claim being that there is an external

204  Fiona Ellis source of value to which we are receptive in our moral relations with others. McDowell and Brewer would not take issue with this, and Foot herself has no obvious ground for resistance once it is made clear that it is our status as desiring human beings that puts us in a position to appreciate such value and to be motivated (fallibly and not invariably) by the requirements it imposes.

6. Conclusions I have identified some points of agreement between McDowell and Levinas on the nature of the desire for the good, and have used their work as a starting point from which to explore what I take to be an eminently defensible position. The position in question is a form of Platonism, and it has clear theistic potential. However, it raises the question of what it could really mean to bring God into the equation, and how the desire for God might be understood once we have moved beyond the disputed objectifying approaches. Levinas imposes strict limits upon what can be said about desire’s object in this context, but his apophaticism is not complete, and we end up learning quite a lot about what it could be to relate authentically to a God who does not appear in the manner of anything else. We learn for a start that morality is fundamental, and that aspiring “knowers” of God must abandon theory in favor of praxis. Hence the knife edge with McDowell. McDowell’s brand of moral realism is itself contentious, and the Hobbesian/Neo-Humean position with which I began has a point for those naturalists who look askance at the very idea that there could be an external source of value. I agree with McDowell that the relevant objections are inconclusive, and would second Platts’s diagnosis that the queerest thing about such arguments—to the effect that an external source of value is too queer to be part of our ontology and too queer to be known—is that they are arguments. As he puts it, “[t]he world is a queer place,” and “we discover moral truths in the way that we discover most (if not all) truths: by attention, perception, and reflection.”85 It has been crucial to the position I have sought to defend that these capacities are in place and that they are operative not simply when we are in the business of affirming moral truths, but when we are striving to be good. It is in this latter context that desire assumes a pivotal role.86

Notes 1. The relevant line of thought is well spelled out and criticized by Akeel Bilgrami in his excellent paper “The Wider Significance of Naturalism: A Genealogical Essay,” in Naturalism and Normativity, ed. Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 2. L. A. Selby-Brigge, ed., Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 469.

Desire for the Good 205 3. Leviathan (1651), book 1, chapter 6 (London: Wordsworth, 2014), 43. 4. This is how John McDowell describes the position in his “Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?” in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 83. 5. I borrow these terms of description from Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1985 (1970)), 75. 6. Mark Platts presses this important question in his “Moral Reality and the End of Desire,” in Reference, Truth, and Reality, ed. Mark Platts (London: Routledge, 1980), 74–78. 7. Murdoch’s “Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?” 82. Iris Murdoch has a similar position in mind when she objects to the idea that “man is a combination of an impersonal rational thinker and a personal will.” The Sovereignty of Good, 40. 8. See John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 77. 9. The most significant figure for my work—other than McDowell—has been David Wiggins, Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), but I have also taken inspiration from James Griffin, Value Judgement: Improving Our Ethical Beliefs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Platts, “Moral Reality and the End of Desire.” See Fiona Ellis, God, Value, and Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) for more details. The position takes much of its inspiration from the work of Iris Murdoch. Murdoch’s position is spelled out in her The Sovereignty of Good and can be seen to emerge in her much earlier contribution to the Symposium R. W. Hepburn, “Vision and Choice in Morality,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, Vol. 30, Dreams and Self-Knowledge (1956), 32–58. See Justin Broackes’s excellent introductory essay in his Iris Murdoch, Philosopher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1–92 for some relevant details concerning Murdoch’s influence on McDowell and others. 10. Philippa Foot, “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives,” The Philosophical Review 81, no. 3 (July 1972): 305–16. 11. David Wiggins, “Categorical Requirements: Kant and Hume on the Idea of Duty,” in Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory, ed. Rosalind Hursthouse, Gavin Lawrence and Warren Quinn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 297. 12. Foot, “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives,” 313. 13. Ibid., 310. 14. McDowell, “Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?” 78–79. 15. For more on this point, see Bilgrami’s, “The Wider Significance of Naturalism,” 33; Platts, “Moral Reality and the End of Desire,” 77; David Wiggins, “Truth, Invention, and the Meaning of Life,” in Needs, Values, Truth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 106. 16. McDowell, “Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?” 79. 17. Ibid., 80. Foot herself comes to reject her earlier position, claiming that she endorsed it because she “held a more or less Humean theory of reasons for action, taking it for granted that reasons had to be based on an agent’s desires.” Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 10. 18. This Humean/Hobbesian picture has tended to prevail in analytic discussions of reason and desire, one motive being to avoid the supposed difficulties that arise when it is granted that there is a goodness fixed in the nature of things to which we are responsive at the level of reason and desire. McDowell objects rightly that this narrowly naturalistic vision is eminently contestable and that the considerations in its favor tend to be question-begging (see

206  Fiona Ellis especially McDowell, “Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?” 82–83). 19. This is all clearly spelled out by James Griffin in his Value Judgement, 32–35. 20. Murdoch’s, The Sovereignty of Good, 40. 21. Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 29–30. 22. McDowell, “Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?” 89. 23. Ibid., 86. 24. Ibid., 90. 25. Ibid., 87. 26. Such desires can be described as needs in the sense that they demand satisfaction and also in the sense that the things desired are needed by the desirer. For more on the nature of appetitive desire, see Maria Alvarez, Kinds of Reason: An Essay on the Philosophy of Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 72–80. 27. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 117. 28. Ibid.,114–15. 29. Ibid.,113–14. 30. Adriaan Peperzak, “A Key to Totality and Infinity,” in To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1993), 137. 31. See Michael Morgan, Discovering Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 167–69 for a helpful discussion of Levinas’s relation to McDowell in this context. 32. There are philosophers who generalize this “lack” model to cover desire across the board. Sartre is an obvious case in point, and his position is spelled out in Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956). I discuss the relation between Sartre and Levinas on the question of desire in my “The Quest for God: Rethinking Desire,” in Emotions and Passions, Royal Institute of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 33. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 63. 34. Ibid.,33. 35. Ibid., 35. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 78. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 34, 38, 218. 43. Ibid., 62. 44. Ibid., 179. 45. Emmanuel Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” in Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 75. 46. Hence: “Everything I know of God and everything I can hear of His word and reasonably say to Him must find an ethical expression.” “A Religion for Adults,” in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Séan Hand (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1990), 17. 47. Paul Fiddes, “The Quest for a Place Which Is ‘Not-a-place’: The Hiddenness of God and the Presence of God,” in Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 47. We should note that Levinas himself explicitly rejects the notion of

Desire for the Good 207 participation in this context, claiming that “participation is a denial of the divine.” (Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 78). Levinas seems to think that talk of participation is bound to compromise God’s reality and our relation to Him, but this is because he is building questionable assumptions into the term’s meaning—as if it could only ever involve the objectification of God and the disappearance of man. I take it to involve whatever Levinas is talking about when he talks about our giving expression to the infinite. For more on this—and some important criticisms of Levinas’s position—see John Milbank’s, “Plato Versus Levinas: Gift, Relation, and Participation,” in Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy, Theology, Politics, ed. Adam Lipszye (Warsaw: Adam Mickiewickz Institute, 2006). 48. Fiddes, “The Quest for a Place Which Is ‘Not-a-place,’ ” 55. 49. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 33. 50. Ibid. 51. Emmanuel Levinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite,” in To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Adriaan Peperzak (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1993), 114. 52. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 63. 53. Ibid., 119. 54. Levinas talks of a good “beyond being,” but this is no invitation to ascend to some mysterious noumenal realm. The point is, rather, to insist upon the irreducibility of the moral in the face of those strategies that aim to reduce value to some non-evaluative matter. See Ellis, God, Value, and Nature, 121–24. 55. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 131. 56. Ibid., 203. 57. Levinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite,” 114. 58. Ibid., 110. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., 111. 62. McDowell, “Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?” 93. 63. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 196–98. 64. Ibid., 199. 65. Compare Simone Weil: “God has got to be on the side of the subject and not on that of the object during all those intervals of time when, forsaking the contemplation of the light, we imitate the descending movement of God so as to turn ourselves towards the world.” The Notebooks of Simone Weil, Vol. 2, trans. Arthur Wills (London: Routledge, 1956), 358. 66. Emmanuel Levinas, “Loving the Torah More Than God,” in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Séan Hand (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press), 145. 67. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 204. 68. Ibid., 62. 69. Ibid. 70. See Platts, “Moral Reality and the End of Desire.” 71. Ibid., 77. 72. The position is well summed up and criticized by Talbot Brewer in his “Three Dogmas of Desire,” in Values and Virtues: Aristotelianism in Contemporary Ethics, ed. Timothy Chappell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 257–84; Talbot Brewer, The Retrieval of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). I am hugely indebted to Brewer’s ground-breaking work in this context. 73. See Brewer, The Retrieval of Ethics, 20–21.

208  Fiona Ellis 74. One might suppose that there is an intelligible propositional equivalent along the lines of “I want that I get closer to, or align myself with, the independently valuable object.” At one level, this seems to capture what is essential to the relevant attraction, but wanting that one be attracted is not the same as being attracted, and one can have the relevant propositional desire without feeling anything at all. See Brewer’s, The Retrieval of Ethics, 57 for more on this. 75. Platts, “Moral Reality and the End of Desire,” 77. 76. Ibid., 79–80. 77. Brewer, The Retrieval of Ethics, 29. 78. Ibid., 32. Versions of this position are to be found in Thomas M. Scanlon’s, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 33–55; Dennis Stampe’s, “The Authority of Desire,” Philosophical Review 96, no. 2 (1987): 335–82. 79. Brewer uses the example of a depressed person. 80. Brewer, The Retrieval of Ethics, 34. 81. Ibid., 29. 82. Ibid., 30. 83. Ellis, God, Value, and Nature, chapter 6. 84. Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” 163. 85. Platts, “Moral Reality and the End of Desire,” 72. 86. I thank John Cottingham and Tal Brewer for comments on an earlier draft of this chapter and for more general discussion of these matters. I am indebted at a more general level to Sarah Coakley, Eddie Howells, and Clare Carlisle.

Bibliography Alvarez, Maria. Kinds of Reason: An Essay on the Philosophy of Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Bilgrami, Akeel. “The Wider Significance of Naturalism: A Genealogical Essay.” In Naturalism and Normativity, edited by Mario De Caro and David Macarthur, 23–54. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Brewer, Talbot. The Retrieval of Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. ———. “Three Dogmas of Desire.” In Values and Virtues: Aristotelianism in Contemporary Ethics, edited by Timothy Chappell, 257–84. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Broackes, Justin. Iris Murdoch, Philosopher. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Ellis, Fiona. God, Value, and Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. ———. “The Quest for God: Rethinking Desire.” In Emotions and Passions, Royal Institute of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Fiddes, Paul. “The Quest for a Place Which Is ‘Not-a-place’: The Hiddenness of God and the Presence of God.” In Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation, edited by Oliver Davies and Denys Turner, 35–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Foot, Philippa. “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives.” The Philosophical Review 81, no.3 (July 1972): 305–16. Griffin, James. Value Judgement: Improving Our Ethical Beliefs. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (1651). London: Wordsworth, 2014.

Desire for the Good 209 Levinas, Emmanuel. “God and Philosophy.” In Of God Who Comes to Mind, translated by Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. ———. “Loving the Torah More Than God.” In Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, translated by Séan Hand, 142–45. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997. ———. “Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite.” In To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1993. ———. “A Religion for Adults.” In Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, translated by Séan Hand, 11–23. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1957. ———. Totality and Infinity. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. McDowell, John. “Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?” In Mind, Value, and Reality, 77–94. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. ———. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Milbank, John. “Plato Versus Levinas: Gift, Relation, and Participation.” In Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy, Theology, Politics, edited by Adam Lipszye. Warsaw: Adam Mickiewickz Institute, 2006. Morgan, Michael. Discovering Levinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Murdoch, Iris. The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge,1985, 1970. Murdoch, Iris, and R.W. Hepburn. “Vision and Choice in Morality.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, Vol. 30, Dreams and SelfKnowledge (1956), 32–58. Platts, Mark. “Moral Reality and the End of Desire.” In Reference, Truth, and Reality, edited by Mark Platts, 69–82. London: Routledge, 1980. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1956. Scanlon, Thomas M. What We Owe to Each Other. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Stampe, Dennis. “The Authority of Desire.” Philosophical Review 96, no. 2 (1987): 335–382. Weil, Simone. The Notebooks of Simone Weil, Vol. 2. Translated by Arthur Wills. London: Routledge, 1956. Wiggins, David. “Categorical Requirements: Kant and Hume on the Idea of Duty.” In Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory, edited by Rosalind Hursthouse, Gavin Lawrence and Warren Quinn, 297–330. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. ———. Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. ———. “Truth, Invention, and the Meaning of Life.” In Needs, Values, Truth. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.

10 On Sociality and Morality Reflections on Levinas, Tomasello, Strawson, Wallace Michael L. Morgan

Regularly, I find myself looking in recent philosophical work for ideas or distinctions that seem, at first glance, akin to something I have found going on in Emmanuel Levinas’s thought. And just as often as I find such moments of apparent comparison, I come to realize, after further thought, that the differences between what I have found and what Levinas is doing emerge as especially interesting and provocative, usually more interesting and provocative than the similarities. All this is part of my longstanding conviction that the importance of Levinas’s work can profitably be exposed and communicated by placing him in conversation with recent philosophical work, in particular by analytic philosophers. There is an important distinction in Levinas’s thinking between what he calls “the ethical,” which he locates in the face-to-face, second-person encounter of each of us with a particular other person, and what he often calls the “political,” which refers to the domain of our everyday lives in which our interpersonal relations occur in various contexts and in which occur our group and institutional lives. For Levinas, the former nexus or linkage is primordial, prior to thought and language, and somehow determinative of all we do and experience; the latter is our lives as we normally live them, marked by consciousness, conceptualization, reason, and everything else. Something like this distinction between a domain of the second person and the domain of group experience and objective understanding can be found in a sketch of a naturalistic account of morality by Michael Tomasello and also, in a more limited context, in P.F. Strawson’s sketch of reactive attitudes in his famous paper, “Freedom and Resentment.”1 In this chapter, I want to explain the distinctions we find in Tomasello and Strawson and then compare and contrast these two distinctions with what Levinas says about the relation between the ethical and the political. My goal is to orchestrate this conversation in order to clarify some features of Levinas’s account.

The Second-Person in Tomasello’s Natural History of Morality One of the central claims of Tomasello’s book is that the development of morality in human beings has passed through two stages, one of

On Sociality and Morality 211 second-person morality and then a second of group morality. He argues that these are two evolutionary stages but also two stages that occur in the lives of individuals. The first is already anticipated in the behavior of great apes, and Tomasello draws on empirical studies of two- and threeyear-olds to demonstrate what this stage involves. He summarizes this stage of “second-person morality” in the following way: [I]nitially, early humans collaborated in joint intentional activities for purely strategic reasons, using others as a kind of “social tool” to further their own interests . . . But over time . . . interdependent collaborative activities structured by joint intentionality fostered in participants a new kind of cooperative rationality. They came to understand that particular collaborative activities had role ideals— socially normative standards—that applied to either of them indifferently, which implied a kind of self-other equivalence. . . . Based on the recognition of self-other equivalence, there arose a mutual respect between partners, and a sense of the mutual deservingness of partners, thus creating second-personal agents. . . . Such secondpersonal agents had the standing to make joint commitments to collaborate and to jointly self-regulate their collaboration. . . . The outcome was what we may call a second-person morality: a dyadic morality of face-to-face interactions between the second-personal agents “I” and “you” (perspectivally defined) collaborating together, and feeling responsible to one another, as a jointly committed “we.” This new morality existed only within the collaborative engagement itself, or when considering such an engagement, and not in other domains of life.2 A crucial stage in the development of such I-you or interpersonal morality was the need to engage in collaborative hunting for scarce food resources and to develop partnerships for carrying out the hunt. Moreover, this involved the development of sympathy for one’s partner and an interest in helping the partner: that is, “an expanded sympathetic concern for non-kin and non-friends, which leads to helping them and, possibly, to a qualitatively new Smithian empathy in which the individual identifies with another in his situation based on a sense of self-other equivalence.”3 In the course of describing these early human collaborative activities, Tomasello gives an account of their practical structure, their forms of agency, their cognitive features, their moral psychology, and their normative features. These latter include, for example, “the understanding of ideal role performance,” which ideals are initially strategic in character, “instrumental and local,” and hence, while normative, they are not yet moral. These are the role ideals for the joint agency of the “we” as well as the specific role ideals for the “I” and the “you.” At the same time, at the cognitive level, the partners come to see their activity as jointly intentional and to develop a “bird’s eye view” of what they are doing. This is the beginning of a kind of impartiality, and it leads to

212  Michael L. Morgan the partner’s “recognition of other persons as agents or persons just as real as oneself—such that the self is seen as just one agent or person among many—[which] provides a reason for considering their concerns as equivalent to one’s own.”4 By itself, as Tomasello underscores, this understanding of self-other equivalence and replaceability is not yet morally normative. But it is the basis for several developments: what becomes a sense of mutual respect, mutual trust, fair treatment, interpersonal evaluations, methods of joint self-regulation, the emergence of legitimate sanctions and protests for violations, and a sense of responsibility to the other partner to live up to the appropriate role ideals.5 This overview, Tomasello contends, is intended to formulate the “moral psychology” for a set of adaptations that require collaborative activities and that involved increased “interdependence” of partners in “producing their life-sustaining resources.” Such a moral psychology ultimately constituted a genuine “second-person morality” or “a kind of second-personal responsibility to their collaborative partners—the original ‘ought’—that was not just a blind emotion or preference, but rather a sense of cooperative rational pressure that innervated their decision making.”6 Finally, Tomasello argues that this stage of development is a “purely second-personal morality” that once existed for early humans who engaged in such joint collaborative activities for foraging and hunting, say, where the role ideals were “only the role-specific ideals inherent in the specific joint intentional activities of the dyad, and the commitment was only local and temporary.” And it also exists for young children, two to three, when they are not yet “interacting socially in meaningful ways beyond the dyad.”7 But human morality, in the history of the species and in the development of individuals, continues on to a further stage, the stage of fullblown group or “objective” morality. This is no longer a morality of sympathy; it is a morality of justice and equality.8 Tomasello begins his account of this stage by noting how practical requirements concerning necessary resources led to the formation of “cultural groups,” each of which became a “big collaborative enterprise.” Thus, with the formation of such groups, “the challenge for modern human individuals was to scale up from a life based on interdependent collaboration with well-known partners to a life lived in a cultural group with all kinds of interdependent groupmates.” This led to the emergence of highly generalized roles and role ideals that were “fully agent independent” and were “maximally generalized ideal standards.” These ideals “came to be conceptualized as the ‘objectively’ right (not wrong) ways to perform the role, including the generic role of simply being a contributing member of the culture.” On the one hand, then, some of these role ideals concerned “things about which the individuals already had second-personal moral attitudes”; that is “they concerned potential issues of sympathy and fairness.” In other words, in some cases, certain ideals and norms simply went from being “dyadic and local to [being] universal and ‘objective.’ ”

On Sociality and Morality 213 On the other hand, some ideals were not created by individuals based on their joint commitments but were simply given to the individual as part of the situation into which they were born; individuals thus were called upon to accept or appropriate norms and ideals as legitimate or to imagine such acceptance or appropriation. The psychological mechanism here was the development of a group-identity and eventually a moral identity that included a sense of loyalty to the group as a moral community.9 Tomasello refers to the development from the second-person morality to the group morality as a process of “scaling up” of a “morality of fairness” based on sympathy to a “morality of justice” based on group identification, loyalty, and eventually as identification with all humanity as a moral community.10 Psychologically, this shift involves “a transition from seeing an equivalence between oneself and one’s collaborative partner . . . to seeing an equivalence among all who would be a member of the cultural group, that is to say, all rational beings.” And this led to everyone’s taking the role ideals associated with such membership to apply to “anyone and everyone, which amounted to a specification of the ‘objectively’ correct and incorrect ways to do things.”11 This amounts to an extension of the notion of joint commitment to a “we” that includes “all members of the group” and further “all rational beings.” Tomasello notes that this development is not only a quantitative one regarding who one identifies with and includes in the “we.” It is also a shift to a different perspective, one that is wholly agent independent and hence “objective” and to an appreciation of role ideals as the “way things ought to be done” that is given with the group as a whole and membership in it. The role ideals are no longer taken to be created and shared by the collaborative partners; they are taken to be part of the furniture of reality, and from this new sense of objectivity, there arise new methods for communicating expectations, for collaborating, and for evaluating conduct. “Thus social norms . . . come to have an independent and objective reality for individuals such that moral violations become less about injuring the particular person and more about rupturing the moral order.”12 Thus, second-person morality of sympathy and fairness becomes group morality of solidarity and justice; the collaborative partners develop moral identities.13 A final point about this development of group morality. Tomasello points out that every cultural group developed an array of conventional social norms; members are expected to conform to these norms, but not all of them are moral norms, and there is no single, coherent set of such moral norms. The ones that are “moralized,” he says, are those that “are connected to natural morality,” which means to the ideals of mutual respect and fairness already associated with second-person morality. That is, “cultural norms do not create morality, only collectivize and objectify it. . . . The point is that cultural norms concern morality to the degree that they connect in some way with humans’ natural attitudes of

214  Michael L. Morgan sympathy and fairness that have existed since before there were groupminded, norm-based cultural groups.” But the outcome of this development and the connections between the two stages of morality is that there will be times when the two moralities conflict with one another. Not only will there be conflicts between the moralities of different cultural groups; even within one community, there can arise conflicts between the “demands of their group-minded cultural morality” and the demands of “their second-personal natural morality.” As Tomasello says, our moral lives are not a single consistent web of norms and practices; it is more messy than that, and one source of that messiness is that the inclination toward treating everyone fairly and equally may, in certain circumstances, conflict with the demands of deferring to those close to us, to family or friends. To put it in terms of the moral psychology that Tomasello sets out, “human beings today thus enter into each and every social interaction with selfish me-motives, sympathetic you-motives, egalitarian motives, group-minded we-motives, and a tendency to follow whatever cultural norms are in effect. . . . All of these motives are always in some sense already there; the only question is which one, or ones, will win the day in particular situations.”14

Strawson’s Reactive Attitudes, the Second-Person, and Morality Tomasello’s evolutionary story, then, distinguishes two stages of moral development; he also claims that both stages or moralities occur in modern human social life. The first stage, second-person morality, introduces sympathy, concern for one’s partner, mutual respect between partners, and a sense of fairness in the treatment of one’s partner. The second stage develops these themes into a sense of justice and equal treatment, and it adds a sense of collective identity and a more general respect for all group members, i.e., the generality and objectivity of certain social norms. Both moralities exist together, along with our own self-interest and a cosmopolitan commitment to all rational beings. Tomasello notes how his view differs from the view Strawson gives in his famous paper, “Freedom and Resentment. But before we consider how and why, we should say a word about Strawson’s account of reactive attitudes and those that are features of morality. P.F. Strawson’s famous paper, “Freedom and Resentment,” has had a rich and controversial afterlife. One of its dimensions that has proven to be profitable for its readers is the conception of reactive attitudes that Strawson introduces and the view of social relations that his conception has seemed to bring with it. Strawson distinguishes between two perspectives that one might take on the interpersonal relations that involve these reactive attitudes. One is the perspective of the agent as a participant in these relations, and the other is the perspective of a third-person

On Sociality and Morality 215 observer of the agent and the relation. On one reading of Strawson’s purpose in the paper, a central point is that even if determinism is true, we would be reluctant to abandon the intelligibility of our capacity for reactive interpersonal relations when understood from our point of view as participants in those relations. In short, the point is that on reflection our social commitments, especially as participants in interpersonal relationships, prove to be so compelling that we would be reluctant to make them dependent on metaphysical beliefs about free will and causal determinism.15 Strawson begins with these “non-detached attitudes and reactions of people directly involved in transactions with each other; of the attitudes and reactions of offended parties and beneficiaries; of such things as gratitude, resentment, forgiveness, love, and hurt feelings” (62).16 These “reactive attitudes and feelings,” as Strawson will later call them, are those had by participants in interpersonal transactions. Once he has clarified these cases, he proposes to go on to discuss “non-participant” or, as he calls them, “impersonal or vicarious” attitudes toward the actions of others.17 So Strawson’s approach is to introduce this large class of human responses to others, what he calls “reactive attitudes,” and to distinguish between those that we have as participants in second-person relations with others and those that we have toward others from the third-person point of view he calls “detached” or “impersonal” and that he associates with therapy or diagnostics. Second, Strawson’s reason for separating these two classes of cases is tied to the dispute between the so-called optimists and pessimists, where the issue concerns especially “punishing and moral condemnation and approval” (62), i.e., whether a commitment to determinism would affect the possibility of morality. As he puts it, the dispute between the optimists and pessimists is particularly about such practices as punishment and attitudes as praise and blame, and these involve a kind of detachment “from the actions or agents which are their objects” (62). Given these distinctions, Strawson proposes first to deal with a class of cases of reactive attitudes where the dispute is not as virulent, the participant cases, and then to turn to those cases where it is more contested or heated. Hence, he starts with cases of reactive attitudes and feelings that are those of participants and not detached and impersonal. Third, Strawson identifies particular cases of attitudes that are paradigmatic of the two types of cases. The paradigm for participant attitudes is resentment or bad feeling (and gratitude—he also adds forgiveness); the paradigm for detached attitudes is moral indignation or moral disapprobation (and moral approval).18 How, then, does Strawson describe the participant reactive attitudes? He summarizes the participant reactions by saying, first, that they “are essentially reactions to the quality of others’ wills toward us, as manifested in their behavior: to their good or ill will or indifference or lack of concern,” and second that “resentment,” as the core case, is “a reaction

216  Michael L. Morgan to injury or indifference” (70). One important distinction that Strawson is here pointing to is between the other person’s behavior or action and the state of mind or “quality of will” that the action or behavior “manifests” to me. What he is interested in are interpersonal practices concerning attitudes or feelings on my part and how they elicit reactions to the attitudes or feelings, the “quality of will,” of the other person. As he puts it earlier, the other person’s quality of will matters to me; we attach great importance to “the attitudes and intentions towards us of other human beings,” and our reactions to others are regularly based on what we take their “attitudes and intentions” to have been (62). The first examples Strawson gives of these attitudes that matter to us are “goodwill, affection, or esteem on the one hand or contempt, indifference, or malevolence on the other” (63). He underscores this claim about the importance of such attitudes by noting how the action itself may produce the same pain or benefit, whether performed accidentally or inadvertently or with malice, but in the latter case, we feel a resentment we do not if we have no reason to think that malice was part of the intention. What we resent about what the other person did is that they did it out of malice or indifference or neglect. The next important point that Strawson makes about these attitudes or intentions is that they (frequently or regularly) occur within the context of the “many different kinds of relationships which we can have with other people—as sharers of a common interest; as members of the same family; as colleagues; as friends; as lovers; as chance parties to an enormous range of transactions and encounters” (63).19 When we act toward one another and express a specific attitude or intention, we do so as participants in temporary or ongoing relationships. Typically, he says, “we demand some degree of good will or regard on the part of those who stand in these relationships to us,” although they differ with the relationship and the situation. These demands or expectations we have regarding one another, then, are tied to these relationships in various ways, as appropriate or inappropriate, as required or discouraged, and so forth. Strawson’s central concern is with the “particular conditions in which [these reactive attitudes] do or do not seem natural or reasonable or appropriate” (65). Since his focus is on whether the belief in determinism would count as a condition for doubting the propriety or reasonableness of having some particular reactive attitude, Strawson proceeds to classify various types of conditions that might have such an effect, to see if any would presuppose a conviction about the agent’s rational control of what he had said or done. In particular, he distinguishes between conditions that might lead us to doubt the propriety of such a reactive attitude toward the injury that occurred and conditions that might lead us to doubt the propriety of such a reactive attitude toward the agent him- or herself. In other words, some pleas or excuses might lead us to withhold the normal reactive attitudes because something interfered with the

On Sociality and Morality 217 “normal inter-personal relationships” or the expectations and demands that are associated with them. Indeed, the kinds of pleas that Strawson is most interested in, such as the claim that the agent is only a child or is a “hopeless schizophrenic,” are ones that “invite us to suspend our ordinary reactive attitudes towards the agent, either at the time of his action or all the time” (65). Moreover, he takes up these kinds of pleas or conditions from both the objective and the participant perspectives, but it is primarily the latter that interest him. For our purposes, however, what is most important are not his comments about how qualifications in the agent’s rationality and control over his or her actions alter the propriety of our natural reactions. It is that the primary participant reactions— gratitude, resentment, and forgiveness—are evaluative responses to the state of mind of the violator and are deemed to be “natural human reactions” within normal human relationships and interpersonal encounters. These human relationships, furthermore, require the participation of the parties involved, and this means, as Strawson emphasizes, that the perspective of the parties is the participant or first-person second-person point of view. To abandon this participant or subjective standpoint for the objective or detached standpoint totally and completely is, Strawson claims, “practically inconceivable” (68). Thus, the demands or expectations that we associate with these interpersonal relationships and with the reactions of one participant to the intentions and mode of will of the other party are second-person demands or expectations. They are about how you ought to act toward me, how I ought to react to you, and how you ought to react to me. Finally, for Strawson, these interpersonal relationships and the attitudes we have toward one another that are associated with them are “natural” or, as he puts it, “our natural human commitment to ordinary interpersonal attitudes . . . is part of the general framework of human life” (70). This commitment, many of these relationships, and the reactive attitudes themselves are all given with human life as we know it; they are not a priori, nor are they accidental, and they certainly are not created or invented to deal with how others’ attitudes seem to us. Roughly speaking, this is what “natural” seems to mean to Strawson.20 Thus far, then, Strawson has been talking about reactive attitudes that the participant in an interpersonal relationship has toward the other party in the relationship and hence toward the person who failed to meet the demands or requirements regarding what to do and the expected attitude of mind toward the agent associated with the relationship. Against this background, Strawson now turns to objective or detached reactive attitudes, ones that he takes to include what he calls “moral indignation” or “moral disapprobation” (70–71). He calls these “impersonal or vicarious or generalized” analogues of the personal reactive attitudes. In those participant cases, we should recall, there was “an expectation of, and demand for, the manifestation of a certain degree of goodwill or regard

218  Michael L. Morgan on the part of the other human beings towards ourselves, or at least on the expectation of, or demand for, an absence of the manifestation of active ill will or indifferent disregard” (71). Hence, “the generalized or vicarious analogues of the personal reactive attitudes rest on, and reflect, exactly the same expectation or demand in a generalized form,” which means that they reflect or express “the manifestation of a reasonable degree of goodwill or regard, on the part of others, not simply towards oneself, but towards all those on whose behalf moral indignation may be felt, i.e., as we now think, towards all men” (71).21 These, then, are generalized or impersonal versions of the personal or participant reactive attitudes to the relevant “expectations or demands.” It is with these impersonal or detached reactions that moral appraisal enters into our relationships with others, and while they may target and apply to a particular other person who has violated a norm or requirement, they express an assessment or appraisal of others generally.22 Furthermore, just as earlier Strawson considered various classes of pleas regarding the conditions regarding the others that make one’s personal reactive attitudes appropriate, so here he considers pleas regarding the others that make one’s impersonal or generalized reactive attitudes appropriate and that must also be in place for the self-reactive attitudes to be appropriate. That is, in order to take someone for whom moral obligation is appropriate or in reaction to whom one might feel moral approbation or moral disapproval, the person must have a moral sense; we must be able to see him or her “as a morally responsible agent, as a term of moral relationships, as a member of the moral community” (73). These are the central claims that Strawson, in the course of his evaluation of the role that the metaphysical belief in determinism ought to play in our moral lives, makes about our social lives, about the attitudes and feelings we have in response to the conduct of others, and about the interpersonal relationships in which these attitudes and feelings function. First, in our social lives, we regularly engage in a variety of relationships, from very informal ones to ones that are more formal and regularized, such as being a parent and child or being friends, teacher and student, lawyer and client. Second, participants in such relationships can view the other party from a second-person, participant point of view or, alternatively, they can view the other party or the relationship from a third-person, objective (detached, impersonal) point of view. Third, in our relationships with others, there are expectations that one party rightfully has of the other. Sometimes these are demands or requirements that the other party ought to meet, e.g., the requirements of friendship, the obligations that a promisor incurs when a promise is made to a particular person, and the expectations teachers and students have of one another. Furthermore, there are also expectations or demands that the subject can have of the other party concerning their attitude toward the subject or their “quality of will,” i.e., about how seriously they ought to take the

On Sociality and Morality 219 subject and the kind of concern or sensitivity or attention the subject has a right to expect. In addition, there will be expectations each party has of the other about how they might appropriately respond to what each one does with regard to the other. Third, when one party to a relationship acts toward the other in a particular way, the other participant can and often will react not only to the conduct itself but also to the “quality of will” or “intention” of the agent. Fourth, such reactions often take the form of an attitude or feeling directed toward or aimed at the agent, one feature of which attitude or feeling is how it interprets and evaluates the agent’s supposed good or ill will or indifference or disregard. Fifth, one subset of such reactive attitudes or feelings, when these are objective or generalized, involves moral evaluation of the agent’s intention, and these include moral disapprobation or moral approval or blame or praise. Finally, Strawson takes this array (or system) of attitudes and feelings to be essential to our social lives and to be natural for us as human beings. It requires no external justification as a system or framework; it is sufficient for us to take this array or system as a natural feature of human life.23 As I indicated earlier, Tomasello takes his own account of the development of second-person morality and then group or cultural morality to differ in an important way from Strawson’s sketch of reactive attitudes and interpersonal relationships. But before we turn to Tomasello’s criticism and then to Levinas, I want to look first at an interpretation and development of the Strawsonian picture by Jay Wallace, which will help us sharpen the difference between Tomasello and Strawson.

Wallace on Strawson, Reactive Attitudes, and Interpersonal Relations Wallace’s paper is about how the reactive attitudes are connected to our “involvement or participation” in interpersonal, human relationships.24 Wallace extracts a specific set of attitudes from those Strawson mentions, and he looks at them in a very precise way, in order to argue about the implications of emotional reactions for our moral relations with others. In the course of his argument, Wallace clarifies a number of features of Strawson’s account or makes decisions about how to read them and with what implications. Several of these features or problems will be our entrée to placing Levinas alongside Strawson and in conversation with Wallace. Wallace begins his paper by noting that one of Strawson’s claims about the moral sentiments is that “there is a connection between reactive attitudes and involvement in human relationships,” and he glosses this claim with the paraphrase, “Strawson’s basic contention [is] that the reactive attitudes are attitudes of involvement in human relationships” (119). This is already a striking move by Wallace. It is one thing to say that there is a connection between certain reactive attitudes and human relationships and another to say that the reactive attitudes are attitudes of

220  Michael L. Morgan involvement or participation in human relationships. Wallace sees this clearly. Suppose that human relationships can be said regularly and normally to come with expectations or requirements that one party has with regard to the actions and attitudes of the other party. Wallace distinguishes between two conceptions of human relationships. According to one, these expectations and requirements that each party in the relationship has with regard to the other participant are moral requirements and are tied to the reactive attitudes one party expresses regarding the other. On this conception, then, in order for this to be a human relationship at all, it must include participants who act and react to one another in moral ways, and these moral ways are built into the network of reactive attitudes that each can appropriately enact toward one another. According to another, “more familiar conception of an interpersonal relationship,” each such relationship is “a socially salient pattern of historical interaction and attachment, as when we speak of our relationships to our friends, family members, colleagues, and so on” (119). Wallace admits that within such relationships, the participants will act toward one another and react emotionally in various ways, but the reactive attitudes must be understood to be “relational” in the more fundamental way described by the first conception. Wallace notes that getting clear about this “more fundamental” or “deeper” character of reactive attitudes as relational will facilitate understanding of why Strawson thinks that the system or network of such attitudes and of interpersonal relations of which they are a part are inescapable or unavoidable, regardless of what metaphysical beliefs we might or might not hold. The core of Wallace’s account, then, is to clarify this more fundamental or relational conception of reactive attitudes as involving moral requirements and as defining natural interpersonal relationships. And the centerpiece of that core are two points: first that “paradigm examples” of reactive attitudes are “the emotions of resentment, indignation, and guilt” and second that “their defining feature is their connection with demands or expectations.”25 The latter is crucial. Characteristic of these specific reactive emotions is how they involve “holding someone to a demand or expectation” (122). When people are related to one another, they must be able to “demand consideration or regard from” the others to whom they are related, and this means that if “they fail to live up to the expectations one holds them to,” this regard or consideration is expressed by “their being susceptible to resentment or indignation toward them” (122). As Wallace notes, this connection between the reactive attitudes and the susceptibility to certain demands or expectations is something that Strawson mentions but does not emphasize or elaborate.26 But it is central to Wallace. How then, Wallace asks, does this help us understand how reactive emotions are connected to involvement in interpersonal relationships? Let me give his answer in my own way. The demands or expectations that

On Sociality and Morality 221 Wallace has in mind are what Strawson called “participant reactive attitudes” because they are intrinsically relational demands or expectations. That is, in the case of resentment, for example, failing to meet a demand is to fail a particular other party to whom I am related and involves an intention toward that other party or ill will toward that party. To fail to meet a demand in such a case is to fail the person who has the right to make the demand; it is to injure that person and to express thereby a certain attitude toward him or her. In response to this attitude and the agent’s action, the injured participant feels resentment. Wallace’s way of putting this is to say that Strawson’s distinction between the participant and the objective points of view “tracks extensionally” the distinction between contexts in which there is a susceptibility to the reactive attitudes of resentment and indignation and those in which there is not. As an example, he calls our attention to the detached or impersonal perspective appropriate to the therapist’s relation to a client and the way that a therapist can slip into an inappropriate relation by taking a client’s comment personally.27 But this point seems to assume that those who are susceptible to these particular reactive attitudes are involved or participate in interpersonal relationships, which seems to mean second-person relationships. But why is this so? What has the one got to do with the other? The problem is that, for Strawson, the reactive attitudes that express moral indignation or moral disapprobation seem not to be associated with second-person relationships; rather they seem to be the “impersonal and vicarious analogues of resentment” and hence are associated with the objective or therapeutic point of view. In what sense, then, do the narrowly participant reactive attitudes “reflect” involvement in interpersonal relationships? As Wallace puts it, surely we can react with appropriate moral emotion to those with whom we seem to have no second-person relationship. Furthermore, it also seems quite possible for us to have close personal relationships with others, who nonetheless would not be susceptible to the narrow set of participant attitudes Wallace focuses on, the morally judgmental ones. In short, being susceptible to these reactive emotions seems neither necessary nor sufficient for being involved in an interpersonal relationship. As a reading of Strawson, Wallace’s worries here seem obvious. After all, as Strawson presents the reactive attitudes and makes the distinction between the participant point of view and the objective point of view, the reactive attitudes of resentment and indignation occur only from the former perspective, while the “analogues” of those attitudes— moral disapprobation and moral indignation—only occur, as vicarious and generalized versions, from the objective or therapeutic, third-person perspective. Hence, it is obvious, according to Strawson’s account, that moral reactive attitudes are only indirectly related to our involvement in interpersonal relationships; that is, the two are connected exclusively insofar as the objective and moral reactive attitudes can only occur if we

222  Michael L. Morgan are already, from a personal and participating point of view, involved with others in interpersonal relationships in which the reactive attitudes we express have demands and expectations that are “analogues” to the ones we hold universally and impersonally. In other words, the moral reactions only occur once the participant is no longer in a second-person relation to all those others. Or, as we might put Strawson’s view: there are a host of reactive attitudes, and they can be had from a variety of points of view, but one thing seems certain, that either a reactive emotion can be that of a participant or it can be a moral emotional reaction, but it cannot be both. Wallace’s response to these problems is to argue that the small group of reactive attitudes he has in mind already have an “implicitly relational structure” (125). This is a very important point; in fact, it will provide the link I have been hoping to find between Strawson and Levinas. Here we need to ask how Wallace works out this claim about the reactive emotions. Later we will compare his strategy with a Levinasian strategy for doing something like the same thing. The core claim of Wallace’s solution is that a reactive emotion, especially, for example, resentment, “presupposes relational requirements,” i.e., “requirements that specify things that we owe specifically to other people” (126). A reactive attitude involves an evaluation of the intention of a particular other person whose conduct fails to meet a demand or requirement that I make of him or her. Wallace puts this by identifying three features of the reactive attitude of resentment; he calls them injury, quality of will, and demand (126). The first feature, injury, refers to the fact that the other’s conduct must have a negative effect on me in particular; the second feature refers to the way in which the injury or harm is interpreted by the injured person in terms of the other person’s quality of will or intention toward him or her. And the third feature calls attention to something we have mentioned before and that Wallace focuses on: that the other person’s violation must be of a demand (or expectation or requirement) that I hold the other person to meet, i.e., the expectation or requirement is one that I hold regarding this particular other person. In the case of promising, for example, the injury done involves the other’s breaking a promise he or she made with me or I made with her or him so that the demand to keep the promise is one each party makes of the other. If Wallace is right, then, the specific relationship, the demands it contains, and the possible reactions to failing to meet those demands—this whole nexus is relational in the sense that the parties to it relate to one another in a second-person way. It is important to keep in mind, however, that the demand in question, the expectation that one party has of the other, is targeted and not generalized or indeterminate in terms of the person on whom it falls. Hence, in the case of a promise, it is the relation of promise making and promise keeping that makes failure to comply a moral fault. For Strawson and for Wallace, if his reading of Strawson is plausible, the

On Sociality and Morality 223 demands in question are not necessarily moral demands; they are reasonable demands or expectations, given the relationship between the parties. One might resent what another person has done or failed to do, thinking they have shown disregard or even worse toward you, and be justified, if you were friends or relatives or neighbors, and what they have done might be taken to be insensitive or unkind but not for that reason morally wrong.28 In such second-person relations, Wallace argues, the demands or requirements that fall upon others are not generic or global; they are targeted, in the sense that these demands or requirements, which he calls “moral requirements,” are “constitutively connected to normative claims or entitlements that are held by other parties” (131). Hence, on this relational interpretation, the failure to act on the demand or requirement is a “failure to acknowledge or take seriously the claims of other parties . . . [which is] a form of disregard for another person, a source of claims” (131). In this way, the injured party has a particular right that others do not share to respond to the very particular injury done to him or her by this attitude of disregard.29 Moreover, Wallace associates this relational interpretation of the reactive attitudes, especially of one like resentment, with a view like Scanlon’s that claims that “morality can be understood as a condition for the possibility of relating to other people in a distinctively valuable way, which we might characterize as mutual recognition or regard” (131).30 We need not elaborate here in detail Wallace’s reasons for thinking that the view of reactive attitudes as relational that he is here promoting is connected to Scanlon’s account of morality as involving the mutual recognition of the claims of other people.31 Basically, Wallace’s claim is that what Scanlon looks at in terms of making the moral demand, he looks at—a la Strawson—in terms of the reacting to the failure to meet that demand. In short, for Wallace, Strawson introduces an aspect of the moral life that is consistent with the picture of morality that Scanlon gives in his contractualism, albeit with some modifications. Wallace’s relational interpretation of the selected set of reactive attitudes—resentment, indignation, and guilt—was proposed, as Wallace goes on to clarify, in order to solve a major problem with Strawson’s contention that “the reactive attitudes are attitudes of involvement or participation in interpersonal relations” (134). As Wallace puts it, the connection between the reactive attitudes and involvement in interpersonal relations hardly seems a tight one. Clearly there are occasions when we want to react to a person’s acts with indignation or moral disapproval even when we have “no interactions” with that person of any kind, and there are occasions when we have long and continuous relations with others when reactive emotions seem inappropriate. But Strawson, Wallace claims, wants the connection to be a tight one: the reactive attitudes are attitudes of involvement or participation.

224  Michael L. Morgan Wallace puts this another way: when it comes to the connection between the reactive attitudes and interpersonal relationships, there are three considerations at issue: involvement or participation in the interpersonal relationship, susceptibility or propriety of reactive attitudes, and objectivity or generality. Wallace claims that Strawson often has reactivity and participation collapse into one another and sets them over against objectivity. But Wallace denies this exclusion. He argues that there are degrees of socially salient relationships, from ongoing and close relationships, such as family membership or friendship, to casual encounters or temporary social meetings, such as chance encounters with a stranger, and while the former come with much greater reactive demands, the latter may still have some or make similar demands but to a lesser or weaker degree. With regard to objectivity, Wallace notes that Strawson is right to call this an attitude or better a stance and to contrast it with the attitude or stance of participation or involvement. But this means that objectivity is an option for the participants in an ongoing socially salient relationship, say friendship, to forgo the participant stance in favor of a more detached and hence impersonal point of view. Wallace makes this case by starting with the interpersonal relationships and asking how they—say ongoing socially salient relationships like being members of the same family or being friends—are connected to the reactive attitudes. His point is that being in such relationships makes having these attitudes or emotions appropriate and possible, but it does not require that we always, in fact, have them or react in these ways. What is central to the reactive emotions is that they follow from specific demands or requirements so that when each party to the relationship expects the other party to meet these demands, each also expects that failure to comply opens him or her to a normatively inflected emotional reaction. As Wallace puts it, “interpersonal relationships are normatively structured by a reciprocal nexus of obligations and claims of the kind that makes the reactive attitudes intelligible, and that is acknowledged and affirmed by them when they are in fact experienced” (135). But Wallace’s point is that this account of the relational character of these relationships does not require that the reactive emotions actually be felt or experienced; they might not be, but the normative structure makes them appropriate and makes the party who has been injured susceptible to feeling them. But, Wallace goes on to worry, if moral requirements or demands apply to our dealings with everyone, then “there are claims that we have on each other simply as persons, and not in virtue of the special relationships that we stand in with the other party” (136). Does this not dilute the notion of a relational nexus or interpersonal relation so that, in fact, we have them with everyone? And if so, what does that do to Strawson’s distinction between the participant perspective and the objective or detached perspective? Wallace’s response is to note that we should treat interpersonal relationships as a spectrum of cases, from ongoing, intimate, or

On Sociality and Morality 225 strong relationships, what he calls “thick” relationships, to ones that are casual, weak, and infrequent and even non-proximate or “abstract.”32 It is in the case of the thick relationships, he argues, that we have the special obligations and requirements that are a paradigm for how failure to meet them elicits powerful reactions on the part of the partner who is the victim or injured party. Even though these overlap with more generic, moral requirements, they elicit stronger emotional responses and are the paradigm for the moral, generic cases. Wallace mentions in particular the “disappointments and hurt feelings, the sense of betrayal and being let down, that people are distinctively subject to when they stand in these kinds of relationships to each other” (137). These thick relationships and the strong reactions to failures within them, then, are the paradigm, and the more generic, detached perspective of moral evaluation and reaction is modeled on them. Moreover, there are moments when only these more generic attitudes will apply, e.g., when our only relation to the other person is as a person per se and where there is no discernible or relevant “thick” relationship. And in cases where both apply, the hurt or injured party can choose which attitude or stance to take up, whether to respond to the other person’s failure with very particular hurt feelings or resentment or to respond with a more generic form of moral judgment or emotional reaction. As Wallace puts it, we stand in some highly generic reciprocal relations to every other person as a bearer of claims against us and toward whom we have obligations and vice versa, so that there is some sense in saying that our moral involvement with others is always relational in this sense.33 These moral relations of course are, in a sense, inescapable, but when it comes to how in any particular case we respond, we might well choose to react more personally or, in other cases, to set aside our personal reactions in favor of taking the “moral high ground,” so to speak.34

Tomasello on Strawson—and Wallace As I have indicated, Tomasello sees important differences between his own view of second-person and group moralities and Strawson’s account of the reactive attitudes and their implication for morality. And once we look at those differences, we can also see how Tomasello’s view compares to Wallace’s. We will do this first and then turn to Levinas. As Tomasello puts it, “Strawson thinks that the possibility of a purely second-personal morality is barely imaginable because he thinks this means a world of ‘moral solipsists,’ each of whom thinks that she is the only author and target of reactive attitudes, which is almost a contradiction in terms.”35 We can reformulate Tomasello’s point as one about whether dyadic second-personal collaborations, as he describes them for early human beings and for young children, constitute moralities, whether they can occur as a distinct stage of human moral development,

226  Michael L. Morgan and whether the demands and interests that the participants have within them can contend with other demands and interests in our lives. Tomasello seems to want to answer yes to all three of these questions, while he takes Strawson to answer no at least to the first two and to admit the third only if the demands and interests are not taken to be moral ones. To Tomasello, the crucial development is that the participants in secondpersonal collaborations make a “joint commitment” to their projects and activities. “Within these ‘we’ relations they are not just acting and reacting to one another as individuals with personal preferences and attitudes; rather, they are holding one another accountable with respect to more or less impartial standards independent of either of them,” and with these standards is introduced the interest in fairness in treatment, reward, recognition, and so forth. To be sure, for Tomasello, this is not yet a regime of justice; the scope is still limited to the two partners, and the ideal role standard is limited and not general and “objective.” But this fairness is one step away, he argues, from a full-fledged group-centered morality. That is, for Tomasello, Strawson’s treatment of resentment and especially the sense in which it is a response to the other person’s attitude, his ill will toward one fails to appreciate the sense in which the “I” and the “you” develop a sense of collective identity and a mutual respect that involves sympathy for the other and a sense of replaceability. In a sense, while Strawson allows for situations where an individual faces the alternative of acting impartially toward another or acting out of special, personal interests, he would not treat this as a moral dilemma but rather as a special kind of conflict between self-interest and morality. Wallace’s revision of Strawson can be viewed as one way to add nuance to both Strawson and Tomasello. Strawson does seem to admit that there are various everyday interpersonal relations in which the parties act and react to one another. But his separation of evaluative emotional reactions into personal ones and vicarious ones and then further classifying them as non-moral and moral seems to be operating at cross-purposes with his distinction between the participant and the detached or impersonal point of view. There are some personal relations—some secondperson interactions—that involve expectations and obligations that have a moral character and some that do not. Indeed, one can see how moral obligations that arise when the interpersonal relations involve distant and generically identified partners could generate emotional actions not so unlike ones present in many personal relations. It is Wallace’s strategy to use the variety of emotional reactions to show when proximate and distant interpersonal relations are morally akin and why. In short, according to Tomasello, second-person relations involve moral obligations, even if they are not yet general and objective, as they come to be in group moralities. According to Strawson, until we have reactive attitudes such as disapproval and disapprobation and a general or detached point of view, we do not yet have moral obligations. Wallace

On Sociality and Morality 227 rejects this sharp separation in Strawson’s account and argues that there are emotional reactions in certain types of second-person relations that already are indicative of the presence of moral duties and obligations. There is much else that distinguishes these three accounts, but the one I have been focusing on concerns whether there is a sharp separation, regarding the presence of moral obligations, between second-person interactions and group identification and relations. How, we might now ask, does Levinas’s account of the primacy of the ethical and its relation to the political help us respond to this question and to understand these three responses to it?

Levinas on Ethics, Second-Person Relations, and Beyond Emmanuel Levinas is best known as the philosopher of the other. For him, our lives are grounded in the second-person relation we have with the “face” of the other person. The content of this relation with the other is the self’s infinite responsibility to and for each and every other person insofar as it is the subject’s orientation to the other’s vulnerability and needs. Most of Levinas’s time is spent in exploring the character of this face-to-face structure as a transcendental and orienting dimension of all our interpersonal relations. Alongside all the formal and informal relationships we have with others, there is always this dimension already in place, as it were. Only late in Otherwise Than Being does Levinas say something about how this orienting dimension, what he calls “the saying,” always is manifest in our ordinary, everyday relationships with others, what he calls “the said.” The latter is the domain of being, to use the Heideggerian expression, or of presence, consciousness, ordinary experience, “intentionality,” and so forth. The face-to-face never occurs by itself; it is always part of this larger domain. It is always given as an ethical, normative structure of all our relations with others.36 During the 1970s and 1980s, in numerous papers and interviews, Levinas repeats the basic features of his account of how the face to face is manifest in our everyday experience. For example, in “Uniqueness,” a paper from 1986, Levinas discusses the project of justice, the way in which the face to face and the self’s infinite responsibilities for the other is realized in the complex plurality of social and political life, in the context of a critique of the crisis of Europe. In the paper’s last section, “Justice and the Unique,” Levinas says that this “interpersonal relation [i.e., the face to face] . . . is in no way a repudiation of politics” (195). This, of course, is crucial. In his earlier vocabulary, what this means is that infinity is not a rejection of totality; it is a critique of it. Here he shows how this insight leads to “the liberal state, to political justice, through the plurality of individuals belonging to the “extension’ of the human genus” (195). But “the reference to the face of the other preserves the ethics of that state” (195). “Human multiplicity does not allow the I—let us say

228  Michael L. Morgan does not allow me—to forget the third party who pulls me away from the proximity of the other” (195). This introduction of the third party, alongside the unique other person, is the move from the transcendental second-person structure to the network of second-person relationships and all other kinds of relationships of everyday life, including all kinds of collective identification and collective agency. “The third party, different from my fellowman, is also my fellowman. And he is also the fellowman of the fellowman,” and this is the “moment of justice” (195). That is, once there is more than one other person, the network of interpersonal relationships increases and ramifies, and this will require an extensive process of grouping, classification, comparisons, and ultimately judgments and adjudications. In other words, what occurs in this situation of multiple encounters is an “appeal to Reason capable of comparing incomparables . . . Here, the right of the unique, the original right of man, calls for judgment, and, hence, objectivity, objectification, thematization, synthesis. It takes institutions to arbitrate and a political authority to support all this. Justice requires and establishes the state” (195–96). But within these institutions and within the state, the voice of conscience or the call of ethics is still heard. “Justice . . . awaits the voices that will recall, to the judgments of the judges and statesmen, the human face dissimulated beneath the identities of citizens. Perhaps these are the ‘prophetic voices’ ” (196). And this expression is not simply an anachronism. “They are sometimes heard in the cries that rise up from the interstices of politics and that, independently of official authority, defend the ‘rights of man’; sometimes in the songs of the poets; sometimes simply in the press or the public forum of the liberal states, in which freedom of expression is ranked as the first freedom and justice is always a revision of justice and the expectation of a better justice” (196).37 Admittedly, a picture like this one is anything but analytical and exploratory. But it does point to how, from Levinas’s point of view, the way in which the necessarily second-person, participatory perspective of the face to face with one another, occurs alongside a whole array of other second-person encounters by others and beyond that to all interpersonal relationships. At the same time, the sense of obligation to each unique other person occurs in our everyday experience alongside third-person judgments about what is the most appropriate, most just, fairest, and most effective thing to do in a given social and economic situation or even in a particular situation where deliberation and a decision are called for on the part of each of the parties in an interpersonal relationship. In short, various salient social relationships—from relationships of friendship and family membership to the casual and weak familiarity of people riding together in a bus or standing in line at the grocery store—all occur, as capable of being contexts in which decisions and actions toward others might be called for, while presupposing the various second-person interpersonal encounters that Levinas calls the face to face. The special

On Sociality and Morality 229 expectations or demands that we associate with one another in all such ordinary relationships occur as ways in which each person’s responsibilities to and for the other need to be grouped, compared, ordered, and so forth. From one point of view, each party to every interpersonal relationship in various ways is bound by a host of expectations and even demands or requirements; from another point of view, each party can be expected to respond in various ways or to react emotionally if the expectations and demands that are modes of responsibility are not met or are ignored or are rejected. And these reactions, too, are ways of expressing one’s responsibilities to the other person with whom one is related. Everything we do to another is a way of expressing our responsibility for that other person, and since this kind of responsibility for and accountability to others is ethical, so, in a sense, is everything we do with regard to the other. According to Levinas, then, our second-person stance toward others is fundamental and orienting for all everyday, ordinary experience and in particular for all of our interpersonal relationships. But what he says does not help us very much to understand how the infinite responsibility of each person to each and every other person manifests itself in everyday interpersonal relationships and how it influences the principles, practices, and modes of involvement characteristic of these relationships. To fill out a Levinasian picture would require a great deal of work, but we can say something helpful about it by considering what Levinas contributes to the differences between Tomasello, Strawson, and Wallace on the possibility of second-personal moralities and their relation to group moralities and even a cosmopolitan, universal morality. Tomasello is not clear about why and how the role of sympathy and the presence of fairness in second-person collaborations already involve morality in the sense of moral obligations or duties. Strawson doubts that the reactive attitudes such as resentment do already, in second-person reactions to the others, invoke moral considerations. Wallace helps us see how some such second-person reactions, ones that occur within thick second-person relations, do already involve moral considerations. In short, the question for all three about whether morality must wait for detached, impersonal judgments and ones that incorporate impartiality and justice or whether it can already be present in some second-person relations is a pivotal one. And it is here that Levinas can provide a point of view from which this question is given a radical answer. For Levinas, all interpersonal relations, from the ego or subject’s point of view, already, at any given moment, involve the subject’s infinite responsibility to and for the other person. This holds primordially and “essentially.” It is what sociality or social relations are, more fundamentally than what is given to them by situational or contextual factors. These factors and the complexity that comes with multiplicity brings others’ considerations into view, but what provides all our interpersonal relations with moral

230  Michael L. Morgan normativity is the always-already-given infinite responsibility and vulnerability and dependency. Hence, on Levinas’s picture, second-person relations always have an ethical and moral dimension, and larger networks of such relations have their ethical and moral dimension only insofar as they are expressions and manifestations of these primordial ones. From Levinas’s point of view, what truth there is in Tomasello’s naturalist and evolutionary account can be seen to be a manifestation, in everyday experience, of a structure that underlies all our relations. And the gap that Strawson sees between resentment as a personal reaction and approval or disapproval as social ones is in fact, at a deeper level, grounded in a feature of the interpersonal which both reactive situations involve. In this way, moreover, Levinas provides a reason for seeing the spectrum of which Wallace speaks as a single spectrum of human, interpersonal interrelations so that, in a sense, all stages along the spectrum can be seen to be expressions of ethical responsibilities persons have one to another. In these broad terms, then, the problematic that comes into view by looking at Tomasello, Strawson, and Wallace concerning the possibility or necessity of a second-person morality can be illuminated in a special way, an “ontologically” or “metaphysically” robust way, by turning to Levinas. The kinds of sympathy for others, mutual respect, attentiveness and acknowledgement, and fairness that arise in second-person encounters or relations can all be seen to be expressions of something deeper and “primordial” that lies at the core of all our interrelations. A Levinasian view leads us in this direction; it is one way of locating a background picture against which to consider these interesting contributions to our understanding of the interpersonal in human experience.

Notes 1. See Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); P. F. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” in Free Will, ed. Gary Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 59–80. 2. Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality, 40–41. 3. Ibid., 49. 4. Ibid., 56. 5. Ibid., 56–77. 6. Ibid., 82. 7. Ibid., 83–84. 8. He also calls them “natural” and “cultural” moralities; see Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality, 126. 9. See Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality, 84–87, for a summary of these developments. 10. Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality, 92. He uses this expression, “scaling up,” regularly to refer to the process whereby the secondperson or dyadic collaboration develops into a group and even universal collaboration, with the associated change in the type of morality appropriate

On Sociality and Morality 231 to the two stages. He develops his “scaling up” account of this shift or transition as involving four sets of psychological transformations on pp. 122–25. 11. Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality, 93. See also 95. Tomasello notes that the move to cultural groups is not yet, strictly speaking, a move to all humankind, but it does take the participants to an increasingly “agent-independent perspective” and to greater “objectivity,” which really “represents maximal generality beyond early humans’ more limited partnerindependent perspective from within the dyadic interaction” (95). 12. Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality, 103. 13. The central idea behind “scaling up” is that human beings did not have to create group morality as if they were engaging in a kind of creation out of nothing. Tomasello underscores this point on p. 122: “In our story, from the beginning modern humans possessed early humans’ second-personal morality for face-to-face interactions with collaborative partners, so they did not have to create an ‘objective’ morality from scratch, only scale up their existing second-personal morality to fit a cultural way of life.” 14. Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality, 127–28. 15. See Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” 59: “Others [among those philosophers who say that they do know what the thesis of determinism is]—the optimists perhaps—hold that these concepts and practices [“the concepts of moral obligation and responsibility” and “the practices of punishing and blaming, of expressing moral condemnation and approval”] in no way lose their raison d’ȇtre if the thesis of determinism is true.” All references in the text are to this reprinting of the paper. 16. Strawson’s discussion of these “participant reactive attitudes” takes up pages 62–70. 17. This discussion occurs primarily on pages 70–76. 18. See Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” 70. Strawson here says that the cases he is about to discuss are the “sympathetic or vicarious or impersonal or disinterested or generalized analogues of the [participant] reactive attitudes” (70). 19. Strawson calls these “ordinary inter-personal relationships, ranging from the most intimate to the most casual” (64). 20. Strawson later says: “the existence of the general framework of attitudes itself is something we are given with the face of human society. As a whole, it neither calls for, nor permits, an external ‘rational’ justification” (78). Without some form of such attitudes and feelings, Strawson cautions, it is hard to imagine our having anything we might call “a system of human relationships, as human society” (80). The “general metaphysical proposition” that some require for such a justification concerns determinism, as Strawson sees it, and his concern in the essay is to take such a requirement to overintellectualize the moral life. 21. Later, Strawson refers to the relevant moral attitudes as “that complicated web of attitudes and feelings which form an essential part of the moral life as we know it” (78). 22. Strawson adds one further “set of attitudes” alongside these two, the participant reactive attitudes and the impersonal or detached reactive attitudes. These are “self-reactive attitudes associated with demands on oneself for others,” which include “feeling bound or obliged (the ‘sense of obligation’); feeling compunction; feeling guilty or remorseful or at least responsible; and the more complicated phenomenon of shame” (71–72). Scanlon included this category of self-directed reactions by calling attention to the fact that moral requirements will make the violator susceptible to feelings of self-reproach

232  Michael L. Morgan or guilt. We will come back to these when we turn to Levinas, for whom shame especially is extremely important to how we understand our secondperson relations with others, and for him shame involves a guilt-like feeling that is not wholly internal but that also requires a sense of failing another and failing before the other. 23. As I will discuss later, this issue of justification is one point at which Levinas might be called upon—and compared with others too, e.g., Habermas, Rawls, Scanlon, Gauthier, and a variety of others who treat as fundamental some kind of agreement, contract, or interpersonal (ideal) process of reasoning. Habermas, for example, discusses Strawson in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, 45–50. 24. R. Jay Wallace, “Emotions and Relationships: On a Theme from Strawson,” in Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility Vol. 2, ‘Freedom and Resentment’ at 50, ed. David Shoemaker and Neal A. Tognazzini (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 119–42. 25. Ibid., 122. 26. Wallace, 22, cites Strawson, 77. 27. Wallace, “Emotions and Relationships,” 123. 28. Wallace appears to think that when one is wronged by the other party, it is always a moral issue. But it seems to me that one can be wronged but not morally wronged, e.g., when one fails to invite a particular relative to a family celebration, even if one does it intentionally and not simply as a matter of forgetfulness. In this case, the relative might feel hurt or slighted, but is this really a moral injury or wrong? I do not think so. 29. Wallace does go on to show how his account also suits indignation, as an impersonal reaction, based on a vicarious identification with the person directly targeted, and guilt, as a self-reaction, by the one who has not met the demand that is targeted at a particular other person and as based on the person at fault identifying with the person who has been wronged by one’s conduct; see “Emotions and Relationships,” 131. Wallace also suggests that in the paper he does not give a full-fledged defense of the relational interpretation of morality. He does offer a fuller defense in his new book, R. Jay Wallace, The Moral Nexus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). 30. Wallace cites Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), Chapter 4. 31. For discussion of this connection, see R. Jay Wallace, “Scanlon’s Contractualism,” in Normativity & the Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), Ch. 12, 263–99 and especially 283–89. The essay originally appeared in symposium on Scanlon’s book in Ethics 112 (April 2002). See also, in Scanlon’s replies to his commentators, Ethics 112 (April 2002), 513–14. 32. Strawson already suggested that interpersonal relations occur along this type of spectrum of cases, from strong and “thick” relationships to ones that are casual and involve “chance associations or encounters.” See Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” 63. 33. Wallace, “Emotions and Relationships,” 139: “Exposure to reactive attitudes is a matter of interactions that are structured in terms of relational requirements, whose disregard provides people with a potential normative basis for resentment. But the directional requirements of morality structure our relationships to everyone who is a bearer of claims. We cannot escape the network of these requirements, however compelling our professional or personal reasons might be for wanting to adopt toward others a more objective stance.” 34. For discussion of how the two stances and their implications, see Wallace, “Emotions and Relationships,” 139–42.

On Sociality and Morality 233 35. Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality, 83. For Strawson’s claim that such a morality is “barely imaginable” and that the participants would be “moral solipsists,” Tomasello refers to “Freedom and Resentment,” 72. 36. Levinas says this already in Totality and Infinity, but his specific introduction of the third party and his elaboration of what plurality brings with it thought, conceptual articulation, discrimination, judgment, and so on, only comes in Otherwise Than Being. 37. In an interview, “Dialogue on Thinking-of-the-Other” (1987), in Entre Nous, 204, Levinas says: “in order to be just it is necessary to know: to objectify, compare, judge, form concepts, generalize, etc. Faced with human multiplicity, these operations impose themselves.”

11 Rethinking Vulnerability in a Levinasian Context Diane Perpich

In writings up to and including Totality and Infinity (1961), Levinas rarely if ever uses the word vulnerability. The same texts abound, however, in references to the poor, the weak, the widow, and the orphan. These figures, surrogates of vulnerability, carry significant weight in the early elaboration of the ethical relation. In Totality and Infinity, for example, we read: “The transcendence of the Other, which is his eminence, his height, his lordship, in its concrete meaning includes his destitution, his exile, and his rights as a stranger. I can recognize the gaze of the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, only in giving or in refusing.”1 The claim appears to be that to recognize the Other just is to recognize his or her hunger and destitution; that is, his or her vulnerability. In later works such as Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, vulnerability becomes an explicit term of Levinas’s analysis, but whereas prior works focused exclusively on the vulnerability of the other, the later writings identify vulnerability with the subjectivity of the subject, suggesting that what it means to be an incarnate subject is to be a “sensibility—an exposure to others, a vulnerability and a responsibility in the proximity of the others, the-one-for-the-other.”2 This shift from the Other to the ego, consistent with a general shift in emphasis in Levinas’s writings, complicates any simple story we might be tempted to tell about a “Levinasian” conception of vulnerability. However, the principal problem with “vulnerability” in respect to Levinas’s works is that the story simply hasn’t yet been told. Early engagements with Levinas make almost no direct mention of vulnerability,3 and though recent work has paid more attention to it as a significant term for his thought,4 there have been no systematic accounts of what the term means or how vulnerability is linked to responsibility or might be thought to produce obligations or duties in the usual sense. The appeal of vulnerability, especially for those looking for a more “applied Levinas” is clear: vulnerability appears to bring ethical considerations into play in a manner that parallels the immediacy Levinas attributes to our responsibility for another. While we can argue over who has responsibility for a vulnerable child, no one denies that the child’s vulnerability

Rethinking Vulnerability in a Levinasian Context 235 generates legitimate and immediate ethical demands. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas seems to extend something like this kind of vulnerability to all others, at least to the extent that it is supposed to be straightaway evident that the Other makes an ethical demand on me which cannot be ignored. But the difficulties of reading Levinas in this way ought to be equally plain. The analogy fails: the other person is likely a stranger to me, is likely not my child, is likely not directly dependent on me, and may even be in a position of power over me. Why think every Other is a vulnerable other? And why think, even if all others are vulnerable, that it is my responsibility to do something about it? Does vulnerability lose its moral force when it is thought of as a property shared by all? Regarding universal corporeal vulnerability as a ground for ethical obligation, there is the worry, as the editors of a new volume on the topic note, that “labeling everyone as (equally) vulnerable . . . renders the concept of vulnerability potentially vacuous and of limited use in responding to specific vulnerabilities . . . because it obscures rather than enables the identification of the context-specific needs of particular groups or individuals within populations at risk.”5 In short, a universal vulnerability approach is “too broad and poorly defined to be of any practical use.”6 Relatedly, there is the worry that such a view overemphasizes our dependence on one another to the neglect of considering autonomy as the goal of measures redressing vulnerability. Catriona Mackenzie, for one, argues explicitly that “an adequate account of the moral obligations arising from vulnerability must give central place to the obligation not just to respect but also to promote autonomy.”7 The aim here is to begin the task of providing a more systematic overview of how vulnerability functions in Levinas’s philosophy. Engaging with contemporary theories of vulnerability within Anglo American and especially feminist ethics allows us to sharpen crucial points about vulnerability in Levinas’s thought, acknowledging that his view likely is a version of a universal vulnerability approach. But it also permits us to respond to the objections outlined by Mackenzie and others and to challenge a fundamental tenet of the way vulnerability is talked about in the latter discourses. The first two sections of this chapter examine the work of vulnerability in Levinas’s texts from early to late and lay out the bare bones of a Levinasian theory of vulnerability. The last section considers how this view contributes to and challenges contemporary debates about the intertwined natural and social causes of vulnerability and attendant moral obligations.

Strangers, Widows, and Orphans: Vulnerability at Work in Levinas’s Early Texts In looking at “vulnerability” in Levinas’s thought, it makes sense to begin with the stranger, the widow, and the orphan—those quintessential

236  Diane Perpich biblical figures of social and economic precarity. But we will look less at what these figures mean or what sense of vulnerability they convey and look more closely at the work that they do in Levinas’s early texts. Looking at the function of these figures rather than their meaning allows us to arrive at a point that is axiomatic for Levinas and that is not always taken into account in contemporary writings about vulnerability: namely, that the body is not ethically neutral. The first reference to these figures is to the widow and the orphan alone and appears in Part IV of the lecture series, Time and the Other, published in 1947. The pattern of ideas Levinas establishes in this passage serves as something of a template for the exposition of the relation to the Other as it is worked out in almost every later text, and it is this pattern that gives us a first clue as to what vulnerability is doing in Levinas’s texts. When he begins to talk about the alterity of the Other, there is first a “formal” analysis of alterity stated almost wholly in negative terms, indicating only what the relation to the other is not. This formal account is then followed by a “concrete” description, which more often than not brings in additional content under the guise of “deformalizing” the initial account. The deformalized description invariably resorts to figurative language, or, as seen here, invokes literary figures like the widow and orphan (and later those of the teacher, the master, and finally the face) to gesture toward something that cannot be said straightforwardly in the formal account. In Time and the Other, we find a very compressed version of this pattern: The Other as Other is not only an alter ego: the Other is what I myself am not. The Other is this, not because of the Other’s character, or physiognomy, or psychology, but because of the Other’s very alterity. The Other is, for example, the weak, the poor, “the widow and the orphan,” whereas I am the rich or the powerful.8 In the 1979 preface to the republication of Time and the Other, Levinas explains that these early lectures were attempting to capture an “alteritycontent” that would describe not just this or that difference, but “the very quality of difference” itself—a non-relational or “absolute” alterity.9 On the one hand, of course, the figures of the poor, the weak, the widow, and the orphan fail miserably at this task: if the ego is the rich and powerful and the other is the poor and the weak, then are they not related to one another exactly according to a relational logic of A and not-A? Formally, there is no way to escape the logic of opposition, and this is no doubt what drives Levinas to figurative examples. The strategy is at least partly successful, for even as the figures chosen capitulate to the formal logic of opposition, they also invoke something that cannot be captured in formal terms: the irreducible singularity of the other person’s concrete life. Arguably, it is not widows or orphans as a group or as such that

Rethinking Vulnerability in a Levinasian Context 237 interest Levinas, but the widow and orphan as invoking a specificity that can be ignored only at a moral cost: the orphan is this child who has lost his parents, the widow is this woman who has lost this beloved spouse. It is, as Rosenzweig would have it in his complaint against Hegel, this human being with a first and last name who escapes the all-encompassing logic of relational difference. And the harm is both in the loss of the loved one and in the fraying of the social network that the relation supported. The widow and the orphan are invoked, on my reading of these passages, to convey the absolutely concrete and singular human being who lives this life and not another. This reading may also explain Levinas’s somewhat cryptic remark, made a few lines later in the passage quoted earlier, that intersubjective space is “asymmetrical.”10 We might think of it this way: there is a world of difference—a radical asymmetry, if you will—between knowing something about someone’s life and living that life, just as there is an irreducible difference between writing about poverty and being poor. The difference will never be captured on the page or in concepts, no matter how much ink is spilled, no matter how deft or evocative or compassionate the portrayal. The figures of the widow and the orphan point to, but cannot reach, this lived experience of poverty, but what is equally unreachable, if you will, is the manner in which the lived experience of loss and lack of a place in the social order becomes a unique demand on me. There is further evidence that Levinas has this sort of ethical difference in mind in the last sentence of the passage from Time and the Other where he draws a distinction between charity and justice. He notes that Durkheim misunderstood the “specificity of the other” and adds, as a commentary on Durkheim’s view of social relationships, that “the essential difference between charity and justice come[s] from the preference of charity for the other, even when, from the point of view of justice, no preference is any longer possible.”11 Justice is equal treatment under a law or principle; it requires that each person be seen from a perspective in which he or she becomes formally (conceptually) the same and indistinguishable from every other before the law. In the thinking of these early texts, the application of a law is like the subsumption of an experience under a concept. Justice in this 1947 text—the term will be used differently just a few years later—is akin to the abstract or formal representation of difference. Of necessity, it makes everyone relevantly the same. Charity, by contrast, requires disregarding this sameness and formal equality in order to meet the material needs of a here and now suffering human being. The hungry widow may have no legal or formal right to the food in my cupboard, and I may have no legal responsibility to feed her, but her hunger is as undeniable as my ability to satisfy it. Charity differs from the recognition of an abstract right based on an abstract identity (for example, being a citizen or a dependent minor). It involves, instead, an acknowledgement of the other’s need and of the demand that one render aid.

238  Diane Perpich In Totality and Infinity, we find much the same pattern. When Levinas is laying out the formal features of his account of alterity—the long list of what alterity is not—it is the Stranger who is principally invoked: The absolutely other is the Other. He and I do not form a number. The collectivity in which I say “you” or “we” is not a plural of the “I.” I, you—these are not individuals of a common concept. Neither possession nor the unity of number nor the unity of concepts link me to the Stranger, the Stranger who disturbs the being at home with oneself.12 The stranger is a figure of disturbance and disruption in the Levinasian imaginary, though at a (mostly) formal and conceptual level that supposedly defies the normal operations of logic in which saying “I” and “you” indicates different people who can nonetheless be ranged together under a single concept. Only after Levinas has outlined the formal case for alterity—a case extending over some forty pages in Totality and Infinity—does he turn to the widow and the orphan. Their first appearance in the text is in the line quoted in the opening paragraph earlier, where Levinas writes that one recognizes the gaze of “the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, only in giving or in refusing.”13 That the widow and the orphan are invoked in contexts where their vulnerability appears to be a cause or catalyst for ethical responsibility has led some to suggest we read Levinas as a kind of non-cognitivist about ethics. I would venture that Levinas’s “non-cognitivism,” if such there is, is a purely negative commitment. That is, I think it would be right to say that, for Levinas, the moment of ethical relation to another person is not reducible to the expression of a justified true belief about the other or about one’s obligation to him or her, but it would not be right to follow that with what follows for most variants of non-cognitivism: namely, that expressions like “I am responsible even for the Other’s responsibility” function to express an emotion or elicit an emotion in the hearer.14 If the vulnerability of figures such as the widow and the orphan have ethical significance in Levinas’s texts, it is not because ethics for him is about feelings rather than reasons nor because he believes we have a natural sympathy for others nor because suffering has an unequivocal meaning or makes an unequivocal ethical demand on us.15 What the widow and the orphan stand for, if this is the right way to put it, is the material thickness of human lives—the lived, material need of the other that cannot be reduced to or captured within a set of principles or typologies. This is not a claim about what we can or cannot know about the other, since no amount of knowledge would bridge the gap between the I and the Other as Levinas would have it. Nor is it a claim about what we feel in relation to the other’s need (the practical necessity of their demand, for example, or pity for their situation). The need itself is ethical, and the body thus is

Rethinking Vulnerability in a Levinasian Context 239 as well. The claim is better understood as existential or phenomenological: it is a claim about what it is like to be the sorts of beings we are, and the sort of beings we are have this irreducible ethical materiality as the stuff of our existing.

Sensibility as Subjectivity: Vulnerability in the Later Works We can think of Levinas’s latter works as, effectively, a continued reflection on materiality. In Otherwise Than Being, this materiality is reconceptualized in terms of what Levinas calls the “openness” of the subject. Thus, while in many respects there is a break between Levinas’s first major work and his second, there is also a continuity of development. Talking about “openness” is a somewhat unique way to put the problem, but the problem is an old and philosophically familiar one: how is the subject in or open to the world in all its meaningfulness? This way of putting the problem speaks the language of phenomenology more than empiricism, but the question is still familiar enough. For Levinas, it is especially a matter of redefining sensibility. Following the phenomenological tradition, Levinas rejects traditional theories of mind-dependent sense-data as intellectualist (his word for an abstraction that ignores the body and the ego’s being in the world in almost equal measure). But he equally rejects a view like Heidegger’s for which sensibility is the “openness of disclosure.” The latter, he charges, remains an intellectualist abstraction, in which openness is “reduced to sight, idea and intuition, a synchrony of thematized elements and their simultaneity with the look.”16 For his part, Levinas proposes that we seek a more fundamental sort of signifyingness or sensibility whose “secondary signification” will be sensation in the everyday sense, but for which the primary or “dominant signification of sensibility is already caught sight of in vulnerability.”17 Vulnerability fuses sensibility and incarnation together as a single structure at the core of subjectivity. For Levinas, sensibility indicates something like the sensibleness or signifyingness of experience (and these terms have to be thought of apart from an intellectualist tradition that would interpret them as meanings laid over or cloaking a stratum of pure matter). Incarnation is thus understood not as mere, dumb embodiment, but as the signifyingness of an animate body. Levinas notes that his project involves “renouncing intentionality” or rejecting that it can serve as the “guiding thread”18 of an investigation of the psyche, and notes that the “pathos” of existentialism was due to a similar opposition to the “intellectualism of reflexive philosophy” and to the “discovery of a psyche irreducible to knowing.”19 But he suggests that existentialism did not in the end go far enough in resisting the return of abstract and reductive models of subjectivity. Like traditional philosophy, existentialism was too ready to set aside the manner in which our materiality or incarnation

240  Diane Perpich is already a mode of signification, and it is in this regard that Levinas avers that “the corporeality of the subject is not separable from its subjectivity.”20 The flesh and blood being that each of us is can hardly even be conceived by the Cartesian conception of the subject, which requires a deus ex machina to bring body and soul together. But the ensouled body or embodied psyche is already the one-in-the-other and thus, says Levinas, an original kind of signifyingness. Interestingly, Levinas will see in this original signifyingness two possibilities, or it may be better to think of him as seeing two distinctive ways in which we live this signifyingness. In the one, sensibility qua vulnerability lapses or collapses into enjoyment and complacency. Here, for a moment at least, we coincide with ourselves in enjoyment of a need met or taste tasted. This is the sense in which, in the earlier work, he notes that not all actions have a purpose or a “for the sake of” in the Heideggerian sense. Sometimes we take the walk for the pure pleasure of the walk. In a second possibility, the signifyingness of vulnerability is lived as a radical non-self-coincidence, a moment in which the ego is alienated from itself and “denucleated” or cored out and opened to alterity.21 The psyche in this sense “is the form of a peculiar dephasing, a loosening up or unclamping of identity,”22 which he also speaks of in terms of “exposure to the other, the passivity of the for-the-other in vulnerability.”23 Throughout the analyses of incarnate subjectivity, Levinas deliberately inverts the tropes of Heidegger’s “ecstatic” Dasein who stands out into the clearing of being and who appears to expand into that space with the relaxed effort of a gas spreading out to fill its container. The Levinasian ego is an openness but not dispersed into being; it is riveted in being by its exposure. Levinas imagines the ego as an “identity that . . . is ‘in itself’ as one is in one’s skin,”24 though, again, it would be a mistake to imagine this as the being-in-itself or en-soi of things, a pure materiality that is what it is and no more. The ego is “cramped” and “ill at ease” in its own skin; it is an “irritability,” a “susceptibility,” “an exposure to wounding and outrage.”25 In later sections of Otherwise Than Being, Levinas asks us to imagine the openness of the subject as “the denuding of the skin exposed to wounds and outrage. This openness is the vulnerability of a skin exposed, in wounds and outrage, beyond all that can show itself, beyond all that which, in being’s essence, can be exposed to comprehension and celebration.”26 It will perhaps be objected that these descriptions of the subject are too poetic or fanciful to be philosophically cogent or useful, and, certainly, they run counter to the tastes of contemporary Anglo American philosophy. But it can be argued that Levinas is seeking a form that will be as densely material as the content he is trying to convey. Hume famously challenged the notion of direct, introspective access to the ego by suggesting that, if one turned the mind’s eye inward, all that was ever found was a bundle of ideas and never a substantial self. But Hume’s challenge

Rethinking Vulnerability in a Levinasian Context 241 passes muster only if we have already reduced consciousness to a gaze and then removed the gaze from the materiality of the eye and consigned it to an immaterial “mind’s eye” view. The Levinasian contention is that Heideggerian-like depictions of the ego as embedded in a system of signs or as standing outside itself in the fullness of being are likewise still fleshless abstractions—more complex than the “mind’s eye” view of modern epistemology, perhaps, but an abstraction nonetheless. The problem he sets himself is how to describe our being this here and now subjectivity, with all its concrete bodily density, while also preserving the dynamism of subjectivity and its signification. Vulnerability is not just a central term in this analysis: it is the full matrix within which Levinas can capture, simultaneously, connections to embodiment, signifying sensibility, and being exposed.27 Moreover, it allows Levinas to suggest that it is in and through this exposedness that the ego becomes most itself. In “No Identity,” he defines vulnerability as “the aptitude, which every being in its ‘natural pride’ would be ashamed to admit, ‘to be beaten,’ ‘to receive blows.’ ”28 The subject is not in the world as the maker of meanings nor as a receiver of those meanings, but as an aptitude for meaningfulness and an aptitude that palpates in the body rather than being a mere feature of cognition or something we call “mind.” It is neither a capacity (like an empty vessel waiting to be filled) nor a receptivity (like the clay that takes the form stamped onto it). It is “neither a conjunction of structures nor in a tissue of reflexes. It does not amount to the inwardness of the transcendental consciousness secured from all traumatism which still in the depths of its receptivity assumes [or takes on] the given”; instead subjectivity signifies “by a passivity more passive than all passivity, more passive than matter, by its vulnerability, its sensibility, by its nudity more nude than nudity, the sincere denuding of this very nudity that becomes a saying, the saying of responsibility, by the substitution in which responsibility is said to the very end, by the accusative of the oneself without a nominative form, by exposedness to the traumatism of gratuitous accusation, by expiation for the other.”29 The idea of vulnerability as an “aptitude” to be beaten—not a willingness per se, but a talent for it—is certainly an objectionable idea, literally and figuratively. But what Levinas appears to be struggling to articulate by such a phrase is a manner of conceiving subjectivity as an embodied relatedness that cannot be disassembled either into an active self and a passive other on which it acts or a passive self and an active other that imprints its meanings on the ego. The self is a restless moving outside itself and yet crammed into its own skin; it is denuded to the point of being an exposure without reserve, without the ability to close itself off, and yet capable of retreating into satisfaction and enjoyments—which nonetheless always have one side or dimension open to an outside. Vulnerability in Levinas’s sense is the core, or structure, of subjectivity—an exposedness and an unlimited undergoing by and for the sake of the other.

242  Diane Perpich

Contemporary Debates About the Inherent Versus Social Character of Vulnerability We may well wonder whether Levinas’s understanding of “vulnerability” is so distant from the way the term is used in contemporary ethics that there is no viable way to map the one discourse on to the other or engage them together. In this last section, I consider the possibility that Levinas’s view helps us reconceive the relationship between embodiment and vulnerability. That may seem counterintuitive: after all, how could any discussion of vulnerability, ethical or otherwise, miss the connection to embodiment? But examining the manner in which contemporary feminist theories wrangle over where the body belongs in an ethics of vulnerability allows us to better see the strength of Levinas’s analysis and its connection to a larger reconceptualization of vulnerability. In their recent edited collection on vulnerability, Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds argue that, while vulnerability has become a critical term for feminist ethics, bioethicists, policy makers, and others, it remains undertheorized, both in terms of an ontological and a normative account of the term.30 In response, they develop a taxonomy of vulnerability distinguishing inherent forms of vulnerability, whose cause we might think of as internal to the body and arising naturally in it, from situational forms of vulnerability that are fully socially caused or significantly exacerbated by social, political, economic, and environmental contexts.31 Vulnerability to illness or the infirmity of old age, in this view, is an inherent vulnerability and is universally shared, though we will each experience this kind of vulnerability to differing degrees. Situational vulnerabilities, by contrast, have one or more external sources. When governments fail to protect access to clean air or water, making people ill, this is a situational form of vulnerability, even though bodily illness is involved. A subset of situational vulnerabilities can be termed pathogenic. These, following the work of Robert Goodin, are “morally unacceptable vulnerabilities” that can and should be eliminated altogether.32 The vulnerability of women to higher rates of sexual violence, for example, is a pathogenic vulnerability.33 In part, Mackenzie and company’s taxonomy is a reaction to the ethics of corporeal vulnerability developed by theorists like Judith Butler and Martha Fineman. Fineman criticizes the manner in which standard moral and political discourses—even those that are explicitly feminist—have tended to pathologize vulnerability, linking it with diminished agency and a general air of victimhood. A focus on vulnerable groups, such as the elderly or refugees, does as much to restigmatize as to aid members of those groups, Fineman argues, and simultaneously and problematically props up the idea of an autonomous, non-dependent subject as the moral norm. Fineman advocates recognizing that all human bodies are vulnerable: “The vulnerable subject approach does what the one-dimensional

Rethinking Vulnerability in a Levinasian Context 243 liberal subject [approach] cannot: it embodies the fact that human reality encompasses a wide range of differing and interdependent abilities over the span of a lifetime.”34 While Fineman’s interest is clearly oriented toward policy change, Butler’s aim is more broadly philosophical and concerns learning to live with the “anxiety” caused by another’s difference and why it might be valuable to do so. Epistemic humility in the face of ways of life that “challenge . . . the surety of one’s epistemological and ontological anchor”35 means learning “to live and to embrace the destruction and rearticulation of the human in the name of a more capacious and, finally, less violent world, not knowing in advance what precise form our humanness does and will take.”36 At least two kinds of vulnerability are at issue in Butler’s reflection. Foremost is the vulnerability that comes from having an identity that is not recognized or recognizably human and that renders one’s life invisible or, as she more often puts it, ungrievable. A second kind of vulnerability concerns the ways in which we are all vulnerable to being “undone” by others, and here is the place where Butler’s unspoken reliance on Levinas is clearest: we are “from the start, even prior to individuation itself, and by virtue of our embodiment, given over to an other: this makes us vulnerable to violence, but also to another range of touch, a range that includes the eradication of our being at the one end, and the physical support for our lives, at the other.”37 While conceding the larger point about the vulnerability that comes with embodiment, Mackenzie and her co-authors worry that a universal vulnerable subject approach of either kind renders the concept of vulnerability normatively vacuous. If vulnerability is conceived simply as a function of human embodiment, everyone is equally vulnerable, and it becomes difficult to see how vulnerability would generate any particular obligations or what those obligations would be. There is also the risk that such a view obscures the vulnerability of specific groups whose experiences are outside the typical range. Effectively, if “all vulnerabilities matter,” it becomes harder to make visible and demand remedy for vulnerabilities that certain groups experience in disproportion to a wider population.38 Much here depends on the relation between embodiment and vulnerability. Both Fineman’s universal vulnerable subject approach and Mackenzie and company’s taxonomy treat the body and embodiment as if there is nothing much to think about there and certainly little to talk about. Despite Fineman’s desire to destigmatize vulnerability, she conceives it almost wholly in negative terms as harms to a physical body. The core feature of embodiment in her account is fragility, and she calls for recognition of a universal susceptibility (of all human beings not just those who fall into certain vulnerable “populations”) to physical and psychic harm. “Human vulnerability,” she writes, “arises from our embodiment, which carries with it the imminent or ever-present

244  Diane Perpich possibility of harm, injury, and misfortune.”39 Fineman rarely mentions the body without mentioning harm or injury, and she is often concerned with forms of harm beyond our immediate control: disease, pandemics, other “biologically based catastrophes,” and natural disasters. Economic and institutional forms of harm are described with less vivid language though Fineman notes the ways they can impact families for generations. She also stresses that we have differing abilities to respond to such harms, making vulnerability universal but also particular.40 I suspect that part of Mackenzie’s caution in regard to Fineman’s position stems from the emphasis on bodily “catastrophe” and a tendency to equate the body with biology. Women have all too often been reduced to their biology and, somewhat oddly, Fineman’s move to universalize vulnerability appears to feminize all of humanity rather than explicitly challenging the identification of the feminine with the body and victimhood. If Fineman perhaps too readily equates the body with biology and with harm, however, Mackenzie, as exemplary of the taxonomy approach, may be too ready to distinguish bodily from social sources of vulnerability in order to relegate bodily harms to a relatively uninteresting realm of the natural or the “inherent.” In speaking about the vulnerability of a woman in an abusive relationship, Mackenzie notes that “the source of her vulnerability is not primarily her inherent corporeal vulnerability but her relationship with an abusive partner.”41 This remark captures Mackenzie’s tendency to see the body on one side and social factors on the other: either it is her body that makes her vulnerable, or it is her abuser. In a case where we identify the abuser as the main source of vulnerability, both the body and the social structures that support abuse are rendered more or less invisible. A different example casts the inherent/ situational distinction in a light by which it becomes much more difficult to neatly parse supposed “sources” of vulnerability. Pregnancy is a biological condition entailing certain kinds of physical and emotional risks for all women who undergo it. Thus, all women experience a certain inherent vulnerability during pregnancy. But the specific form this vulnerability takes—not just its extent or duration, but how it feels and how it is lived—will depend on more than a woman’s individual bodily health or the specifics of her pregnancy. Marital status and age, financial circumstances, social and cultural context, and work and living situations all determine the level of vulnerability experienced by a woman during pregnancy, and these likewise impact her experience of the biological facts of her pregnancy. In the context of work, to take a single dimension that bears analysis, additional risks will be involved depending on whether the woman’s job is physically demanding or not, whether there are unique environmental risks, whether her workplace offers health benefits, paid leave, and job security in the event of leave. While one could try to identify forms of vulnerability that are mainly inherent (e.g., the vulnerability of infants to disease) or forms that are

Rethinking Vulnerability in a Levinasian Context 245 mainly situational (e.g., the vulnerabilities created by a social caste system), even here the vulnerabilities in question involve a mix of material and social elements. Modifying the either/or of Mackenzie’s taxonomy, we want to say that vulnerability is always simultaneously biological and social, inherent, and situational: the degree to which pregnancy renders a woman vulnerable and the types of risks she faces will depend on intertwined physical and social causes. Thus, while it may be conceptually tidy to identify distinct sources of vulnerability, it seems closer to the phenomena to see vulnerabilities as occurring on a continuum between material and social factors. Some forms of vulnerability will be closer to the material end, some more deeply conditioned by social factors, but a continuum acknowledges the important fact that all forms of vulnerability arise in our embodied being, and all will be tied to social arrangements and practices capable of increasing or diminishing their impact.42 Mackenzie, of course, does not deny the compound character of most instances of vulnerability, but she nonetheless insists that a taxonomy identifying distinct sources “enables a finer-grained analysis of the sense in which vulnerability is both an ontological condition of our humanity and context specific.”43 But even if we suppose that the gain to be had from the notion of distinct sources of vulnerability has to do with the context and, more specifically, with assigning responsibility to mitigate, eliminate, or redress risks undergone and consequences suffered, there remains room to doubt the effectiveness of the distinction. Because a certain instance of vulnerability is natural to the human condition or rooted in the body—inherent, in Mackenzie’s terminology—does this mean the state has a lighter responsibility or no responsibility at all in regard to it? In fact, we routinely hold states accountable for providing aid and accommodation to citizens with physical impairments and hold a variety of state institutions responsible for assisting in the prevention of impairment through programs aimed at ensuring workplace safety or safe foods and drugs. For a theorist like Fineman, her turn to vulnerability was in part motivated by the need to craft an argument for further state intervention and responsibility for the general welfare of all. Even outside this sort of concern, the source of vulnerability is likely to have less influence on the normative claim for redress than the severity and duration of the impact. Jackie Leach Scully notes that concentrating on the generality of vulnerability detracts from the attempt to identify and redress the conditions that render specific groups more vulnerable than others, but concentrating on the special vulnerability of specific groups reinforces the harmful idea that the goal of a “normal” human life features reduced vulnerability and increased autonomy.44 The resolution to this either/or is not a both/and, however. Because as Scully notes, what is needed is a more complex ontology: that is, a more complex account of the relation of vulnerability and embodiment. Intersubjectivity rather than biology is, for Scully, the source of vulnerability’s universality because we

246  Diane Perpich are all dependent on one another. Dependencies, she argues, are not inherent vulnerabilities that “come about through the material and biological finitude of the human organism,” nor are they like “contingent vulnerabilities generated by structural inequalities”; they are “generated intersubjectively.”45 Stepping back to collect the fundamental features of vulnerability across Levinas’s major works, we might be tempted to say that like Fineman, Levinas pays more attention than the tradition has to the embodied character of subjectivity, and, like Mackenzie, he recognizes the importance of sociality in the constitution of subjectivity. But, unlike Fineman, his is not a straightforwardly biological conception of the body, and, unlike Mackenzie, he does not imagine sociality as mere scaffolding supporting (or creating barriers for) an autonomous subject (no matter how relational). Levinas develops a conception of human embodiment as always already suffused with sociality and of the social relation as inseparable from our lived, embodied being, but even this formulation seems rather tepid in comparison with what he is trying to bring into view. For Levinas, and here he would go somewhat beyond Scully’s suggestion, it is not just that our lives are entwined with others through institutions such as family, schools, government, and law or through social practices of language and culture. Nor is it only that we are dependent on one another for the whole of our lives. The conception of vulnerability Levinas develops, though perhaps still in somewhat nascent form, makes our exposure to one another not a feature of human life, but the fundamental structure of subjectivity. It is much more like what Butler means when she writes, “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other.” In love no less than in grief, in kinship and friendship relationships, we are “dispossessed . . . by virtue of another” who makes possible our being a self at the same time as they make possible the dissolution and rearticulation of our own borders and the borders of the human.46 Much work would need to be done to develop anything like a Levinasian account of political duties or even of ethical obligations in our usual sense from this account. I have argued elsewhere that the attempt to derive a politics from Levinas’s ethics is not in any case a straightforward task, and I tend to think Levinas bequeaths us a discourse on ethics that exhibits the same fragility and vulnerability that it ultimately sees as constitutive of the ethical relation itself.47 Form and content here reinforce one another and lead to unique opportunities for “translating” Levinas’s work, but also to certain difficulties and cautions (like Derrida’s). Traditional ethical theories might be said to be looking to increase moral stability and, so far as possible, moral certainty. For example, the imperative that counts in Kantian ethics is categorical not hypothetical. Utilitarian and consequential moral theories likewise seek to bring about stable states of affairs where the greatest good predominates. And virtue theories aim similarly at instilling habits that facilitate consistently

Rethinking Vulnerability in a Levinasian Context 247 smooth and agreeable social interactions. Each of these theories targets moments of potential human conflict and seeks resolutions that create steady, harmonious states. For Levinas, by contrast, ethics will be a disruption of the status quo, a dislocation from the comfortable society of home and hearth, an extraction from nature, reason, and culture. But unlike the disruption that might be caused by an order barked by an army sergeant or a disagreeable rule handed down by a tyrant, the ethical command that Levinas describes as an interruption of egoistic life comes from a source that is less than nothing—namely what he calls the “face” of the other. In later works, Levinas will go so far as to represent this command as a kind of interruption of the self, by itself, despite itself. He will, moreover, identify this disruption with vulnerability. There is thus little certainty in the ethics Levinas proposes. In contemporary social and political theory, as well as in global policy analysis, vulnerability is portrayed as a threat to the full functioning of the self and as a condition requiring remedy. Vulnerable individuals or groups are defined as those who have an increased bodily susceptibility to harm and a lowered ability to manage that harm through their own resources. The most vulnerable are those who must depend on others to meet basic needs—children, the elderly, or refugees would all fall into this category. It is fair to say that for such accounts, and they are the majority, vulnerability is conceived as a threat to the self. Levinas’s account potentially upends such views, teaching us to see vulnerability not as diminished capacity, but as increased connection—a connection, moreover, that is central to what it means to be a self. As Desmond Manderson eloquently writes, “The great sundering accomplishment of Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority lies in the way in which it reconfigured our relationship to others. It asked us to understand our responsibilities in a more dramatic and expansive fashion, and to conceive of human vulnerability as a force and a demand through which we become—more and more, not less and less—ourselves.”48

Notes 1. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 77, emphasis added. 2. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1981), 77. 3. Two notable exceptions in the early secondary scholarship are the work of Alphonso Lingis, “The Sensuality and the Sensitivity,” in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 219–30, and a short essay by Roger Burggraeve, “Violence and the Vulnerable Face of the Other: The Vision of Emmanuel Levinas on Moral Evil and Our Responsibility,” Journal of Social Philosophy 30, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 29–45. 4. For recent attention to vulnerability in Levinas’s thought, see William Edelglass, “Levinas on Suffering and Compassion,” Sophia 45, no. 2 (October

248  Diane Perpich 2006): 43–59; Ann Murphy, “Corporeal Vulnerability and the New Humanism,” Hypatia 26, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 575–90; Diane Perpich, “Vulnerability and the Ethics of Facial Tissue Transplantation,” Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 7 (2010): 173–85; Diane Perpich, “Don’t Try This at Home: Levinas and Applied Ethics,” in Totality and Infinity at 50, ed. Scott Davidson and Diane Perpich (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2012), 127–52; Desmond Manderson, “Law, Ethics, and the Unbounded Duty of Care,” in Totality and Infinity at 50, ed. Scott Davidson and Diane Perpich (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2012), 153–70; Deborah Achtenberg, Essential Vulnerabilities: Plato and Levinas on Relations to the Other (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014). 5. Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers and Susan Dodds, “Introduction: What Is Vulnerability and Why Does It Matter for Moral Theory,” in Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 6. 6. Ibid. 7. Catriona Mackenzie, “The Importance of Relational Autonomy and Capabilities for an Ethics of Vulnerability,” in Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 34. 8. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 83. 9. Ibid., 36. 10. Ibid., 84. 11. Ibid. 12. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 39. 13. Ibid., 77, emphasis added. 14. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 99. Non-cognitivism in ethics, roughly speaking, maintains that normative moral statements, such as “Killing is always wrong,” differ from factual statements, like “The sun is 90 million miles from Earth” because we can specify the truth conditions for the latter but not for the former. It is clear what we would need to do to verify the truth (or falsity) of the claim about the sun while it is not similarly clear how to verify or falsify the statement about killing. For non-cognitivists, the idea that moral statements are not candidates for being true or false isn’t especially problematic since such sentences only seem to be in the business of stating a verifiable belief (or they do so only secondarily and in a qualified sense of “belief”). According to non-cognitivists, moral claims are primarily in the business of expressing speakers’ pro or con attitudes, their approval or disapproval, of certain kinds of action. Most thinkers who want to assimilate Levinas to non-cognitivism appear to position him somewhere near this emotivist or expressivist camp. And, to be fair, some of Levinas’s own claims lend a certain force to such a positioning. For example, the passage where Levinas writes that “The presentation of the face is not true, for the true refers to the non-true” and so on looks like the non-cognitivist idea that moral statements and the normative force of moral claims are of a different kind than those attending statements of true or false belief. Additionally, some may be tempted to see in Levinas’s language about the “straightforward” or “immediate” response to the face of the other a residual strain of naturalism about ethics, which is often a central motivation behind non-cognitivist and expressivist moral theories. Naturalism about ethics holds (again, in very simple terms) that ethical claims are generally reducible to other natural phenomena: for example, to psychological attitudes of approval or disapproval, to the expression of emotions, even to the expression of an attitude approving certain larger systems of normative rules. There is good reason, however,

Rethinking Vulnerability in a Levinasian Context 249

15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

to hesitate before branding Levinas’s thought a form of non-cognitivism or naturalism, at least in the sense in which these terms are in use in Anglo American philosophy. While it is not a decisive reason, it is not insignificant that Levinas appears to have had little or no familiarity with meta-ethics in the Anglo American tradition, and certainly his focus is not an analysis of the meaning of moral statements or their truth conditions. This does not mean that Levinas’s theory does not have resonances with some aspects of non-cognitivism, nor that we should abstain from discussing the intersection of his thought with contemporary meta-ethical positions, but it does mean proceeding with care. Indeed, he rejects exactly this view in the essay “Useless Suffering,” written many years later. Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” in The Provocation of Levinas, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Woods (London: Routledge, 1988), 156–67. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 67. This reading of Heidegger, of course, can be challenged. The interest here is less in whether it “sticks” as a criticism of Heidegger than in its role as a foil for what Levinas is trying to articulate in the early works. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 67. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 80. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 74. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 71. Emmanuel Levinas, “Substitution,” in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 85. Ibid., 86. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 145–46. As early as 1951, Levinas had worried about the manner in which the critique of modern subjectivity replaced the stasis of the Cartesian res cogitans with a purely dynamic process, writing: “The concern of contemporary philosophy to liberate human beings from the categories adapted uniquely to things cannot . . . content itself with notions of dynamism, duration, transcendence, or freedom, as opposed to those of the static, the inert, the determined, as a description of the human essence” (Emmanuel Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?” in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996], 8). Some 17 years later, he is still chewing over how to reconceive the “node” or “knot” of subjectivity in the face of accounts in the human sciences and Heidegger alike, according to which, “Everything is outside, or everything in me is open” (Emmanuel Levinas, “No Identity,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis [Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers 1987], 145). Levinas is clear that he is not rejecting the dynamism or the openness that these accounts identify with subjectivity, but he suggests a different understanding of the subject’s “openness,” wherein it signifies an “incapacity to shut itself up from the outside” (145). The monadic self and the Cartesian res cogitans had the opposite problem: how to break out of the shell of the mind in order to reach a world of objects and others. Levinas accepts the contemporary picture of a subject who is immersed in the world, always already temporally extended and dynamic, constituted by and embedded in social structures, but he imagines all this to be the case because the subject cannot not be affected. Levinas, “No Identity,” 146.

250  Diane Perpich 9. Ibid., 147 n.8. 2 30. Mackenzie, Rogers and Dodds, “Introduction,” 1. 31. Ibid., 7. 32. Ibid., 9. 33. Mackenzie and her co-editors likewise note that all forms of vulnerability are either dispositional or occurrent—roughly, potential or actual. Mackenzie, Rogers and Dodds, “Introduction,” 8. 34. Martha Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 20, no. 1 (2008): 12. 35. Judith Butler, “Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy,” in Undoing Gender (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), 35. 36. Butler adds, “The necessity of keeping our notion of the human open to a future articulation is essential to the project of international human rights discourse and politics. We see this time and again when the very notion of the human is . . . defined in advance, in terms that are distinctively western, very often American, and, therefore, partial and parochial” (Butler, “Beside Oneself,” 37–38). 37. Butler, “Beside Oneself,” 23. 38. Mackenzie, Rogers and Dodds, “Introduction,” 6. 39. Martha Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject and the Responsive State,” Emory Law Journal 60, no. 2 (2010): 267. 40. Ibid., 269. 41. Mackenzie, “Relational Autonomy,” 38. 42. It is surprising, in fact, that Mackenzie and her co-authors make no use of Seyla Benhabib’s notion of a situated self who is “immersed in a network of human relationships that constitute our life together” Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992), 125 (emphasis in original). Benhabib’s conception of “the generalized and the concrete other” nicely combines the normative individualism of Mackenzie’s position (in calling for universal respect for all as moral persons) and its recognition of social situatedness and in particular the specific relationships of care and solidarity that mark family and community belonging (10). Additionally, Benhabib sees the concrete and generalized positions as existing along a continuum. What we owe to others will rarely (maybe never) be the either/or of moral respect on one end or care on the other. 43. Mackenzie, “Relational Autonomy,” 38. 44. Jackie Leach Scully, “Disability and Vulnerability: On Bodies, Dependence, and Power,” in Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, ed. Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers and Susan Dodds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 206. 45. Ibid., 216. 46. Butler, “Beside Oneself,” 19. 47. See Diane Perpich, “A Singular Justice: Ethics and Politics in Levinas and Derrida,” Philosophy Today 42 (1998): 59–70. 48. Manderson, “Law, Ethics, and Care,” 153.

Bibliography Achtenberg, Deborah. Essential Vulnerabilities: Plato and Levinas on Relations to the Other. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014.

Rethinking Vulnerability in a Levinasian Context 251 Benhabib, Seyla. Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. New York: Routledge, 1992. Burggraeve, Roger. “Violence and the Vulnerable Face of the Other: The Vision of Emmanuel Levinas on Moral Evil and Our Responsibility.” Journal of Social Philosophy 30, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 29–45. Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge 2004. Edelglass, William. “Levinas on Suffering and Compassion.” Sophia 45, no. 2 (October 2006): 43–59. Fineman, Martha. “The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition.” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 20, no. 1 (2008): 1–23. ———. “The Vulnerable Subject and the Responsive State.” Emory Law Journal 60, no. 2 (2010): 251–75. Levinas, Emmanuel. Ethics and Infinity. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985. ———. “Is Ontology Fundamental?” In Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi, 1–10. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. ———. “No Identity.” In Collected Philosophical Papers. Translated by Alphonso Lingis, 141–52. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987. ———. Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981. ———. “Substitution.” In Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi, 79–96. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. ———. Time and the Other. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987. ———. Totality and Infinity. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. ———. “Useless Suffering.” In The Provocation of Levinas, edited by Robert Bernasconi and David Woods, 156–67. London: Routledge, 1988. Lingis, Alphonso. “The Sensuality and the Sensitivity.” In Face to Face with Levinas, edited by Richard A. Cohen, 219–30. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986. Mackenzie, Catriona. “The Importance of Relational Autonomy and Capabilities for an Ethics of Vulnerability.” In Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, 33–59. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Mackenzie, Catriona, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds. “Introduction: What Is Vulnerability and Why Does It Matter for Moral Theory.” In Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, 1–29. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Manderson, Desmond. “Law, Ethics, and the Unbounded Duty of Care.” In Totality and Infinity at 50, edited by Scott Davidson and Diane Perpich, 153– 70. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2012. Murphy, Ann. “Corporeal Vulnerability and the New Humanism.” Hypatia 26, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 575–90. Perpich, Diane. “A Singular Justice: Ethics and Politics in Levinas and Derrida.” Philosophy Today 42 (1998): 59–70.

252  Diane Perpich ———. “Don’t Try This at Home: Levinas and Applied Ethics.” In Totality and Infinity at 50, edited by Scott Davidson and Diane Perpich, 127–52. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2012. ———. “Vulnerability and the Ethics of Facial Tissue Transplantation.” Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 7 (2010): 173–85. Scully, Jackie Leach. “Disability and Vulnerability: On Bodies, Dependence, and Power.” In Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, 204– 21. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

12 Between Virtue and the Theory of Subjectivity Noddings’s Care, Levinas’s Responsibility, and Slote’s Receptivity Guoping Zhao Over the past few decades, the traditional Western approach to ethics, which is built largely on the notion of an independent, even autonomous, self with an elevated value in rationality and agency, has been seriously challenged by a series of movements. The movements have come from various directions: from feminism and the women’s movement, philosophical reflections over the tragedies of the 20th century, and historical developments in the international landscape, to ecological concerns and the Green movement.1 In different ways, these movements have all questioned the Western tendency to place the highest value on activity, domination, and control and to embrace an ego-conscious self that knows, comprehends, and dominates the other. Critics point out that “Kantian and consequentialist moral theories focus primarily on the rational decisions of agents taken as independent and autonomous individuals. Even virtue theory focuses on individuals and their dispositions.”2 In this ethical approach, the dominant concerns are fairness, equality, and individual rights, and “impartial and abstract principles” are expected to be applied “consistently to particular cases.”3 Rational, independent individuals, “as instances of the general and timeless conception of person,”4 are privileged as the center of consideration, and ethical actions are necessarily extensions of the actor as the originator of the actions, rather than a related self that is existentially being with the other. Little consideration is given to our existential condition as being with the other and our capacity to relate to the other. For many critics, the problem with such an approach to ethics is rooted in the notion of the self, because when the self is positioned as an independent agent and privileged as the originator and actor, it has the power to see the other, to define the other, and to know the other. With or without good intentions for the other, this power is already an act of violence to the other, in the sense that the other is necessarily reduced and objectified under the gaze of the conscious subject. An ethics that apparently fails so terribly in its regard for the other raises the question of whether it can still legitimately be called ethics. In Todd’s words, the “very otherness” is “at the heart of hideous inequity and social violence.”5

254  Guoping Zhao In this chapter, I review three theorists—Nel Noddings, Emmanuel Levinas, and Michael Slote—from the feminist, Continental, and analytical philosophical traditions and their respective ethical theories developed against the dominant Western approach. While Noddings and Levinas attempt to reconfigure a notion of the relational self in seeking new ethical ground, Slote attempts a virtue theory that does not challenge the fundamental beliefs and assumptions of the Western tradition. I discuss how these theorists understand the root cause of the problems of the Enlightenment legacy and their respective approaches and justifications in addressing the problems. I conclude that, while a shared interest in and valuing of receptivity is apparent in all theories, they also bear profound differences and exhibit different merits.

The Relational Self and Noddings’s Ethics of Care Noddings belongs to a movement that draws its inspiration for ethics from the way women experience the world and their relationships with others. It insists that an ethics that is built on the male-centered, separated, rational, and autonomous self that makes ethical decisions about the other without an already-established relation to the other does no justice to women’s experience as always related to others. Aiming to ground ethics in a related and embedded notion of the self, Noddings proposes an ethics of care that is profoundly different from the universal, abstract, principle-based, and male-centered traditional ethics. Yet Noddings’s ethics of care does not start with a thorough ontological analysis of a relational self. Only through scattered statements does it become clear that she defines humans as ontologically related to others. “Relation will be taken as ontologically basic,” says Noddings.6 “I am not naturally alone. I am naturally in a relation from which I derive nourishment and guidance . . . My very individuality is defined in a set of relations. This is my basic reality.”7 As Ann Diller puts it, “We are born in relation and we grow in relation. For Noddings this is the starting point.”8 Such a naturalistic account of the self, however, has made it difficult to understand how, exactly, for Noddings, human relations constitute the self. The natural condition of humans has been construed by Hobbes as individual egos at war with each other, for example. Natural relations do not necessarily lead to ethical choices. They can also lead to war, violence, hatred. Nevertheless, throughout Noddings exposition of the ethics of care, it becomes clear that mother and mothering is the model self and relation on which she bases her ethics. The mother’s self as unconditionally related to the infant, her instinct to ensure the safety and growth of the child for whom the mother is the source of nutrition and comfort, is the model of the self Noddings is looking at. Diller comments, “Nel Noddings unabashedly ties her exposition of the Ethics of Care to the

Between Virtue and the Theory of Subjectivity 255 mother-child relation as one of the central paradigmatic cases for understanding what is entailed in the actions, experiences, and deliberations of caring and being cared for.”9 For Noddings, caring, as stemming from the motherly instinct, “is essentially nonrational in that it requires a constitutive engrossment and displacement of motivation.”10 “We love, not because we are required to love but because our natural relatedness gives birth to love. It is this love, this natural caring, that makes the ethical possible.”11 In this mother-child orientated ethics of caring, “we consider the other’s point of view, his objective needs, and what he expects of us . . . The one-caring desires the well-being of the cared-for.”12 Hence, for Noddings, the relations with others by which persons are “partly constituted”13 are not intended to be found in all human circumstances. Other relations she mentions are also primarily particular relations characterized by physical proximity and a degree of nurturance, such as mother-child, teacher-student, and those between friends, colleagues, and spouses.14 Such a particularly related self centered around mother or mothering seems to be morally too specific as the model self for an ethics of care to have a bonding force for all. While the boy is in part constituted by that caring relationship, a moral ideal springing from mother’s instinct cannot be expected of him. He could not be expected to care for somebody, even his own mother, the same way his mother cared for him. We cannot, it seems, define the mother’s way of caring as morally required and expect him to act the same way. The problem with such a notion of the self and its ethics is that it is ontologically particular and cannot be applied or extended to general relations. If the bonding force of ethics is for all humans, not just for mothers or like figures, we have to provide a model of the self that speaks to the human condition. The mothering instinct for care for her own child is not shared by all humans and cannot be expected to be developed in all humans and therefore cannot be used to define ethics and provide general ethical guidance. A mother loves and cares, not because she and the child are related in the same way anyone is related to any other, but because she has a particular relationship with this particular child who is hers. I share Hoagland’s opinion when he says, “I do not think mothering [as explicated by Noddings] can be properly used as the model for an ethics of caring.”15 An ethics for all cannot be based on such an instinctive, particular love but has to be based on something we all share as humans. But Noddings argues that her concern is neither about universal judgment nor about acts but about how to meet the other morally. She argues that she has rejected universality, which has historically been associated with the transcendental concept of the Western subject. “I shall . . . reject the notion of universalizability. Many of those writing and thinking about ethical judgment—being an ethical judgment—must be universalizable; that is, it must be the case that, if under condition X you are required to do A, then under sufficiently similar conditions, I too am required to do A.

256  Guoping Zhao I shall reject this emphatically.”16 She argues that her attention is not to judgment but to “how we meet the other morally,” on the “uniqueness of human encounters.”17 But do we still expect persons beyond particular relations to meet others morally? How does the way a mother meeting her child represent the “uniqueness of human encounters”? Or is she proposing a domain ethics that only applies to certain situations and relations? Yet she claims that “caring comes first in importance, first in time, and first in the construction of human morality” and that “ultimately it is in caring relationships that we achieve our highest moral ideals.”18 Arguing for a replacement of the ethics of principle with the ethics of caring, she still means for her ethics of caring to provide guidance for all ethical actions, and to do so inevitably requires a level of universality. Noddings is not unaware of such a need for a universal ground for her ethics. In her exposition, she struggles to seek out common human ground by looking cross-culturally for that which we share as human species. Citing anthropologist Ralph Linton, Noddings claims that “an objective morality is possible” because, indeed, “morality is based on common human characteristics and needs.” “[M]orality is rooted somehow in common human needs, feelings, and cognitions.”19 She explains, “I want to build an ethic on caring, and I shall claim that there is a form of caring natural and accessible to all human beings. Certain feelings, attitudes, and memories will be claimed as universal.”20 Even though she has claimed that “the [caring] ethic itself will not embody a set of universal moral judgments,”21 she is seeking universal sentiments to provide grounds for an ethics of caring that is an ethics for all. Eventually, she identifies “the sentiment of natural caring” as “universal in the whole species.”22 She expounds that we have all been cared for or have cared for others; therefore, the sentiment of caring is shared by all. Such a claim of universal sentiment as the ground of ethics opens her ethics of care to its interpretation as a virtue theory, in which the sentiment and ability to care and to empathize with others becomes a virtue that leads to an ethical life. But to the extent that Noddings still uses the relational self of the mother, the favoritist nature of mother’s love and mother’s unconditional sacrifice for the child, as the model relational self on which to ground an ethics of care, difficulties, and problems seem inevitable. In responding to some of the difficulties, Noddings has claimed, “I am not obliged to care for starving children in Africa.”23 Yet as Hoagland argues, “An ethics which leaves starving people in a distant land outside the realm of moral consideration is inadequate.”24 Its failure to consider global economic issues has also led some to conclude that it is a domain ethics. Virginia Held, seeing Noddings’s attempt to use the mother-child relation as paradigmatic for all, suggests, “I doubt that we should take any one relation as paradigmatic for all the others . . . I am inclined at this point to think that we will continue to need conceptions of different types of relations

Between Virtue and the Theory of Subjectivity 257 for different domains.”25 The asymmetric relation between the caring and the cared-for, for many feminists, also signals a pursuit of oppression.26 Some feminists strongly criticize its undermining of women’s autonomy and its promotion of servility, which comes from the motherly unconditional sacrifice for the cared for. For many, the ethics of caring has, indeed, become a “dangerous ethics.”27 Hoagland comments, “If an ethics of caring is going to be morally successful in replacing an ethics located in principles and duty, then it must provide for the possibility of ethical behavior in relation to what is foreign, it must consider analyses of oppression, it must acknowledge a self that is both related and separate, and it must have a vision of, if not a program for, change.”28 I suggest that the problems with Noddings’s ethics of caring come first from a lack of careful deliberation on a related notion of the self. Basing her ethics on the natural but particular and specific sentiment of mothering, her account of caring seems to embody an inherent impossibility. For a related self to be the condition for a new ethics, an analysis and exposition of how we are ontologically related to, or constituted by, the other can provide the philosophical basis.

Levinas’s Ethics as the First Philosophy Levinas seems to be working in this direction, with a well-thought-out exposition of human subjectivity in which the self is already in an asymmetrical responsibility to the other and suffers for the pain and destitution of the other before the self-conscious being is established. An ethical relation with the other, for Levinas, is not a decision made by the alreadyformed subject but the condition we are in before any conscious actions take place. In this sense, Levinas’s ethics is no longer ethics in its traditional form. Nevertheless, the unconditional subjection of the self to the other’s call points to an ethics where human beings can live together peacefully and caringly. When Noddings describes the asymmetrical relation between the self and the other, she is still following the long Western tradition of projecting the self and the other as subjects well formed before they enter into a relationship, even though she claims that the relation will be considered ontologically basic. The modern notion of the dignity and freedom of the well-formed subject is shared by Noddings, so she insists on seeing the other, starting from an infant, as a person “with her/his own subjectivity and with her/his own ego.”29 To care for the other, the one-caring meets the cared-for as a subject. “Caring involves stepping out of one’s own personal frame of reference into the other’s.”30 Noddings says, “Indeed, this recognition of the freedom-as-subject of the cared-for is a fundamental result of her genuine receiving of the cared-for.”31 But for Levinas, the very notion of the formed subject centered on its ego and consciousness is at the root of the problem.

258  Guoping Zhao Levinas is deeply suspicious of Western philosophy’s single-minded emphasis on the ego and consciousness and on its use of reason to control and dominate everything it touches. The rational movement of consciousness and ego, according to Levinas, is to gather, to identify, and to make a theme. To the self, it is a movement of essence, a movement to lose the self in “an ideal principle.”32 For Levinas, subjectivity is characterized precisely by the impossibility of total manifestation. Being identified and captured in an essence truncates and reduces the self. To the other in the world, the self’s conscious knowing of the other suppresses and possesses the other. “The things will be ideas, and will be conquered, dominated, possessed.”33 In the rational processes of identification, reflection, and objectification, the other in the world is absorbed, assimilated, and conquered, its independence and alterity lost. Thus, the subjective, egoistic, and self-centered tendency of human consciousness leads to a society where each is against all. “Essence thus is the extreme synchronism of war.”34 Therefore, Levinas’s ethical theory of the subject begins with a deep concern for the subjective and egoistic tendency of human consciousness that totalizes and suppresses the other. Consciously knowing the other means comprehending, absorbing, and thus possessing the other, and in this process, the other is made the same and its independence lost. “For possession affirms the other, but within a negation of its independence. ‘I think’ comes down to ‘I can’—to an appropriation of what is, to an exploitation of reality.”35 For Levinas, the modern concept of the rational and autonomous self is at the root of the ethical problem we face today. “Ontology as first philosophy is a philosophy of power,” says Levinas.36 This distaste for totalizing thinking has led Levinas to search for a human subjectivity that is not centered on consciousness, that is “older than the ego, prior to principles.”37 Hence, Levinas attempts to approach human subjectivity differently. According to his account, before intentional consciousness, prior to contemplation and synthesizing, the self has already encountered the other. As human beings, we are social beings who are always surrounded by others. But the other, for Levinas, is a “concrete manifestation of absolute difference.”38 Unlike objects in the world, the absolute alterity of the other cannot be seen as the content of knowledge and cannot be absorbed or assimilated into the known. The naked face of the other makes comprehension or thematization difficult, and as a result, it suspends all notion of totality. More importantly, the calling from the other has effectively suspended or “blocked” the formation of the self. According to Levinas, “knowing of oneself by oneself” rests on a “subjective condition”: the existence of an ego or I.39 But before I “show myself, before I set myself up,”40 I am called out of myself, “in exile,” fissioned and traumatized. In the face of the other, the “ego” or the “I” has dropped out of being.

Between Virtue and the Theory of Subjectivity 259 In this state of “not being,” the self has no escape from answering the other’s call. Responsibility becomes “that which founds and justifies being as the very being of being.”41 “It is an assignation to answer without evasion, which assigns the self to be a self.”42 Subjectivity in this phase is born out of our very responsibility to the other; it is openness and subjection to the other. Subjectivity as responsibility is “substitution,” says Levinas, passivity without identity. “In substitution my being that belongs to me and not to another is undone.”43 I become a “hostage,” standing for the other as “here I am, answering for everything and for everyone.”44 “I am summoned as someone irreplaceable. I exist through the other and for the other.”45 Subjectivity as responsibility is also “incarnation,” in the sense of “being-in-one’s-skin, having-the-other-in-one’sskin.”46 In incarnation one bears the other under one’s skin, hosts the other in the “same” without assimilation, and like a maternal body, is unable to “extricate herself from a responsibility that she did not actively undertake, but to which she was already assigned by the Other.”47 The Other in your skin, your responsibility yet unpossessed and unassimilable and, in this sense, absolutely separate is, for Levinas, the living condition of us as social beings. Hence, Levinas suggests that subjectivity at this stage can be best understood as a “maternal body.”48 It is the pregnant body that nurtures the other-within despite itself, in its passivity. It is a host to the other and also a hostage of the other. The vulnerability, apprehension, and responsibility to the indwelling, the incarnation, of the-other-in-the-same, is the feature of maternity. Levinas says, “In maternity what signifies is the responsibility for Others, to the point of substitution for Others and suffering both from the effects of persecution and from the persecuting itself in which the persecutor sinks. Maternity, which is bearing par excellence, bears even responsibility for the persecuting by the persecutor.”49 Levinas’s phenomenological analysis of human existential experiences as social beings has shown that, from the very beginning of our existence, we are with others and that our self, our ego, is already profoundly affected by such encounters. “The-one-for-another has the form of sensibility or vulnerability, pure passivity or susceptibility, passive to the point of becoming an inspiration, that is, alterity in the same, the trope of the body animated by the soul, psyche in the form of a hand that gives even the bread taken from its own mouth. Here the psyche is the maternal body.”50 While Noddings is still thinking in Cartesian terms, the motherly figure is a preformed, self-conscious subject that attends to and cares for the child that is the subject-to-be, despite her claim that relation is considered ontologically basic. Levinas’s maternity and maternal body, on the other hand, come from a completely different ontology. The maternal body is the metaphor of the condition we are all in prior to self-consciousness, implicated in the other, caring for the other in its very flesh and in its

260  Guoping Zhao sensibility. Responsibility is not the motherly love for a particular child, but a human condition we are all in, despite ourselves, as being in the world and with others. The seemingly shared appreciation of maternity in Noddings and Levinas, therefore, covers a deep rift. It is only with the precondition of the absolute openness, receptiveness, and responsibility to the other, out of our encounter with the third party, that the rational movement of ego and consciousness is born. According to Levinas, the presence of the third party motivates “justice and consciousness.”51 When there is a third party, even though the neighbor and the third party are not comparable, for the purpose of justice, “there must then be a comparison . . . thematization, thought, history and inscription.”52 Thus, subjectivity as essence and consciousness is effected by justice; it is “a function of justice”53 and is only legitimized by justice. Consciousness comes to be on the basis of the self’s sociality, while our ethical responsibility is prior to essence. For Levinas, the overall structure of subjectivity is the dynamics between being and not-being. “Being and not-being illuminate one another, and unfold a speculative dialectic which is a determination of being.”54 Consciousness, rational movement and the call from and the face of the other are all elements that ontologically constitute the self. Subjectivity conceived this way is being with consciousness but at the same time a withdrawing from being; it appears and manifests itself, but bears the trace of its own interruption and destruction in the face of the other. Grounded in the self’s sociality, such subjectivity maintains its roots in its subjection to the other and can no longer hold its totalizing power. It is far less secure and stable than the alleged independent and autonomous modern subject. Only when “in insomnia” will the “imperturbable” ego and consciousness return to “monotony, anonymity, insignificance, into an incessant buzzing that nothing can now stop and which absorbs all signification.”55 In that case, subjectivity will become absolute and imperialistic in its thinking and appearing. For this reason, even when subjectivity is born out of our encounter with the other and when the self is unconditionally open to the other in its very constitution, there is still violence against the other, and the totalizing, egoistic, and subjective tendencies still dominate philosophy, ethics, and our relationships with others. Levinas’s ethical theory of the subject delineates a self already in ethical relations with the other, and ethics is not a choice. We have no escape from our responsibility for the other. My responsibility for the other, “for the faults or the misfortune of others,” for his or her freedom, is not something we decide as a formed subject. Only when in “insomnia” do we forget the root of our consciousness and subjectivity and turn a deaf ear to the unsettling sound rustling deep in the underside of our ego. We continue to assume an absolute, stable, and complacent ego that has power over the other and above the world. But listening to the deep

Between Virtue and the Theory of Subjectivity 261 sound of our responsibility to the other, letting the dis-ease of the self in the face of the other affect the very formation of our own being, allows us to stay in an ethical relationship with the other we encounter in the human world. An ethical commitment, therefore, would lead us to fight against such tendency, to go back to the very foundation of our being where the free reign of ego and consciousness is already disrupted, and we are inevitably responsible for the other.

Slote’s Virtue Theory of Receptivity Unlike Levinas and even Noddings, Slote attempts to stay clear of any ontological consideration of ethics and instead proposes a virtue theory of receptivity as a remedy to the much-challenged Enlightenment overemphasis on reason and rationality. He criticizes Levinas for his use of hyperbolic, evocative, and metaphorical language and for linking Western emphasis on reason and rationality to “the idea and reality of domination and violence.”56 Slote states, “I don’t see that ethical or epistemological rationalism automatically or plausibly translates into a desire to dominate others.”57 For Slote, linking rationalism to domination and violence is going too far and can lead to “moral and epistemological skepticism, nihilism, and literal self-doubt.”58 Seeing postmodernists’ critiques of the modern ego- and consciousness-centered subject an “iconoclastic” attack on the “received opinions and values (e.g., . . . the reality of the individual human self or subject),”59 Slote calls for such an attack to be resisted. Instead, he declares, his purpose is to stay within the perimeter of analytical philosophy, “arguing in analytically acceptable terms,”60 relying on reason and common sense in providing “a general critique of Western philosophical thinking—in ways that don’t rely on exaggeration or metaphor.”61 According to Slote, the failure of the Enlightenment and its associated rationalism is not necessarily a failure of the emphasis on reason per se, but a failure to recognize the value of receptivity. “I think it makes more literal sense to see the emphasis on reason in ethics and epistemology as tied to the failure of receptivity rather than to actual tendencies to dominate or do violence.”62 In the West, we have only valued reason/rationality and activity/control and completely ignored the value of receptivity, says Slote. The general picture of human life and human happiness Enlightenment thinking has painted for us is thus “distorted and unhelpful in many different ways.”63 What is needed is a strong “counterbalance” provided by the virtue of receptivity. “My purpose here will be to argue for new thinking about values, for rethinking our values, rather than for abandoning seriously considered ethical and evaluative thought.”64 With the value of receptivity tempering and compensating for reason/rationality and activity/control, we may have “a more adequate and balanced picture of what is really valuable in our lives,” suggests Slote.65

262  Guoping Zhao Slote defines receptivity as “that tendency, the capacity for unselfconsciously taking in what others feel.”66 Contrary to active projection or control, receptivity is our ability to be “receptive to the needs and aspirations of others, to what we can learn from those we disagree with, to the natural world around us, and to what our own lives have brought us or may bring us in the future.”67 The ability to be open to and to receive the other’s views and feelings unselfconsciously is important and valuable because it is “a touchstone for other values.”68 Slote suggests that only through a full appreciation of receptivity can we understand “where and how certain other very real values—the values of activity, rationality, and autonomy—are important.”69 Slote notes that in the recent intellectual and historical developments, including the women’s movement and the Green movement, there has been a shared emphasis on and appreciation of emotion and empathy, passivity, and receptivity. His virtue theory of receptivity is meant to be a positive response to the new developments, in which the central role of empathy and receptivity in human life and human thought is confirmed. Rejecting the Enlightenment view that practical reason is the source of morality and drawing on Noddings’s notion of caring and the ethics of care, Slote argues that emotion, empathy, and feeling “are what actually lie behind our moral values and practices.”70 The Enlightenment view of practical reason as “the source of morality” is misplaced, claims Slote.71 Empathy and receptivity are “required for altruism and genuine morality,”72 and receptivity lies at the root of our moral and ethical lives. Impressed and inspired by Noddings’s ethics of care, Slote wrote The Ethics of Care and Empathy in 2007 to explore and defend “a care-ethical approach to morality and to moral theorizing.”73 Treating Noddings’s caring and empathy as virtues and ignoring her attempt at an ontological justification, Slote nevertheless does not want to be limited by Noddings’s particular notion of motherly caring and empathy. Slote notes that caring and empathy for the other and for the world surrounding us always entail “a kind of receptiveness vis-à-vis the feelings, attitudes, thinking of others.”74 Thus, he suggests that it is possible to reconfigure the “normative care ethics” to illuminate and emphasize “the importance of receptivity to leading a morally good or decent life.”75 The idea of receptivity or receptiveness goes “beyond anything we can and will say by reference to caring and/or empathy,” claims Slote.76 Receptivity, which is to temper and counterbalance rational activities, is about unselfconsciously receiving the other and thus is to a large extent “independent of issues concerning empathy or caring,” he suggests.77 While arguing for the central role of receptivity and emotion in moral lives, Slote emphatically claims that he is no “irrationalist, if by that term one means someone who thinks or imagines that reason has no serious or important place in our lives and thinking.”78 In fact, he maintains that receptivity and rationality are essentially interconnected. Receptivity

Between Virtue and the Theory of Subjectivity 263 is the “precondition” of epistemic rationality.79 According to Slote, to have a belief or to understand another’s perspective, we have to at least momentarily view “that person’s ideas and arguments in the favorable light in which he or she views them.”80 Emotion/feeling is inevitably involved in rational/cognitive thinking. In other words, the “deliberate, projective kind” of activity is always preconditioned by the more “automatic, associative, unselfconscious, unwilled, and receptive kind” of activities.81 Enlightenment philosophy, “by treating the emotions as something irrelevant to and, if possible, to be banned or isolated from the epistemic/intellectual realm, can be criticized for failing to see the virtuous character of receptivity, of being receptive, in that realm.”82 With this understanding, Slote argues that our moral decisions about right and wrong also depend on receptivity. “Receptivity lies at the heart of moral judgement and moral belief.”83 He explains, “If moral judgement and claims depend on our capacity for approval and disapproval, then they depend on our capacity for empathically taking in the warmth that we see others expressing in their actions or attitudes and the lack of warmth or coldness that those who are indifferent or malicious towards third parties exhibit in their actions or attitudes.”84 Our moral judgment is not cold, indifferent evaluation and calculation, with no involvement from feelings and emotions. Rather, it is deeply situated in our very ability to feel and receive the actions. Hence, “empathy enters into our moral concepts, into our very understanding of claims about right and wrong.”85 What actually lie behind our moral values and practices are “empathy, emotions, and feeling—as fed by relevant epistemic/cognitive abilities and the beliefs they put at our disposal.”86 Rational and receptive abilities are unified in moral judgment. Such an integration of cognitive abilities and emotional empathy, such joined values of rationality and receptivity, for Slote, are what is missed in Enlightenment thinking and is the remedy for its failure. With his virtue theory of receptivity, Slote believes that he has solved the problem of Enlightenment ethics with its overemphasis on rationality and control, without shattering the received opinions and values of the tradition. Responding to the new appreciation of emotion and empathy in recent developments from all directions and expanding Noddings’s virtue of caring to virtue of receptivity, integrating the seemingly inevitable rationality/receptivity divide, Slote believes that he has found a new source for ethics and a new direction after the Enlightenment.

Virtue Theory and the Theory of the Subject In a nutshell, Slote is arguing that our unconstrained pursuit of rationality must be tempered by receptivity, the ability to be open and receptive to what comes our way. But he does not explain why reason and the rational quest need to be tempered and counterbalanced. He identifies

264  Guoping Zhao “Faustianism”87 as the culprit of all failure or violence that Levinas and many other Continental philosophers have identified in the dominant Western Enlightenment thinking. Named after the character of Goethe’s Faust, Faustianism is defined as “the sacrificing of higher values to power, curiosity, and material gain.”88 Slote explains, “The Faustian attitude involves a controlling and even a dominating attitude toward the world and even toward one’s own actions,”89 and it happens when reason is not tempered and balanced by receptivity. But he does not explain why untempered reason leads to Faustianism. What is it in the nature of the rational pursuit that gives rise to the Faustian attitude? He does not explain the exact difference between Faustianism and a positive and praising attitude toward rationality. He only claims that “without the notion [of receptivity] we cannot begin to understand what is wrong with the more general Faustian emphasis on activity, domination, and control that has been so central and influential on Western thought and culture as a whole.”90 But why do active gathering and identifying rational activities have to be balanced by unselfconscious openness and receptiveness to the world? What exactly is wrong with a single-minded pursuit of rationality? I suggest that it is here that Levinas’s philosophy, while unsavory to Slote, can be helpful. Levinas’s work is driven by his deep concern for the totalizing tendency embedded in the unconstrained quest for rationality central to Western thinking. He provided an analysis of how the free reign of such a pursuit can be detrimental to both the self and the other and developed a theory of the ethical subject that is built on the unconditional (or unselfconscious, in Slote’s term) receiving and respecting of the unknowability and unassimilability of the other. The necessary disruption to the unconstrained rational interest coming from the alterity of the other is the condition that leads to the self’s ethical responsibility to the well-being of the other. Levinas provides an understanding of why a single-minded focus on reason is a problem, why unconstrained rational interest is necessarily violent to others, and perhaps why it has to be curbed by an unconditional receiving of the other. Levinas’s ethical theory of the subject helps justify receptivity as a value in balancing the value of rationality and explain why Faustianism takes place and why it is a problem. Interestingly, while Slote denies the link between an emphasis on reason and the idea and reality of domination and violence in social lives, he admits that there is a visible desire in Western history “to dominate the environment.”91 Yet he quickly claims that, aside from this area, “the connection [of rationalism] with domination is hard to sustain or argue for.”92 But why does such a desire manifest itself only in our relationship to the environment? Where does such a desire come from, and what makes it possible? In other words, what are the source and mechanism of such domination? Moreover, what is the difference between our

Between Virtue and the Theory of Subjectivity 265 relationship to the other in the social world and the other in the natural environment? Again, Slote does not provide answers to these questions. While he is interested in incorporating the insights from Green thinking and from ecological and feminist critiques, he fails to realize that feminist and Green thinking are deeply influenced by, or even grounded in, some of the critiques provided by Continental or even postmodern philosophies. Slote claims that the virtue theory of receptivity is sufficient to address the Enlightenment problems of Faustianism, especially in ethical practices. The virtue theory certainly has advantages, clarity and a pointed argument being two of them. Slote is able to propose what is desirable with a common-sense analysis. What he is missing, though, are the insights that a deep phenomenological or ontological analysis can bring to his theory and therefore a necessary justification for his proposition. Apparently, a shared interest in and appreciation of the significance of receptivity to our ethical lives can be found in all three theorists: Noddings, Levinas, and Slote. Receptivity fairs positively, in different ways, in all three theories. The difference is the philosophical justification for the value of receptivity. Noddings tries to locate it in an ontological analysis of motherly care, although her theory is incomplete and, to a certain degree, inconsistent. Levinas is the only one who has attempted a coherent theory and a thorough development of the ontological condition; however, while providing deep insights, he is uninterested in further extending their implications to practical life. The difference between Slote’s and Levinas’s ethics theories is whether we need to look beyond the surface and search deep into the phenomenological basis of our values and beliefs. If we admit that human experience goes beyond the here and now, Slote can benefit from Levinas’s focus and obsession with what happens at the deep level of our existence. Slote’s critique of Levinas, his “hyperbolic” language and vague, evasive theorizing, are not without merit, but he seems to lack an understanding of and appreciation for the deep insight Levinas can provide. Slote’s approach to addressing the apparent problems of the Enlightenment legacy without shattering its foundations may have undermined his very purpose because, without challenging the Enlightenment subjectivity and without understanding the source of the Faustian violence, merely proposing a new value of receptivity to temper rationality appears to lack strength and depth.

Notes 1. Michael Slote, From Enlightenment to Receptivity, Rethinking Our Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 2. Virginia Held, “Care and Justice in the Global Context,” Ratio Juris 17, no. 2 (2004): 143. 3. Ibid., 144. 4. Ibid.

266  Guoping Zhao 5. Sharon Todd, “On Not Knowing the Other, or Learning from Levinas,” in Philosophy of Education, 2001 (Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, 2002), 67. 6. Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkley: University of California Press, 1984), 3. 7. Ibid., 51. 8. Ann Diller, “Review: The Ethics of Care and Education: A New Paradigm, Its Critics, and Its Educational Significance,” Curriculum Inquiry 18, no. 3 (1988): 327. 9. Ibid., 331. 10. Noddings, Caring, 25. 11. Ibid., 43. 12. Ibid., 24. 13. Held, “Care and Justice in the Global Context,” 143. 14. Diller, “Review.” 15. Sarah Lucia Hoagland, “Review: Some Concerns About Nel Noddings’ ‘Caring,’ ” Hypatia 5, no. 1 (1990): 109. 16. Noddings, Caring, 5. 17. Ibid., 5. 18. Diller, “Review,” 329. 19. Noddings, Caring, 27. 20. Ibid., 27–28. 21. Ibid., 28. 22. Ibid., 79. 23. Ibid., 86. 24. Hoagland, “Review,” 113. 25. Virginia Held, cited in Diller, “Review,” 332. 26. Hoagland, “Review.” 27. Diller, “Review.” 28. Hoagland, “Review,” 113. 29. Julian Edgoose, “An Ethics of Hesitant Learning: The Caring Justice of Levinas and Derrida,” in Philosophy of Education 1997 (Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, 1998). 30. Noddings, Caring, 24. 31. Ibid., 72. 32. Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, ed. by Sean Hand (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 89. 33. Emmanuel Levinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” in To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Adriaan Peperzak (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993), 49. 34. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1981), 4. This text will be cited as OTB for all subsequent references. 35. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. R. A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 46. 36. Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 46. 37. Levinas, The Levinas Reader, 107. 38. Todd, “On Not Knowing the Other, or Learning from Levinas,” 69. 39. Levinas, OTB, 102. 40. Ibid., 103. 41. Seán Hand, in Levinas Reader, 75. Italics in the original. 42. Levinas, OTB, 106.

Between Virtue and the Theory of Subjectivity 267 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

Ibid., 127. Ibid., 114. Ibid. Ibid., 115. Lisa Guenther, “ ‘Like a Maternal Body’: Emmanuel Levinas and the Motherhood of Moses,” Hypatia 21, no. 1 (2006): 119. Levinas, OTB, 67. Ibid., 75. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 162. Ibid., 16. Ibid, 162. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 163. Slote, From Enlightenment to Receptivity, Rethinking Our Value, xii. Ibid. Ibid., 1. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 2. Ibid., xii. Ibid. Ibid., 3. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 197. Ibid., x. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 18. Ibid. Ibid., 12. Michael Slote, The Ethics of Care and Empathy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 33. Slote, From Enlightenment to Receptivity, Rethinking Our Value, 12. Ibid., 197. Ibid., 12. Ibid. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 195. Ibid., 200. Ibid. Ibid., 198. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 12. Ibid., xi. Ibid., 181. Ibid., xi. Ibid., xii. Emphasis in the original. Ibid.

268  Guoping Zhao

References Diller, Ann. “Review: The Ethics of Care and Education: A New Paradigm, Its Critics, and Its Educational Significance.” Curriculum Inquiry 18, no. 3 (1988): 325–42. Edgoose, Julian. “An Ethics of Hesitant Learning: The Caring Justice of Levinas and Derrida.” In Philosophy of Education 1997. Urbana, IL Philosophy of Education Society, 1998. Guenther, Lisa. “ ‘Like a Maternal Body’: Emmanuel Levinas and the Motherhood of Moses,” Hypatia 21, no. 1 (2006): 119–36. Hand, Seán. In the Levinas Reader. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989. Held, Virginia. “Care and Justice in the Global Context.” Ratio Juris 17, no. 2 (2004): 141–55. Hoagland, Sarah Lucia. “Review: Some Concerns about Nel Noddings’ ‘Caring.” Hypatia 5, no. 1 (1990): 109–14. Levinas, Emmanuel. Ethics and Infinity. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985. ———. The Levinas Reader, edited by Sean Hand. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989. ———. Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998. ———. “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity.” In Collected Philosophical Papers, translated by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987. ———. Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Noddings, Nel. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Slote, Michael. The Ethics of Care and Empathy. Abingdon: Routledge, 2007. ———. From Enlightenment to Receptivity, Rethinking Our Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Todd, Sharon. “On Not Knowing the Other, or Learning from Levinas.” In Philosophy of Education, 2001, 67–74. Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, 2002.

13 Levinasian “Ethics as First Philosophy” In Analytic Moral Philosophy Melis Erdur

According to Levinas, ethics is all about how to relate and respond to the other person in his particularity or alterity or, in other words, to his “face.” For him, all aspects of this response to the other are ethical: First of all, “the face,” Levinas states, “is what one cannot kill, or at least it is that whose meaning consists in saying: ‘thou shalt not kill’ ” (Levinas 1985: 86). That is to say, there is no way to even recognize “the other” without already having the right ethical stance toward him. Second, ethical responsibility is “a principle of individuation” (Levinas 2006: 93) in that the subject (the I), who is supposed to respond to the ethical command of the other, is itself defined as the one who is ethically responsible to the other. And third, there is no prior ontological or rational basis from which ethical obligations to the other can be derived. Thus, according to Levinas, all fundamental philosophical questions regarding the nature and force of ethical responsibilities are substantive ethical questions. Ethical obligations cannot be philosophically vindicated by or “grounded” on something outside of ethics.1 Ethics, in other words, is “first philosophy”—at least in the sense that it is second to none: nothing other than ethics can account for ethics (although it may account for other things). This crucial aspect of Levinas’s philosophy—that all philosophical reflection regarding ethics is thoroughly ethical and that there is no nonethical standpoint from which ethics can be analyzed and evaluated— bears a striking similarity to an increasingly popular approach in analytic moral philosophy. Two contemporary analytic philosophers, namely, Simon Blackburn and (in his later works especially) Ronald Dworkin, I believe, are its best representatives. Both, in their own way, insist that all fundamental questions regarding ethics (or morality2) are themselves substantive ethical questions and that there is no standpoint external to ethics from which the existence, the significance, or the authority of ethical claims can be evaluated. In what follows, I will present the ways in which Blackburn and Dworkin defend the autonomy of ethics and argue for their affinity to Levinasian “ethics as first philosophy.”

270  Melis Erdur

Blackburn, (Hume,) Dworkin Blackburn’s theory of moral discourse is called “expressivism.” In a nutshell, it is the view that ethical/moral statements do not purport to describe how the world is but, rather, express our conative attitudes such as approvals and disapprovals of things. For instance, the statement “Wanton cruelty is morally wrong” expresses the speaker’s disapproval of wanton cruelty, and the statement “Helping others in need is good” expresses the speaker’s approval of helping others in need. The key point is that such judgments concerning moral right and wrong are not beliefs in the ordinary sense because there are no “moral states of affairs” or “moral facts” that they can be regarded as representing. An empirical statement such as “The desk before me is made of wood” attributes an empirical property (that of being made of wood) to an object (the desk before me). It represents the world in a certain way (in which the desk before me has the property of being made of wood), and thus, the statement is true if and only if the representation matches the state of affairs in the world. Moral statements, by contrast, the expressivist claims, cannot be understood in the same way, according to the model for empirical truths, because there are no “moral properties” or “moral states of affairs.” “The wrongness of wanton cruelty,” for instance, or “the goodness of helping those in need” is not a phenomenon in the world that we can accurately or inaccurately capture. Blackburn’s denial of the existence of objective “moral facts,” “moral states of affairs,” or “moral properties” has naturally led to charges of moral relativism. The critics of Blackburn’s expressivism have been arguing that if there are no objective “moral facts” or “moral properties,” and if moral statements “merely” express our own attitudes toward things, as the expressivist claims, then clearly the truth of moral statements (if we can even talk about such a thing) must be relative to the attitudes of the speaker. When I assert that “Wanton cruelty is wrong,” its truth must be determined by my attitudes: If I disapprove of it, the statement must be true; otherwise, it must be false. But, Blackburn’s critic claims, this is an unacceptable sort of moral relativism. Obviously, some things, such as slavery and genocide, are wrong objectively, independently of what anyone thinks of them. Blackburn’s response to the charges of moral relativism is not that it is morally acceptable, or in any event inescapable, but that his expressivism does not commit him to it. To that end, he first emphasizes the distinction made by his philosophical ancestors, A. J. Ayer and C. L. Stevenson, between expressing an attitude and saying that you have it. Clearly, if I say, “I disapprove of wanton cruelty,” the truth of this statement is relative to whether I, in fact, disapprove of wanton cruelty: it is true if I disapprove of it and false otherwise. That is because “I disapprove of wanton cruelty” is an empirical statement that asserts that I disapprove

Levinasian “Ethics as First Philosophy” 271 of something. On the other hand, he notes, if I say “Wanton cruelty is wrong,” which is a genuine ethical statement, according to expressivism, I do not say that, as a matter of fact, I disapprove of wanton cruelty, but rather express my disapproval. Hence, expressivism does not directly entail that the truth of the statement “Wanton cruelty is wrong” is dependent on whether I disapprove of wanton cruelty. But it has been hard for the critics of expressivism to shake off the intuition that expressivism must lead to moral relativism because, according to the expressivist, there are no “moral facts” or “moral properties” in the world—but only our attitudes.3 So they keep asking the expressivist: If it is not our attitudes that make moral statements true or false, what can make them true or false? If there are no “moral properties” in the world, then what else can make wanton cruelty really wrong? Blackburn’s response to this perpetual charge of moral relativism, I think, constitutes one of the best defenses of the autonomy of ethics. He says that the question as to what makes cruelty morally wrong can only be understood as a substantive ethical question concerning the ethical reasons why wanton cruelty is wrong—and that there is no other, nonethical philosophical question regarding what the wrongness of cruelty depends on. In other words, according to Blackburn, there is no philosophical question as to what “metaphysically constitutes the wrongness of wanton cruelty” or a metaphysical explanation of how “the wrongness of wanton cruelty emerges” or the metaphysical conditions of its continued existence because “the wrongness of wanton cruelty” is an ethical matter—it is not the kind of thing (a metaphysical phenomenon) that can have a nature. The only question, therefore, is the straightforward (but not necessarily easy) ethical question as to what exactly is ethically bad about wanton cruelty, and the answer to that question is that, for starters, what is so bad about wanton cruelty is not the fact that we disapprove of it. He says: [I]t is not because of our responses, scrutinized and collective or otherwise, that cruelty is wrong. [My] explanation . . . issues an “internal” reading of the statement of dependence [of the wrongness of cruelty on our responses], according to which the statement amounts to an offensive ethical view, about (of course) what it is that makes cruelty wrong. Critics of this explanation allow the internal reading, but complain that the [expressivist] is being willfully deaf to an intended “external” reading, according to which the dependency is a philosophical thesis, and one to which the [expressivist], it is said, must assent. The crucial question, therefore, is whether the [expressivist] willfully refuses to hear the external reading. According to me, there is only one proper way to take the question “On what does the wrongness of wanton cruelty depend?”: as a moral question, with an answer in which no mention of our actual responses properly figures.

272  Melis Erdur There would be an external reading if realism were true. For in that case there would be a fact, a state of affairs (the wrongness of cruelty) whose rise and fall and dependency on others could be charted. But [expressivism] acknowledges no such state of affairs and no such issue of dependency. (Blackburn 1993:172–73) This is one of the most underappreciated statements in analytic philosophy, given that Blackburn’s critics have continued to regard his response quoted here as a philosophical trick or outright dishonesty. They have insisted that, in addition to a straightforward moral sense of dependency (of wrongness of cruelty on our attitudes), which Blackburn can deny like any other participant of moral discourse, there is obviously an “external” or metaphysical sense of dependency (of wrongness of cruelty on our attitudes), which Blackburn is committed to in virtue of his expressivism but refuses to (or pretends not to) hear or understand. What they fail to appreciate, I think, is that Blackburn’s denial of another, a nonethical sense in which “the wrongness of wanton cruelty” may be said to be dependent on our attitudes or not, is the whole point of his view. The whole point of his account is that all fundamental questions concerning “the nature,” “the ground,” or the justification of ethical right and wrong: that is to say, all questions pertaining to what is ethically right or wrong and why (in the end, ultimately, at bottom) it is right or wrong are substantive ethical questions. Ethics, he could have said, is “first philosophy.” I would like to suggest now that what underlies Blackburn’s denial of a non-ethical reading of the question as to what the wrongness of wanton cruelty depends on, for instance, is the fundamental distinction between factual and ethical contents that is distinctive of the Humean tradition that he comes from. As it is well known, Hume has claimed that the contents of factual statements (“is”) and the contents of ethical statements (“ought”) are so radically different that there is no way of turning one into the other. An ethical question, in particular, cannot be reduced to a factual question of any kind but must be answered from the ethical point of view (by presupposing at least one ethical claim). Connecting this general Humean principle to the earlier discussion, we may say that since “the wrongness of wanton cruelty,” for instance, is an ethical matter, it cannot be reduced to a (non-ethical) factual matter of any kind, but, rather, can only be understood and answered from a substantive ethical point. Ethical content is not dependent on, inferior to, or more suspect than factual content—it does not have to be ultimately “vindicated” by the latter. This is how the Humean fundamental distinction between factual and ethical/moral domains, when taken seriously, establishes the autonomy of ethics, rather than casting doubt on the philosophical legitimacy of ethics. A non-factual ethics becomes

Levinasian “Ethics as First Philosophy” 273 philosophically suspect only if we reject a fundamental fact/value distinction and insist that anything philosophically respectable has to be some sort of fact (because there really are only facts). This is exactly why Dworkin, an analytic moral and legal philosopher with a very different background and views than Blackburn, arrives almost at the same point as Blackburn when it comes to the autonomy of ethics, simply because he, too, subscribes to and takes seriously Hume’s distinction. For many years, Dworkin has argued that there is no Archimedean point outside of morality from which we can undermine or vindicate morality because all fundamental questions concerning morality are substantive moral questions themselves, which need to be answered within the moral domain.4 In his latest book on moral philosophy, however, he explicitly points to Hume’s distinction as what underlies his longstanding defense of the autonomy of ethics: The great Scottish philosopher David Hume is widely understood to have declared that no amount of empirical discovery about the state of the world—no revelations about the course of history or the ultimate nature of matter or the truth about human nature—can establish any conclusions about what ought to be without a further premise or assumption about what ought to be. Hume’s principle . . . is often taken to have a stark skeptical consequence, because it suggests that we cannot discover, through the only modes of knowledge available to us, whether any of our ethical or moral convictions is true. In fact, I argue . . . [that] his principle has the opposite consequence. It undermines philosophical skepticism, because the proposition that it is not true that genocide is wrong is itself a moral proposition, and, if Hume’s principle is sound, that proposition cannot be established by any discoveries of logic or facts about the basic structure of the universe. Hume’s principle, properly understood, supports not skepticism about moral truth but rather the independence of morality as a separate department of knowledge with its own standards of inquiry and justification. (Dworkin 2011:17)5

Justifying the Autonomy of Ethics—Back to Levinas As I have argued here, analytic philosophers such as Blackburn and Dworkin arrive at a sense in which ethics is autonomous—according to which questions regarding the “nature,” force, and justification of ethical obligations are viewed as substantive ethical questions and evaluated only from the ethical point of view and never from an external (factual) metaphysical or rational one—in virtue of their adherence to the Humean distinction between factual and ethical/moral content. By declaring ethical/moral content to be fundamentally distinct from (but not inferior to)

274  Melis Erdur factual content, they guarantee the independence of the former from the latter: ethical matters do not need to be explained or vindicated in factual terms in order to be philosophically respectable. Ethics is to be explained and vindicated in ethical terms. This fundamental idea, I believe, is the heart of the Levinasian notion of “ethics as first philosophy.” In order to further compare and contrast these analytic philosophers with Levinas, I would now like to examine the justification they provide for the (originally Humean) distinction between ethical and factual content. Traditionally, in analytic philosophy, the Humean separation between “is” and “ought” has been justified (to the extent that it has been justified) in factual terms: that is to say, by putting forward arguments that, as a matter of fact, ethical matters are not factual, or that as a matter of fact, factual matters are not ethical. Here are three such factual arguments purporting to establish the distinction between factual and ethical contents. The first one, which goes back to Hume himself, is that factual and ethical contents are fundamentally different because factual beliefs and ethical judgments have radically different roles in action: only the latter can motivate us to act (Hume 1978: 457–58). You can tell me all the facts about what is happening in a meat factory, but, unless I make an ethical judgment about, say, the wrongness of badly treating animals, I won’t be motivated to do anything (such as buying my meat elsewhere or, alas, becoming a vegetarian). States of mind (such as beliefs) with factual content alone cannot motivate. The second argument for the distinction between factual and ethical contents is that it is logically impossible to derive a genuine “ought” conclusion from “is” premises alone (ibid.: 469–70). You may assume as many factual premises as you want, concerning what is the case, the argument states, but, if you want to derive a conclusion concerning what ought to be the case, then you have to already have at least one assumption about what ought to be the case. The third common argument for the Humean distinction that I will mention is that there are, as a matter of fact, no “ethical/moral properties” because they are metaphysically or ontologically too “queer” to be tenable (Mackie 1977; Harman 1977). Whether such arguments succeed or not is beside the point insofar as the justification of the autonomy of ethics/morality is concerned. For the essential problem with them is that they hold the morally crucial idea of the autonomy of ethics/morality hostage to some logical, metaphysical, or psychological facts. For, if we justify the autonomy of ethics by appeal to a psychological, logical, or metaphysical fact, then we make the autonomy of ethics conditional on that fact. If somehow it turns out that motivation works in a different way than what Humeans assume or somehow the logical claim that you cannot derive an “is” from an “ought” becomes logically indefensible or due to other metaphysical considerations we start seeing “ethical properties” as not much queerer than

Levinasian “Ethics as First Philosophy” 275 other things we already accept, then the autonomy of ethics also becomes factually untenable.6 The obvious solution to this problem is to justify the Humean distinction itself, and thereby the autonomy of ethics, ethically by arguing that there ought to be such a distinction or that it is good to think of ethical content as non-factual. This should, after all, be a natural Humean option for the whole point of the fundamental Humean distinction is that not everything is factual. But, surprisingly, even the philosophers who subscribe to the Humean distinction between factual and ethical matters have taken it for granted that the distinction itself has to be justified in factual terms by arguing that, as a matter of fact, there is such a fundamental distinction. What would an ethical defense of the Humean distinction look like? This is where, I think, Levinas is relevant and helpful to analytic moral philosophy because his works contain the seeds of such an argument. Elaborating on his ideas in an early book, Existence and Existents, Levinas says the following: For me . . . “there is” is the phenomenon of impersonal being: “it” . . . I insist in fact on the impersonality of the “there is”; “there is,” as “it rains,” or “it’s night.” (Levinas 1985: 47–48) Here, it seems to me, that Levinas is referring to facts as analytic philosophers normally understand them—what there is in the world or how the world is. These facts are just “there,” no matter what we think of them. They are impersonal and inescapable. But can that be all there is? Can we regard everything as a factual matter? Would it be good to regard every question ultimately as a question of how the world is (impersonally and inescapably)? No, say, Levinas—it would be death to human beings, “a dread before being, an impotent recoil, an evasion” (ibid.: 51). In other words, regarding the factual realm to be the only legitimate realm, and thus ourselves to be nothing but fact collectors, would be ethically offensive. Levinas goes on: [T]o escape the “there is” one must not be posed but deposed; to make an act of deposition, in the sense one speaks of deposed kings . . . [T]he responsibility for the other, being-for-the-other, seemed to me . . . to stop the anonymous and senseless rumbling of being. It is in the form of such a relation that the deliverance from the “there is” appeared to me. (ibid.: 52) It seems to me that here Levinas is pointing to the ethical act or judgment that establishes the autonomy of ethics. It is not by running into

276  Melis Erdur something other than a fact that we can establish a genuinely autonomous non-factual realm. A genuinely autonomous (non-factual) ethical realm cannot be found. What is needed is an ethical gesture that establishes it. According to Levinas, we can do this by deposing facts as if we are deposing kings. We can carve out a territory for the ethical relation (i.e., my relation to the absolutely unique other) and affirm its autonomy by declaring that it does not derive its authority from facts: that it is, as it were, an independent kingdom. The crucial point is that this declaration is ethical: we are saying that the matters pertaining to our obligations to each other ought to be decided ethically all the way down (by a decision process bottoming out in fundamental ethical ideas that need not then be vindicated by appeal to facts) because the alternative is dreadful, “death to human beings.”

Wittgenstein and Conclusion Interestingly, another (presumably analytic) philosopher—namely, Ludwig Wittgenstein—makes a point reminiscent of Levinas. In his “A Lecture on Ethics” (which is hardly ever studied in analytic moral philosophy), Wittgenstein argues that there are no ethical facts by claiming that “[n]o state of affairs has, in itself, what I would like to call the coercive power of an absolute judge” (Wittgenstein 1993: 40). What is significant here is that, like Levinas, Wittgenstein offers an ethical argument against ethical facts: he is saying that there cannot be facts (or states of affairs) pertaining to what we ought to do, or what we ethically owe another person, because they would be objectionably coercive. Notice that he is not claiming that we have no evidence for the existence of ethical facts or that such facts would be metaphysically too “queer,” but that, ethically speaking, it is not proper to regard them as having the kind of authority that they would claim to have. Even the language Wittgenstein uses to describe the distinctiveness of the ethical domain from the factual is reminiscent of Levinas’s. We have seen Levinas recommending “deposing” facts (as if we are deposing kings) as the way in which we can affirm the autonomy of ethics. Wittgenstein offers a similar (although perhaps less revolutionary) picture: he says that ethical claims are to be considered non-factual (not because we have not yet found appropriate factual equivalents for them, but) because their non-factuality is their “very essence” (ibid.: 44). “For all I wanted to do with them,” he elaborates, “was just to go beyond the world” (ibid.): that is to say, beyond factual language. In other words, according to Wittgenstein, ethics is precisely that which allows us to “go beyond” the factual domain. So Wittgenstein seems to agree with Levinas that ethics is the territory not ruled by facts, that ethics is what is “uncontainable” by being/facts, that “it leads you beyond” (Levinas 1985: 86), and that it “haunts” or “disturbs” being (i.e., the factual domain).

Levinasian “Ethics as First Philosophy” 277 I have tried to show that philosophers as different from each other as Levinas, Blackburn, Hume, and Wittgenstein, nevertheless share the view that ethics is autonomous, or “first philosophy,” (at least) in the sense that it cannot be grounded on, vindicated by, or accounted for by anything more fundamental than itself. All fundamental questions concerning the “nature” of ethical obligations, the “source” of their authority, their objectivity, etc. are to be answered in ethical terms, by appeal to ethical ideas themselves. It is not possible, as Hume had claimed, to justify anything ethical without presupposing some (other) ethical claim. Only those, therefore, who are already ethical to some extent can see that they have ethical obligations.7 If someone completely lacks ethical sense, then we cannot show him that he, too, is ethically obligated to act in a certain way. But, fortunately, most people have enough ethical sense to be convinced by a good ethical argument or a compelling case. Most people are ethical enough to be able to see “the face.”

Notes 1. Or, in the helpful formulation of Alphonso Lingis, the translator of Otherwise Than Being (Duquesne University Press, 1981), xviii, according to Levinas, “[e]very effort to deduce responsibility, justify or ground it, or even state it in a synthetic representation, is already an exercise of responsibility.” 2. In this essay, I will use “ethical” and “moral” interchangeably. 3. Even Dworkin, who, as I will explain shortly, should get Blackburn’s point easily, repeats this charge of relativism in his latest book on moral philosophy. 4. See in particular, Dworkin’s “Objectivity and Truth: You’d Better Believe it.” 5. Interestingly enough, however, despite his more recent appreciation of Hume’s principle, Dworkin continues to charge expressivism, which is the direct philosophical descendant of the Humean approach to morality, with moral relativism. It seems to me that Blackburn has been making exactly the same point about the Humean distinction between factual and ethical contents and why merely distinguishing ethical matters from factual matters does not make them suspect or relative. 6. For a similar argument, see my “A Moral Argument Against Moral Realism.” 7. Even for Levinas, this is true. Seeing “the face” requires the ethical stance of seeing someone as an absolutely unique other. S, only those who are already ethical to some extent (i.e., to the extent that they can regard someone as an absolutely unique other) can see “the face.”

References Ayer, A. J. Language, Truth, and Logic. Dover, 1936. Blackburn, Simon. Essays in Quasi-Realism. Oxford University Press, 1993. Dworkin, Ronald. Justice for Hedgehogs. Harvard University Press, 2011. ———. “Objectivity and Truth: You’d Better Believe It.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 25, no. 2 (1996): 87–139. Erdur, Melis. “A Moral Argument Against Moral Realism.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 19, no. 3 (2016): 591–602. Gibbard, Allan. Thinking How To Live. Harvard University Press, 2003.

278  Melis Erdur ———. Wise Choices, Apt Feelings. Harvard University Press, 1990. Harman, Gilbert. The Nature of Morality. Oxford University Press, 1977. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. Levinas, Emmanuel. Entre Nous. Translated by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. London: Continuum, 2006. ———. Ethics and Infinity. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985. ———. In the Time of the Nations. Translated by Michael B. Smith. Continuum, 2007. ———. Otherwise Than Being. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1981. ———. Totality and Infinity. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Mackie, J. L. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. London: Penguin, 1977. Stevenson, C. L. Ethics and Language. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. “A Lecture on Ethics.” Philosophical Occasions, edited by Alfred Nordmann James C. Klagge. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company Inc., 1993, 37–44.

14 Against a Clear Conscience A Levinasian Response to Williams’s Challenge Søren Overgaard

1.  Williams’s Challenge The question I want to discuss in this chapter is as old as Western philosophy itself. In its most general form, it is the question concerning the relation between the demands of morality and the pursuit of happiness or a good life. Formulated in terms of justice (dikaiosune) and happiness or felicity (eudaimonia), this is a topic that is at the center of Plato’s Republic. The problem is introduced in Book Two of the Republic by the two brothers Glaucon and Adimantus who, playing the devil’s advocates, voice the popular view that “[i]f we are just . . . we shall be putting away from us the profits of injustice,”1 whereas if we are egoistic and ruthless, “we shall prosper to our heart’s desire,”2 provided that we combine our injustice with a suitable “counterfeit decorum” of justness.3 We need not be informed of the historical context to grasp the reality of this problem. The ethical and existential relevance of the issue Plato’s dialogue raises strikes today’s reader with undiminished force. The ethical outlook of “the multitude,”4 as sketched by Glaucon and his brother, may indeed be even more widespread in affluent 21st century societies than it was in Plato’s Athens, but presumably the problem would have been a familiar one to moral agents of any time and place. Does what justice or morality demands of me interfere, to some extent, with my leading a comfortable life of my own? Would my life not be better if I maximized my own pleasure a bit more, at the expense of others’s pleasure? In Plato’s dialogue, Socrates attempts to demonstrate not merely that happiness and justice are compatible but “that justice in itself is the best thing for the soul itself.”5 But later philosophers have been (and continue to be) divided on the issue. Kant, for example, seems to opt for the view sketched by Glaucon and Adimantus when he asserts that a happy person is something completely different from a good person.6 But unlike the ancient Athenians, he would not perceive this as posing any kind of threat to morality. On the contrary, to place morality in the service of our pursuit of happiness, Kant would insist, is simply to drag it down to the level of natural inclination.

280  Søren Overgaard I suspect most contemporary moral philosophers would agree with Kant (and the “multitude” in ancient Athens and elsewhere) that it is possible to be a good person without being a happy or content person. Most would also grant the converse possibility of leading a good and happy life without being a thoroughly good person. On the other hand, I suspect few would disagree with Socrates that it is at least equally possible to be a morally good and happy person—that morality and the good life are not mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, again contrary to Socrates, most of us would acknowledge that morality and happiness can, and sometimes do, pull in different directions. A natural or common-sense response to this potential tension is to think of morality as restricted in certain ways. For example, it may be that I cannot be a good person in the moral sense if I always pursue my own ends, regardless of the ways in which my actions affect others, but on the other hand, it cannot be the case that only full-blown altruism will earn me the title of a morally good person. Altruism may be morally laudable, but it surely cannot be a moral demand. If it were a demand, it is difficult to see how morality could be compatible with leading a good, comfortable, and prosperous life in either the Greek or the modern sense. Apart from the odd Socrates or Gandhi, we all consider some degree of comfort and prosperity an essential part of (though certainly not the only part of) the good life. A version of what I am here calling the common-sense response to the tension between morality and the good life is found in Bernard Williams’s writings. Williams criticizes in particular utilitarianism for being unable to make room for anything like leading a good, comfortable life. In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Williams discusses the problem in connection with the idea that “only an obligation can beat an obligation.”7 Once we subscribe to this principle, Williams argues, we “get into trouble—not just philosophical trouble, but conscience trouble—with finding room for morally indifferent actions.”8 Surely, if anything, I am obligated to help people in need; but if that is so, then how can I possibly justify going on holidays, going to the movies, or dining out, given the way the world is? Indeed, how can I justify pursuing my own goals and interests, unless they happen to coincide with obligations I have toward other people? But once I embrace this way of thinking, morality comes to “dominate life altogether,” leaving no room for me to lead a life of my own.9 In the case of a crude form of act utilitarianism, it is easy to see the point of the objection. If I am ethically obligated, in each and every act I perform, to ensure the maximum level of pleasure or happiness of all creatures affected by my act, and if no other type of consideration is allowed to outweigh this ethical obligation, then my life becomes completely dominated by morality. Apart from the enormous practical problems involved in calculating the potential beneficial and harmful

Against a Clear Conscience 281 consequences of an in principle infinite number of alternative courses of action, it is clear that I can really have no projects and aims of my own in this act-utilitarian scenario. On occasion, the calculated maximum benefit might coincide with some aim I wanted to pursue. But, in general, my life would be swallowed up by the demands of morality. In this chapter, I want to confront Levinas with Williams’s challenge. Or rather, I want to confront Williams with Levinas. Levinas, of course, does not describe a subject whose life is dominated by an obligation to maximize pleasure or happiness. But he does seem to insist that I owe everything to the other, even the air that I breathe and the bread that I eat. Indeed, he conceives of subjectivity not as being-in-the-world but as living-for-the-other or being-for-the-other. Thus, it seems we can rephrase Williams’s challenge in simple terms so as to fit Levinas: If an ethical subject is described as “living for the other,” then how could such a subject possibly find room to lead a reasonably good and comfortable life of its own? Or, stated slightly differently, if I owe everything to the other, then how can I ever be justified in keeping anything to myself? And yet if I am not allowed to keep anything to myself, then surely I can have no hope of leading anything like a comfortable life. It seems that Levinas’s moral philosophy cannot possibly offer an adequate response to Williams’s challenge. However, I want to explore whether it might be possible to draw a different conclusion. From the perspective that I think is Levinas’s, there is something ethically wrong with Williams’s challenge itself and the perspective on the relation between morality and the good life on which it is based. Although I do not defend the Levinasian perspective in this chapter, I do mean to suggest that it is not obviously wrongheaded, and thus is worthy of serious consideration. The rest of the chapter is divided into four sections. In the first of these (Section 2), I give a very brief characterization of some of the features of Levinas’s perspective on morality that seem to make it vulnerable to Williams’s objection. Then, in Section 3, I provide an equally brief sketch of two possible Levinasian responses to the objection and argue that neither of them constitutes a satisfactory response to Williams’s challenge. In Section 4, I briefly consider an objection that may seem to be a version of Williams’s critique but actually is not; therefore, it matters little for present purposes that there is a good Levinasian reply to the objection. Finally, in Section 5, I address Williams’s challenge head on. I attempt to show that Levinas offers a reply to Williams that attacks certain problematic assumptions that seem to underlie the latter’s challenge.

2.  “My Place in the Sun” Of the five mottos at the beginning of Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, the shortest and most famous is the following quote from Blaise

282  Søren Overgaard Pascal: “ ‘That is my place in the sun.’ That is how the usurpation of the whole world began.”10 As the argument of Levinas’s book unfolds, it becomes clear that he wants this quote to be interpreted not merely as a critique of egoism or selfishness (or colonialism, for that matter) in the narrower sense. Rather, he directs Pascal’s comment at the self or subjectivity as such. A number of different formulations of the point recur in Levinas’s later writings. Turning Heidegger on his head, Levinas frequently states that ethics is the fear that in the very Da of my Dasein, in the “there,” the “place,” of my being-there, I usurp the place of the other.11 Alternatively, employing the terminology of international economics, he avers that ethical sensibility involves the fear that merely by existing I expel the other to “a third world.” As Levinas writes, My being-in-the-world, my “place in the sun”, my home—have they not been the usurpation of places belonging to others already oppressed by me or starved, expelled to a Third World: rejecting, excluding, exiling, despoiling, killing.12 In other words, simply by existing as a living subject—something I have not chosen, but am rather “thrown” into, as Heidegger emphasized—I assume “my place in the sun,” thereby usurping the other, forcing her into something like a third-world exile.13 If my very existence is exploitation of the other, then resisting the exploitation or usurpation of the other must involve an element of selfsacrifice. To be truly responsive to the needs of the other entails handing over everything, acknowledging that I owe everything to the other, even the air that I breathe, even the space my body occupies. It is to acknowledge “the duty to give to the other even the bread out of one’s own mouth and the coat from one’s shoulders,” the duty “to nourish the hunger of another with one’s own fasting.”14 Taken to extremes, this ethics demands nothing short of self-sacrifice. And Levinas does not seem particularly reluctant to take these ideas to their extremes. On the contrary, he declares that “giving to the other the bread from one’s mouth is being able to give up one’s soul for another.”15 Verging on the macabre, Levinas even likens it to “making a gift of one’s own skin,” and he describes ethical subjectivity as having “sacrifice imposed on it.”16 However, the import of Levinas’s remarks is somewhat unclear. In the famous conversations with Philippe Nemo, Levinas stresses that his “extreme formulas . . . must not be detached from their context,”17 and pressed on the question of whether he will “go so far as to say that [he] does not have the right to live,” Levinas replies in the negative.18 The point, so he explains, is not to prescribe suicide, but to contest the claim of “the famous conatus essendi” to be “the source of all right and all meaning.”19 More precisely, the claim seems to be that the “self-sacrificial” structure epitomized in tearing the bread out of one’s own mouth at once

Against a Clear Conscience 283 explains the possibility of giving one’s life for another20 and is a structure underlying all human acts of goodness, even the most trivial and insignificant cases of simple kindness and politeness. It is through this structure of being-for-the-other (what Levinas also refers to as “the condition of being hostage”) that there can be in the world pity, compassion, pardon, and proximity— even the little there is, even the simple “After you, sir.” The unconditionality of being hostage is not the limit case of solidarity, but the condition for all solidarity.21 Nevertheless, it does seem that, unless Levinas would want to restrict the domain of ethical responsibility to simple acts of kindness and “the pure polish of manners,”22 concern for oneself, one’s own pleasure, one’s interests and projects, one’s own family and friends—that is, much of what most of us would agree is part of a good and comfortable life—cannot possibly be compatible with leading an ethical life in the Levinasian sense. And, whether or not he is prescribing self-sacrifice, Levinas certainly does not want to put any restrictions on the jurisdiction of ethics. On the contrary, he insists that my ethical responsibility has no “limit or measure.”23 It seems, therefore, that Levinas is after all vulnerable to some version of Williams’s charge. To go on expensive overseas holidays, for example or just dine out or go to the movies or, indeed, write philosophical essays—all of this, in a sense, is an affirmation of “my place in the sun” and hence profoundly incompatible with the ethical living-for-the-other that Levinas promotes, regardless of the precise weight and content of the prescriptive element this “promotion” involves. For Levinas insists that his concerns are anything but abstract and theoretical: My place in being, the Da- of my Dasein—isn’t it already usurpation, already violence with respect to the other? A preoccupation that has nothing ethereal, nothing abstract about it. The press speaks to us of the Third World, and we are quite comfortable here; we’re sure of our daily meals. At whose cost, we may wonder.24 So isn’t it the height of hypocrisy to swear allegiance, as some of us are inclined to do, to the fundamental principles of Levinasian ethics and still continue to strive for a comfortable life for ourselves and our loved ones, in a world where millions of people are hopelessly caught in devastating poverty? To avoid hypocrisy, it seems we are forced to pick one of two options. Either we reject the fundamentals of Levinasian ethics and simply declare our commitment to our own projects, interests, and desires, perhaps in conjunction with the acknowledgement of some restricted set of duties to others. Or else we wholeheartedly and consistently embrace

284  Søren Overgaard the Levinasian outlook, consenting to lead a life dedicated to the promotion of the interests and desires of the other.

3.  Must I Enjoy Life in Order to Serve the Other? Some might suspect, however, that this type of objection overlooks something essential in Levinas. I think there are basically two strategies for “softening” the Levinasian message so as to make room for self-concern. In this section, I briefly review each of them. One line of argument draws attention to Levinas’s theme of the “third party.” Obviously, it is rarely or never the case that I am isolated from a wider community, faced only with one particular other. Normally, that is to say, I find myself confronted with numerous others, themselves others to each other. According to Levinas, this fact imposes a certain limitation on my ethical responsibility.25 If I were simply alone with the other, I would owe her everything. But since there are always other others who I am also called upon to serve and perhaps protect from the persecution of the other, regulations, measures, and rules are necessary. These must be general and must take into account the rights of everyone, so in this way even I acquire rights that must be respected. Thus, due to the complexity of human society and the need for rights to be extended to everyone, limits are imposed on my otherwise infinite duties to others. Indeed, as Levinas also suggests, on this level of justice, I am “called on to concern [my]self also with [my]self.” Here I acquire duties to myself as well as to others since I recognize myself as “an other like the others.”26 But this sort of reply does not seem adequate. It can surely never be a right granted to me due to the necessary requirements of justice that I frequently dine out, buy expensive books and music recordings, fly around the world to attend philosophy conferences, etc. Surely, even if we grant that justice demands that everyone (including myself) has a decent standard of living, say, then it would unquestionably be in accord with this principle that I gave up all these luxuries in order that people in the third world would have, say, clean water, basic education, medical care, nutritious food, etc. One could attempt the reply that it would at least be equally in accordance with global justice if I did enjoy the luxuries available to me, but there is an obvious element of hypocrisy in this reply. It is very hard to see how anything but self-interest could motivate the view that my dining out once a month, say, is just as compatible with global justice as would be my donating to famine relief the money I would spend on dining out. In other words, it is far from clear that the appeal to the third party and the requirements of justice can do much to stop “morality” in some form (perhaps more politicized form) from swallowing up most of my life. Some Levinasians have suggested another defense strategy. According to Levinas, only a subject of flesh and blood who eats and is capable of

Against a Clear Conscience 285 enjoyment can be for-the-other.27 I cannot, in any ethically interesting sense of the word, give to the other what for me would be completely worthless. True generosity consists of giving away what matters most to one. This is why Levinas recurrently refers to the example of tearing the bread out of one’s own mouth as an illustration of the general structure of ethical responsibility. For to give away the bread one is eating is to “first enjoy one’s bread, not in order to have the merit of giving it, but in order to give with one’s heart, to give oneself in giving it.”28 But then this structure, so it has been argued, presupposes that I have my share of the joys of life, not that I abolish them. As Adriaan Peperzak writes: Transcendence surpasses and sacrifices but also presupposes the economy of enjoyment, for how could I give without having experienced the pleasure of fulfillment? How could I live for Others . . . without myself enjoying the goods of the earth I want them to enjoy? Levinas is not a preacher of austerity; transcendence does not condemn the joys of life, but it prevents them from becoming absolute; it despises idolatry.29 Peperzak offers both a statement of Levinas’s real point—namely that he does not condemn the joys of life, but merely their becoming absolute— and a reason why Levinas could not consistently aim to make a more “austere” point—namely, that you need to know enjoyment in order to be able to promote the enjoyment of others. Although initially reassuring, however, this response can only really get us near where we want to be at the cost of hypocrisy. For surely the reason Peperzak gives us for concluding that Levinas does not prescribe austerity could perfectly well be used to argue for severe austerity. How much of a taste of the goods of this earth do I really need in order to serve the other? Surely, much less than I allow myself to enjoy at the moment. Indeed, would I not be in an even better position to appreciate the happiness and enjoyment associated with various goods if I deprived myself of all but a bare minimum of access to them? It would be hard to rid oneself of a suspicion of hypocrisy if people would insist that precisely their own level of Western upper-middle-class comfort is what is needed in order to truly “live-forthe-other”: that is, to offer to others the simple politeness and whatever few pennies that would be left after the right level of “fulfillment” has been ensured. So none of the replies considered here seems to work. It remains the case that Levinasian morality swallows up all of our life, demanding the next to impossible: that we live for the other, that we hand over everything, without concern for our own lives. Or rather, that I do this, without expecting anything in return, indeed without concerning myself with what everyone else does.30 But, of course, I do not relinquish all my possessions, and hardly anybody would criticize me for not doing so. For

286  Søren Overgaard of course, very few people would themselves be willing to do any such thing. So does this not tell us that Levinas’s perspective turns out to be a dead end when confronted with Williams’s challenge? There is one other possibility. This is to claim that Levinas is basically right and Williams, therefore, fundamentally wrong. We would be reluctant, most of us, to opt for this possibility, because it would seem to involve having to acknowledge that we are not ethical subjects and—very importantly—have no intention whatsoever of becoming ethical subjects. That we are perfectly content with rejecting and overlooking the ethical appeals that others direct at us, as long as we fulfill our own aims. I nevertheless think it worthwhile to consider this possibility and try to see whether it might hold some critical potential vis-à-vis Williams’s challenge.

4.  Is Ethics the “Whole” of Life? In order to get into focus what I think is the core of the matter, let me consider what appears to be a version of Williams’s challenge directed specifically at Levinas. In his contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, Hilary Putnam admits to being “scandalized” by Levinas’s suggestion that “I am responsible . . . to the point of offering myself as a substitute for the other—think of a concentration camp—to the point of martyrdom.”31 According to Putnam, we can accept much of what Levinas says and still refuse to follow him to the point of prescribing self-sacrifice. Putnam suggests that the reason why Levinas goes to the extremes that he does go to is that he “thinks of ethics as the whole of ‘the true life’ . . . But to be only ethical, even if one be ethical to the point of martyrdom, is to live a one-sided life.”32 The criticism expressed by Putnam seems to be an adaptation of Williams’s challenge. Levinas ends up demanding self-sacrifice because he fails to see that there is and must be more to human life than morality. But do we really need to interpret Levinas as equating all of “the true life” with ethics? To be sure, no part of life is exempt from the demands of ethics, so in that sense, Levinas certainly wants to contradict Williams. But is saying this really the same as saying what Putnam claims Levinas says? Or, to put it differently, couldn’t one deny that most of our projects and joys are exempted from moral evaluation and yet still agree that, nevertheless, morality does not make up all of a human life? Levinas acknowledges that human life makes many different claims on me so that the voice of ethics becomes one voice among many: “In the concrete, many other considerations intervene,” as he somewhat vaguely puts it.33 The vagueness may be explained by the fact that these “other considerations” are not what most interests Levinas. Yet it is not too hard to figure out what he might be alluding to. Apart from considerations belonging to the level of justice and reciprocity, we may safely

Against a Clear Conscience 287 assume that Levinas is thinking of the pursuit of pleasure and enjoyment as examples of the kind of thing that might intervene and interfere with the demands of ethics. According to Totality and Infinity, enjoyment is, after all, an essential (or even the essential) feature of subjectivity;34 and at no point in his development does Levinas retract this thesis.35 Levinas’s point, then, must be that the ethical voice is univocal: that it demands infinite responsibility or “living for the other.” His claim is thus not that one may lead a full human life by heeding this voice alone. But Levinas does not thereby make room for most of what we do to be morally indifferent. Though morality is not all of human life, its voice is audible everywhere. And this may seem, after all, to leave Levinas vulnerable to Williams’s critique. What Williams wants is an ethics that leaves much of what we do outside its jurisdiction, and that is clearly not what we find in Levinas. I will suggest in the next and final section, however, that from a Levinasian point of view, there is something seriously wrong with this idea. And while that point of view may not ultimately be acceptable, at least it is not obviously unacceptable—and, in particular, it has nothing to do with the absurd view rightfully attacked by Putnam: that morality is all there is to life.

5.  Against a Clear Conscience To see how one might turn the tables on Williams, we need to take a critical look at his common-sense suggestion that the way in which a moral philosophy should avoid letting morality “dominate life altogether” is by leaving room for a great number of “morally indifferent actions.” The point of the suggestion is to restrict the jurisdiction of morality so as to avoid a conflict between the demands of morality and the idea of leading a comfortable life. It is this common-sense move as such, and not simply Williams’s version of it, that Levinas challenges. From a Levinasian point of view, there is something unsettling in this common-sense idea: it seems designed to allow most of us to feel satisfied with ourselves, assured of our moral virtuousness, by construing most of our aims, projects, and actions as being ethically indifferent. To put the point in the form of a question: Why should we demand of a moral philosophy that it leaves many of our projects, acts, and priorities outside its jurisdiction? Why—if not precisely to downsize the demands of morality in such a way as to enable the average educated, well-mannered, and reasonably law-abiding Western person to feel satisfied with herself (that is, enable me to feel content with myself)? To make my ethical duty one I can discharge with a fair portion of politeness, helpfulness, and some minor donations to the poor, say—thus ensuring perfect harmony between the demands of morality and the attraction of the good life. It is in order to circumvent the complacency and selfcongratulation this makes possible that Levinas insists on the demands of

288  Søren Overgaard ethics as impossibly demanding.36 Contra Kant’s famous dictum, “ought” does not imply “can”; none of us can live up to the demands of morality. Most of us would not even try to. But there is an implicit recognition of these demands and the “ought” that they embody in simple everyday human kindness, and Levinas asks us to acknowledge these demands explicitly, even if we will never fulfill them. Nor does he pretend to fulfill them himself. As he writes, “What is very important—and I can maintain this without being a saint myself, and I don’t present myself as a saint—is to be able to say that the man who is truly a man . . . is the man who understands holiness [or living-for-the-other] as the ultimate value.”37 The point is not properly appreciated if it is interpreted as merely a critique of the hypocrisy involved in stating that one has done one’s duty. Levinas’s ultimate aim is not captured by the idea that we have to purge our souls of all arrogance and self-righteousness. Nor, I might add, does Levinas intend in some sense to legitimize our comfortable Western upper-middle-class lifestyle, provided we merely renounce all claims to ethical perfection. Nor again is the point that we ought to torment ourselves with our moral imperfection, plunge ourselves into feelings of bad conscience, self-directed blame, or anything of that sort. Indeed, Levinas seems to show remarkably little interest in bad conscience, blame, guilt, and sin—crucial as these notions are in much Christian moral thought. Rather, his emphasis seems to be on a certain “non-repose” or “restlessness” that he describes as being “better than rest.”38 This is because to be preoccupied with one’s bad conscience and to indulge in self-blame or moral self-tormenting are self-directed preoccupations that potentially shut one off from others. The non-repose of which Levinas speaks, by contrast, is intended to indicate an openness, exposure, or fissure of the self in relation to others.39 In other words, by denying us the right to say we have done our duty, and by denying us the right to shut ourselves up in self-torture and guilty conscience, Levinas aims to create an opening, a point of susceptibility or even vulnerability,40 through which a subject may be affected by the appeal of another. His hope is that if we renounce the right to a good conscience, then we may at least sometimes respond to others with kindness and generosity. And he fears that as long as we may find security and shelter in our conviction that we are good, responsible, decent people who do our duty, there is no genuine openness to the plight of another. In other words, the primary target of Levinas’s critique is an ethical complacency or a self-congratulatory righteousness that he thinks is perilous. According to Levinas, our moral duties are always duties to concrete individuals. Their needs and the circumstances of their situations can vary immensely. It is therefore never determined in advance what, in a particular situation, is the right thing to do for another. But precisely when I am convinced of my own moral virtuousness, of having done my duty, I am unlikely to be responsive to the particular demands

Against a Clear Conscience 289 of a particular other in a particular situation. In Levinas’s terminology, I am unlikely to be responsive to the “face” of the other person. If I have done my moral duty, there is, per definition, nothing more that morality demands of me in this particular situation. So the other person’s plight is no longer my concern, ethically speaking, though I may be permitted to engage in supererogatory acts if I am so inclined. But for Levinas, an ethics that permits us to reach a point at which we are no longer each other’s moral concern is one that has no effective bulwark against atrocities. That is ultimately why, from a Levinasian point of view, we should resist the temptation to ask of a moral philosophy that it allows us—with some effort perhaps, but allows us nevertheless—to be content with our own moral performance. This, perhaps, is what is most philosophically and existentially challenging about Levinas’s thought: That he urges us—especially as thinkers, as moral philosophers, as humanists—to acknowledge an ideal and at the same time acknowledge it as one that we cannot possibly live up to; to forfeit the right to a clear conscience; to acknowledge that I never have and never will have done my duty; and yet to recognize, in the very same act of acknowledgement, that this is the real, indispensable duty that morality places on my shoulders. Because then there is at least a chance that we may be open to the call of others, responsive to their needs, at least sometimes, in some cases. So of course we can lead a comfortable and prosperous life. We can just never claim to have the moral right to do so. All Levinas withholds from us is the right to give our activities and priorities a stamp of ethical neutrality or indifference, let alone approval.41

Notes 1. Plato, Republic, trans. P. Shorey, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 366a. 2. Ibid., 366b. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., 358a. 5. Ibid., 612b. 6. “[. . .] es ganz was anderes ist, einen glücklichen, als einen guten Menschen” (Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996, BA 90). 7. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana Press, 1985), 180. 8. Ibid., 181. 9. Ibid., 182. 10. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), vii. 11. Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, trans. M. B. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 23, 28. 12. Ibid., 23; cf. 164.

290  Søren Overgaard 13. In the earlier work Totality and Infinity, Levinas refers to the Platonic dialogue with which I began, in describing the figure of Gyges as “the very condition of man, the possibility of injustice and radical egoism.” Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 173. In the Republic (359c–360b), Glaucon relates the story of “Gyges the Lydian” who discovered a ring that made its bearer invisible: “and becoming aware of this, [Gyges] immediately managed things so that he became one of the messengers who went up to the king, and on coming there he seduced the king’s wife and with her aid set upon the king and slew him and possessed his kingdom.” 14. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 55–56. Note that Levinas refrains from saying that others have similar duties toward me. When Philippe Nemo asks him whether “the Other [is] also responsible in my regard,” Levinas replies: “Perhaps, but that is his affair . . . In this sense, I am responsible for the Other without waiting for reciprocity, were I to die for it.” Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. R. A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 98. 15. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 79. 16. Ibid., 138, 50. 17. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 99. 18. Ibid., 121–22. 19. Ibid., 122. Cf. Baruch Spinoza’s, On the Improvement of the Understanding: The Ethics: Correspondence, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), Prop. VII: “The endeavour, wherewith everything endeavours to persist in its own being, is nothing else but the actual essence of the thing in question” (p. 136). 20. Cf. Robert Bernasconi, “What Is the Question to Which ‘Substitution’ Is the Answer?” In The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 234–51, 235. 21. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 117. 22. Ibid., 185. 23. Ibid., 47. 24. Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, 179. As a reviewer remarks, it is possible to see a strange exaltation of the ego in such statements. I am the one with all the resources. The destitution of the other, her neediness, reflects my elevated status. 25. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 157–59. 26. Ibid., 128, 161. 27. Ibid., 74. 28. Ibid., 72. 29. Adriaan Peperzak, Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 167–68. 30. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 82–84. 31. Hilary Putnam, “Levinas and Judaism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 33–62, 56. 32. Ibid. 33. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 99. 34. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 113–15. 35. Cf. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 72–74. 36. There are interesting points of convergence here between Levinas’s and Wittgenstein’s ethical views as I have argued elsewhere. See Søren Overgaard, Wittgenstein and Other Minds: Rethinking Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity with Wittgenstein, Levinas, and Husserl (New York: Routledge, 2007), chapter 8.

Against a Clear Conscience 291 37. Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. M. B. Smith and B. Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 203. 38. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 54. 39. Ibid., 143–44. 40. Ibid., 14–15, 49. 41. This chapter has a long pre-history. I have presented versions of it at conferences and workshops in Brisbane (2006), Paris (2015), and Helsinki (2017). I thank Michael Fagenblat and a reviewer for comments.

Bibliography Bernasconi, Robert. “What Is the Question to Which ‘Substitution’ Is the Answer?” In The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, edited by Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi, 234–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der praktischen Vernunft—Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. Edited by Wilhelm Weischedel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Levinas, Emmanuel. Ethics and Infinity. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985. Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998. Levinas, Emmanuel. Entre nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other. Translated by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Levinas, Emmanuel. Alterity and Transcendence. Translated by Michael B. Smith. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Overgaard, Søren. Wittgenstein and Other Minds: Rethinking Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity with Wittgenstein, Levinas, and Husserl. New York: Routledge, 2007. Peperzak, Adriaan T. Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997. Plato. “Republic.” Translated by Paul Shorey. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, 575–844. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Putnam, Hilary. “Levinas and Judaism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, edited by Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi, 33–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Spinoza, Baruch. On the Improvement of the Understanding: The Ethics: Correspondence. Translated by R. H. M. Elwes. New York: Dover Publications, 1955. Williams, Bernard. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Fontana Press, 1985.

Contributors

Michael Barber (PhD Yale, 1985) is Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University. He is the author of seven books and approximately 90 articles, principally on the phenomenology of the social world and in such venues as Husserl Studies, Human Studies, the International Journal of Philosophical Studies, and Levinas Studies and in collections published by Oxford, Routledge, and Springer. His The Participating Citizen: A Biography of Alfred Schutz won the Ballard Prize in 2007. He is the editor of Schutzian Research and serves as an officer in various phenomenological societies. Sophie-Grace Chappell is Professor of Philosophy at the Open University. Her books include Ethics & Experience (Acumen 2011) and Knowing What To Do (Oxford University Press 2014). Her main current research concerns the place of epiphanies in our ethical life. Steven G. Crowell is Professor of Philosophy and Joseph and Joanna Nazro Mullen Professor of Humanities at Rice University. He is the author of two books, Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (Cambridge 2013) and Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Phenomenology (Northwestern, 2001), editor of the Cambridge Companion to Existentialism (2012) and co-editor of Transcendental Heidegger (Stanford, 2007) and the journal Husserl Studies. Current research topics include second-person phenomenology, and the relation between phenomenology and metaphysics. Fiona Ellis is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Roehampton, and Director of the Centre for Philosophy of Religion. Her most recent monograph is God, Value, and Nature (OUP 2014), and she has published on a variety of subjects including the philosophy of love and desire, the meaning of life, and the nature of religious understanding. Her edited collection of essays—New Models of Religious Understanding—was published in 2017, and she has co-edited (with Clare Carlisle) a special edition of the journal Religious Studies on

Contributors 293 Religious Experience and Desire (September 2019). She is about to start work on a new monograph entitled The End of Desire: Meaning, Nihilism, and God. Melis Erdur received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from New York University in 2013. She has held several postdoctoral fellowships in Israel, and published articles in the area of moral philosophy, including “A Moral Argument Against Moral Realism”, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 19 (3), 591–602, 2016, and “Moral Realism and the Incompletability of Morality”, The Journal of Value Inquiry, 52 (2), 227–237, 2018. Michael Fagenblat is Senior Lecturer at the Open University, Israel. He is the author of numerous articles in the area of phenomenology and the philosophy of religion, as well as author of A Covenant of Creatures (2010), editor of Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity (2017) and coeditor of Levinas and Literature (2020). Kevin Houser teaches philosophy at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Recent publications include “Emmanuel Levinas: Facing the Space of Reasons” (Levinas Studies, 2017), and “Levinas and Analytic Philosophy: an Ethical Metaphysics of Reasons” (Oxford Handbook of Emmanuel Levinas. OUP, 2018). Felipe León (Ph.D. University of Copenhagen) is a postdoc at the Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen. León’s primary research areas are classical phenomenology, social cognition, and collective intentionality. Recent publications include “Autism, Social Connectedness, and Minimal Social Acts” (Adaptive Behavior 27 (1), 2019, 75–89), and, in co-authorship with Dan Zahavi, “How We Feel: Collective Emotions Without Joint Commitments” (ProtoSociology 35, 2018, 117–134). James H. P. Lewis is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Birmingham. His work concerns ethics and interpersonal relations. Patricia Meindl is a PhD Fellow at the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She specializes in phenomenological accounts of sociality, with a particular focus on the relation between second-personal engagements and collective intentionality. Michael L. Morgan is the Chancellor’s Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies (emeritus) at Indiana University and the Senator Jerahmiel S. and Carole S. Grafstein Chair in Jewish Philosophy and Jewish Studies (emeritus) at the University of Toronto. He has taught at Northwestern, Yale, Stanford, Toronto, and Princeton. He is the author and editor of twenty-two books, most recently The Oxford Handbook of Emmanuel Levinas (2019), Levinas’s Ethical Politics (Indiana, 2016), and Michael L. Morgan: History and Moral Normativity (Brill, 2018).

294  Contributors Søren Overgaard is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of Husserl and Heidegger on Being in the World (2004) and Wittgenstein and Other Minds: (2007), coauthor of An Introduction to Metaphilosophy (2013) and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology (2011), The Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology (2017), and In the Light of Experience (2018). Along with Komarine Romdenh-Romluc and David Cerbone, he edits the book series Routledge Research in Phenomenology. Diane Perpich is professor of philosophy and the founding director of the Program in Women’s Leadership at Clemson University. She is the author of Phenomenological Contributions to Social Ontology (forthcoming) and The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas (2008). Michael Roubach is Senior Lecturer in the department of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of Being and Number in Heidegger’s Thought (2008) and publications on Heidegger, Husserl, Levinas, Cassirer, and the interface between the analytic and continental traditions. Robert Stern is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. He has published widely on Kant and German Idealism, including Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit (Routledge, 2002), Hegelian Metaphysics (OUP, 2009) and Kantian Ethics (OUP, 2015). His most recent book is The Radical Demand in Løgstrup’s Ethics (OUP, 2019), in which he considers Løgstrup’s relation to Levinas; this is also the focus of an edition of the Monistforthcoming in 2020, co-edited with Irene McMullin. He was recently elected as a Fellow of the British Academy. Dan Zahavi is Professor of Philosophy at University of Copenhagen and University of Oxford, and director of the Center for Subjectivity Research in Copenhagen. Zahavi’s primary research area is phenomenology and philosophy of mind, and their intersection with empirical disciplines such as psychiatry and developmental psychology. In addition to a number of scholarly works on the phenomenology of Husserl, Zahavi has mainly written on the nature of selfhood, selfconsciousness, intersubjectivity, and social cognition. Guoping Zhao is a Professor and Research Fellow at Oklahoma State University, USA. She works in the fields of philosophy of education, comparative philosophy, and Chinese education. Her work has focused on the theories of the subject, ethics, spirituality, and democracy. She is the editor of Levinas and the Philosophy of Education (2018, Routledge) and the co-editor of Re-Envisioning Chinese Education: The Meaning of Person-Making in a New Age (2015, Routledge).

Index

absolute Other 87, 92, 102, 199 abstract identity 237 act utilitarianism 280 – 281 Adams, Douglas 170 alterity 236, 238, 240; absolute 236 altruism 262, 280 analytic tradition: central axis of 130; correspondence theory of truth and 131; Levinas’s conception of 129 – 131; and Levinas’s conception of truth 130 – 131; treatments of truth in 130 answerability: being answerable 60 – 64; grounding 68 – 72; maintaining 72 – 75; meaning something is like going towards someone 57 – 58; temporal grounds of meaning something 58 – 59; temporality of valuing 64 – 68; that I am 75; two ways of being answerable 55 – 57 appetitive desires 197, 200, 206n26 applied metaphysics 169 “Apropos of Buber: Some Notes” (Levinas) 87 “Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?” (McDowell) 205n4 Arnauld, Antoine 180 “Asymmetrical Reciprocity” 91 “asymmetry of proximity” 37 – 38 attitudes: desire as reactive 12 – 14; objective 5 – 8; performative 5 – 8; reactive 214 – 219; relevant moral 231n21 Audi, Robert 72 Augustine 171 – 172; and Descartes 181 – 182; and essential sociality of mind 179; and God 176 – 177, 182,

185; and internal relatedness 178; “natural language of all nations” 172; relationalism vs. individualism 175; as a relationalist 181; Wittgenstein’s attitude to 172 – 174 austerity 285 Austin, J. L. 4 “autarky” 184 authority: reason-creating 106; reason-holding 105 – 107 autonomous subject 246 autonomy 6, 29 – 30; authority and 147; Blackburn on 269, 271 – 273; Dworkin on 269; of ethics 273 – 276; Kantian notion of 33; Korsgaard on 147 – 148; Levinas and 273 – 276; women’s 257 autonomy-based ethics 34; individualism endemic to 30, 34; individualist 49; Korsgaard on 49; two sources of normativity and challenge to 45 – 50 autonomy of ethics 273 – 276 Ayer, A. J. 270 being, disinterest and primacy of 153 – 154 Being and Time (Heidegger) 25n92, 69, 77n39, 136n11 Bergo, Bettina 26n119 Bernasconi, Robert 95n47, 96n55, 135n2, 140, 249n27 “big collaborative enterprise” 212 Bilgrami, Akeel 204n1 “bipolar obligations” 114 Blackburn, Simon 8, 188n1, 269; on autonomy 269, 271 – 273; expressivism 270 – 273; moral relativism 270 – 271

296 Index Blanchot, Maurice 56 Brewer, Talbot 202 – 204, 207n72, 208n86 Buber, Martin 80; and the I-Thou relation 81 – 83; Levinas and 85 – 88 Butler, Judith 242, 243, 246 calling into question 102 The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (Putnam) 286 Cartesian individualism 172 charity 237 Children of Men, The (film) 64 Children of Men, The (James) 64 Citizens of the Kingdom of Ends 36 clarifications, and desire for the good 200 – 204 clear conscience 287 – 289 common-sense 265, 280, 287 communication 132; content of 109; language and 126, 128, 131, 183; process of triangulation and 132 concrete description 236 Confessions (Augustine) 173, 175 – 177, 182 conscience 14 – 17, 287 – 289 consciousness 257 – 258, 260 – 261 contemporary philosophy 249n27; Anglo American philosophy 240; debates on inherent vs. social character of vulnerability 242 – 247; theories of vulnerability within Anglo American 235 contradictions of “free nature” 141 – 144 Copernican turn 81 Corneille, Pierre 179 counter-idealism: Levinas versus Korsgaard on priority of the 40 – 45 Critique of Practical Reason (Kant) 150 Cuarón, Alfonso 64 cultural groups 212, 214, 231n11 dangerous ethics 257 Darwall, Stephen 3, 22n36, 22n42, 60; account of shame 15 – 16; “Fichte’s Point” 6 – 7; “ordinary” account of guilt 25n92; “Person is a forensik term” 21n19; phenomenology 9 – 11; “reactive attitudes” and 5; second-person reasons 3 – 5, 17 – 18, 20 Davidson, Donald 58; Levinas and 131 – 132; on truth 131 – 132

Deep Thought 170 – 171, 177 – 179, 182 deformalized description 236 De l’existence à l’existant 77n39, 92 depth, dimension of 108 – 114 Derrida, Jacques 23n46, 86, 136n5; “transcendental violence” 24n58 Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt: Eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie (Schutz) 89 Descartes, René 127; Augustine and 179 – 180; Levinas’s discussion of 127, 130; lumen naturale 181; Meditations on First Philosophy 127, 179 – 181, 183 – 186; theism 186; Williams and 182 desire for the good 193 – 204; clarifications 200 – 204; interlude 196 – 197; Levinas on reason and desire 197 – 200; overview 193 – 194; rethinking reason and desire 194 – 196 desires: appetitive 197, 200, 206n26; Hobbes on 193; Levinasian phenomenology of 12 – 14; Levinas on 197 – 200; metaphysical 156, 198; as reactive attitude 12 – 14; rethinking 194 – 196 deus ex machina 240 developmental psychology 9, 80, 167 – 168, 188 dignity 6, 61, 72, 257 Diller, Ann 254 – 255 dimension: of depth 108 – 114; of height 103 – 108 disinterest, and primacy of being 153 – 154 “disinterestedness” 49, 140, 154, 160n25, 163n59 distress 35, 101 – 102, 108, 201 Dodds, Susan 242 dogmatic moralism 72 domination and rationalism 264 Donne, John 167 Drummond, John 22n42 Dworkin, Ronald 269; on autonomy 269; autonomy of ethics and 273 – 276; expressivism and 277n5; on Hume’s distinction of factual and ethical domains 273; on morality 273 ego 63, 160n18, 163n81, 234, 236, 240 – 241, 257 – 261, 290n24 “egoism” 63, 71

Index  297 empathy 71, 155, 211, 262 – 263 Enlightenment 261 – 262, 263; problems of Faustianism 265 epiphany 102, 111 – 112, 116 – 117, 118n12, 132 epistemic humility 73, 243 epistemological rationalism 261 Erfahrung 82 ethical judgment 255, 274 ethical obligations 269 ethical responsibility 283 ethical responsibility, and facts 284 ethical self 253 ethical summons: Levinas vs. Korsgaard on priority of the 40 – 45 ethics 253; autonomy of 273 – 276; of care 254 – 257; dangerous 257; as first philosophy 257 – 261, 269, 274; justice and 126 – 127; Levinas on 227 – 230, 269; Levinas’s, as first philosophy 257 – 261; nonfactual 272 – 273; and self 253; Totality and Infinity 126 – 127; truth and 126 – 127; two sources of normativity and autonomy-based 45 – 50 Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Williams) 280 ethics of care 254 – 257; relational self and 254 – 257 Ethics of Care and Empathy, The (Slote) 262 Existence and Existents (Levinas) 275 existentialism 239 – 240 experiential metaphysics 169 expressivism 270 – 273; critics of 270; described 270; and moral relativism 271 face: of the inclinations 36 – 37; Levinas and significance of 83 – 85; of the motivations 36 – 37; mysteries of 15; of obligations 36 – 37 facts, and ethical responsibility 284 “Faustianism” 264; defined 264; Enlightenment problems of 265 “fecundity” 66 – 67, 73 – 75 Fermor, Patrick Leigh 175 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 5 – 7, 18, 26n112 Fiddes, Paul 198, 206n47 Fineman, Martha 242 – 244, 245, 246 first-personal consciousness 140; Korsgaard and primacy of 144 – 149

first philosophy: ethics as 257 – 261, 269, 274 Foot, Philippa 194 – 196, 201, 204, 205n17 freedom: inverted 151 – 153; Kant and primacy of 149 – 151; as power 151; as will 151 “Freedom and Resentment” (Strawson) 213 free nature, contradictions of 141 – 144 free-will 140; metaphysics 142; possessives of 143; as privately possess-able 143 functional notion of truth 133 – 135 Gardner, John 62 – 63, 67, 71, 75 Gardner, Sebastian 26n119 Gauthier, Frédérik 232n23 generosity 13, 18, 109, 112, 119n12, 285 Gewirth, Alan 34 giving 102, 109 – 113, 115, 118n8, 119n13, 282 – 283 Gjesdal, Kristin 26n119 God 203; Augustine and 176 – 178; Descartes’s inquirer to 180 – 182, 185 – 186; descending movement of 207n65; Fiddes on 198; forming community with 7; moral community with 7; objectification of 207n47 Goodin, Robert 242 Green movement 253, 262 Habermas, Jürgen 5, 9, 22n36, 22n37, 232n23 happiness, and morality 280 Heidegger, Martin 14, 77n39, 93, 125, 153, 160n19, 162n52, 163n82, 184, 239 – 240, 241, 249n16, 249n27, 282; “call” of conscience and 16 – 17; Dasein 240; grounding 56; grounding answerability 68 – 70, 76n1; notion of truth 129 – 130, 136n12, 137n21; “primacy of being” 140, 150; “selfconstancy” 73; “taking over being a ground” 26n118 height, dimension of 103 – 108 Held, Virginia 256 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The (Adams) 170 Hoagland, Sarah Lucia 255, 256 – 257

298 Index Hobbes, Thomas 31, 43, 62, 193, 254 Hobbesianism: meta-ethical 150; metaphysical 150 holism 5, 61 human consciousness see consciousness human subjectivity see subjectivity human testimony 133 Hume, David 31, 47, 116, 133, 240 – 241, 270 – 274, 272, 277; on factual vs. ethical/moral domains 272 – 273, 274 – 275 Husserl, Edmund 10, 55, 57, 129, 136n12, 188n2; fifth Cartesian Meditation 137n22; “motivations of reason” 10; “personalistic attitude” 21n19 Husserlian phenomenology 41 hypocrisy 283 – 285, 288 Ich und Du (Buber) 81 I-It attitudes 81 incarnation 239 – 240, 259 individualism 34; about persons 167; autonomy-based ethics and 30, 34; Cartesian 172; Descartes’s view on 170; language of 171; normative 250n42; and relationalism 167 – 170, 175 individuality presupposes relationality 167 inherent vulnerability 244 – 246 intellectualism, of reflexive philosophy 239 intellectualist abstraction 239 interlude 196 – 197 interpersonal relations 219 – 225 intersubjectivity 245 – 246 I-Thou attitudes 81 I-Thou relation: Buber and 81 – 83; engaging with Levinas’s criticism 89 – 92; Levinas and significance of face 83 – 85; Levinas contra Buber 85 – 88; overview 80 – 81; Schutz on reciprocity 89 – 92; Young on reciprocity 89 – 92 James, P.D. 64 justice 237; ethics and 126 – 127; Totality and Infinity 126 – 127; truth and 126 – 127 Kant, Immanuel 31, 162n39, 162n40, 162n49, 162n57, 279 – 280, 288;

on autonomy 33; hedonistic conception of human nature 195; “Kantian intuitionism” 72; meta-ethical Hobbesianism 150; metaphysical Hobbesianism 150; moral normativity 4; on practical reason 19; “primacy of freedom” 140, 149 – 151; principle of self-love 49; “thing in itself” 41 Kantian ethics 150, 246 Kantian freedom 153 Kantian intuitionism 72 Kantian morality 150, 199 Kantian notion of autonomy 32, 33 Kantian order 144 Katz, Claire 26n119 Kavka, Martin 26n119 Kaye, Kenneth 167 – 168, 188 Kerr, Fergus 173 knowledge, personal 166 – 188 Korsgaard, Christine 29; on autonomy 147 – 148; on autonomybased ethics 49; on conception of self as a source of normativity 31 – 35; vs. Levinas on priority of counter-idealism 40 – 45; vs. Levinas on priority of ethical summons 40 – 45; vs. Levinas on priority of self-valuing 40 – 45; prereflective second source in 38 – 40; and primacy of first-personal consciousness 144 – 149; reflection and Levinasian other 35 – 38 language: communication and 126, 128, 131, 183; the Other 128 – 129; speech and 128 – 129; Totality and Infinity 128 – 129; truth and 128 – 129 “Lecture on Ethics, A” (Wittgenstein) 276 legalistic summonsing 107 Le temps et l’autre (Levinas) 93 Levinas, Emmanuel 29, 80, 254; autonomy and 273 – 276; autonomy of ethics 275 – 276; “beyond being” 207n54; and Buber 85 – 88; on clear conscience 287 – 289; conception of truth and analytic tradition 129 – 131; and Davidson 131 – 132; “disinterestedness” 140; on enjoyment and pleasure 287; on ethics, second-person relations, and

Index  299 beyond 227 – 230, 269; ethics as the first philosophy 257 – 261; vs. Korsgaard on priority of counteridealism 40 – 45; vs. Korsgaard on priority of ethical summons 40 – 45; vs. Korsgaard on priority of selfvaluing 40 – 45; on participation 206n47 – 48; phenomenology of obligation 11 – 12; on reason and desire 197 – 200; second-personal account of free will 139 – 158; and significance of face 83 – 85; solution to contradiction 155 – 157; Totality and Infinity 125 – 135 liberalism: Levinas on 18, 26n112; rejoining 17 – 20; second-person reasons and commanding to command 17 – 20 Lingis, Alphonso 277n1 linguistic consciousness 34 Linton, Ralph 256 “living social relationship” 90 loving will 157 – 158 Lynch, Michael 134 Mackenzie, Catriona 235, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246 Mackie, John 35 – 36, 46 Malcolm, Norman 173 Manderson, Desmond 247 “Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge” (Levinas) 86 “Martin Buber’s Thought and Contemporary Judaism” (Levinas) 86 materiality 239 – 240, 241 material need 238 maternal body 259 – 260 McDowell, John 194 – 197, 199 – 204, 205n4 “Meaning and Sense” 102 Meditations on First Philosophy (Descartes) 127, 179 – 186 Mental and Social Life of Babies, The: How Parents Create Persons (Kaye) 167 meta-ethical Hobbesianism 150 metaphysical desire 198 metaphysical Hobbesianism 150 metaphysics 141; applied 169; experiential 169; pure 168 – 169 Miteinandersein 93 moral community 7, 16, 60 – 61, 64, 71 – 72, 77n35, 213, 218

moral disapprobation 215, 217, 219, 221 moral enlightenment 9 moral identity 33, 39 – 40, 213 moral indignation 215, 217, 218, 221 moralism, dogmatic 72 morality 56; and act utilitarianism 280 – 281; duped by 8, 10, 20, 55, 114, 139; and happiness 280; Kantian 150, 199; Levinas vindicating 60; manifold distortions of 60; objective 256; second-person 214 – 219; Strawson on 214 – 219; subjectivity and 55 – 56; ways of restricting 280 “morality of fairness” 213 “morality of justice” 213 moral normativity 4, 9, 13, 29, 36 moral order 117, 213 moral phenomenology 10 – 11, 22n42 moral realism 35, 44, 48, 204 moral relativism 270; and expressivism 271 moral skepticism 114 – 117, 119n15 moral statements 270 Moran, Richard 131, 133, 135 Morgan, Michael 26n119 mother-child relation 255, 256 mothering 254, 255 – 257 “motivations of reason” 10 Murdoch, Iris 196, 205n7 Nagel, Thomas 32 – 33, 35, 38 – 39, 49 Natural History of Morality (Tomasello) 210 – 214; secondperson in 210 – 214 naturalism 248n14 natural relations 254 – 255; see also ethics of care Nazi Germany 184 need 197; enjoyment of 240; material 238 Nemo, Philippe 282, 290n14 Nietzsche, Friedrich 116 Noddings, Nel 254 – 255; ethics of care 254 – 257; ethics of care and relational self 254 – 257 Noe, Alva 167, 188 non-cognitivism 238, 248n14 non-factual ethics 272 – 273 normative expectation 5 “normative felicity conditions” 4 normative individualism 250n42 normative realism 37

300 Index normativity: autonomy-based ethics 45 – 50; Korsgaardian reflection and Levinasian other 35 – 38; Korsgaard on conception of self as source of 31 – 35; Levinas vs. Korsgaard on counter-idealism 40 – 45; Levinas vs. Korsgaard on ethical summons 40 – 45; Levinas vs. Korsgaard on self-valuing 40 – 45; pre-reflective second source in Korsgaard 38 – 40; second source of 35 – 38; self as source of 31 – 35; two sources of 45 – 50 objective attitudes 5 – 8 objective morality 256 objective values 31, 42 – 43, 48 “ontological category” 67 ontology 23n46, 30, 34, 46 – 47, 56, 184, 204, 245, 258 openness: of disclosure 239; of subject 239, 240 order 102; Kantian 144; moral 117, 213 orphans, and vulnerability 235 – 239 the Other 259; absolute 199; answerability to 58; essential destitution of the 19; language and 128 – 129; Levinasian 35 – 38; primacy of 154 – 155; and self 257; shift from the Other to the ego 234; space of meaning and 72; speech and 128 – 129; transcendence of 234; trusting the testimony of 132 – 133; truth and 126, 128 – 129 Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (Levinas) 36 – 37, 42, 52n86, 227, 233n36, 234, 239 – 240, 277n1, 281 – 282 Out of our Heads (Noe) 188 participant reactive attitudes 221 Pascal, Blaise 179 pathogenic vulnerability 242 Peperzak, Adriaan 197, 285 performative attitude of persons 5 performative attitudes 5 – 8 Perpich, Diane 26n119 personal knowledge 166 – 188 phenomenological realism 10 phenomenology: Darwall’s 9 – 11; language of 239; of obligation 11 – 12

Philosophical Interrogations (Buber) 88, 171 Plato 200, 279 Platonism 203 Platts, Mark 201, 205n6 practical authority 103 pregnancy, vulnerability during 244 pre-reflective second source in Korsgaard 38 – 40 primacy: of being 140, 150; of firstpersonal consciousness 144 – 149; of freedom 140, 149 – 151; of the other 154 – 155 primacy of first-personal consciousness: Korsgaard and 144 – 149 primacy of freedom 140; Kant and 149 – 151 Principle of Alternative Identity 145 Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) 145 proximity: asymmetry of 37 – 38 “psychism” 63 Pufendorf, Samuel 7, 12, 14, 31, 43 pure metaphysics 168 – 169 Putnam, Hilary 286 Quakers 39 radical asymmetry 237 rationalist anthropology 62 Rawls, John 232n23 reactive attitudes 5, 214 – 219; Strawson on 214 – 219; Wallace on 219 – 225 realism 31; Korsgaard’s opposition to 41; moral 35, 44, 48, 204; normative 37; phenomenological 10; recognitional 10 reason: Levinas on 197 – 200; rethinking 194 – 196 reason-creating authority 106 reason-giving 13 – 14, 46 – 47, 63, 75 reason-holding authority 105 – 107 receptivity: defined 262; role in moral lives 262 – 263; Slote’s virtue theory of 261 – 263 reciprocity: of dialogue 18 – 19; Schutz on 89 – 92; Young on 89 – 92 recognitional realism 10 “reflective distance” 145 “reflective endorsement” 35

Index  301 relationalism 168; about persons 167 – 169, 186, 188; individualism and 167 – 170, 175 relationality: individuality presupposes 167; presupposes individuality 167 relational self 254 – 257; and Noddings’s ethics of care 254 – 257 relevant moral attitudes 231n21 Republic (Plato) 279 responsibility: and motherly love 260; subjectivity as 259 Rogers, Wendy 242 Römer, Inga 26n119 Roumeli (Fermor) 175 Sartre, Jean-Paul 15 – 16, 19, 24n83, 24n85, 206n32 Scanlon, Thomas M. 223, 231n22, 232n23 Scheffler, Samuel 64 – 67, 74 Schutz, Alfred 88, 89; “living social relationship” 90; on reciprocity 89 – 92; “Thouattitude” (Du-Einstellung) 89; “Thouorientation” (Du-Orientierung) 89, 96n70; “we-relationship” 90, 92 Scruton, Roger 182 Scully, Jackie Leach 245 – 246 second-person: in Natural History of Morality (Tomasello) 210 – 214 “Second Person, The” (Davidson) 58–59 second-personal account of free will 139 – 158; contradictions of “free nature” 141 – 144; disinterest and primacy of being 153 – 154; freedom inverted 151 – 153; Kant and primacy of freedom 149 – 151; Korsgaard and primacy of firstpersonal consciousness 144 – 149; Levinas’s solution to contradiction 155 – 157; loving will 157 – 158; primacy of the other 154 – 155 second-person morality 214 – 219 second-person reason-giving 20, 22n36, 22n37 second-person reasons: and commanding to command 17 – 20; conscience 14 – 17; Darwall and 3 – 5, 17 – 18, 20; Darwall’s phenomenology 9 – 11; described 3 – 5; desire as reactive attitude 12 – 14; Levinas’s phenomenology of

obligation 11 – 12; performative and objective attitudes 5 – 8; rejoining liberalism 17 – 20; second-person standpoint 5 – 8; validity of 8 – 9 second-person relations: Levinas on 227 – 230 second-person standpoint: performative and objective attitudes 5 – 8 second source of normativity: Korsgaardian reflection and 35 – 38; the Levinasian other 35 – 38 self 241, 253, 257; active 241; egoconscious 253; ethical 253; and ethics 253; and the other 257; otherness and 253; passive 241; relational 254 – 257; as source of normativity 31 – 35 self-concern 284 – 286 “self-constancy” 73 self-interest 284 “self-positing” 5 self-sacrifice 282 – 283, 286 self-valuing: Levinas vs. Korsgaard on priority of 40 – 45 Sellars, Wilfrid 12 sensibility, as subjectivity 239 – 241 “separated being” 11 Sher, Gila 134 Slote, Michael 254; on domination 264; on Enlightenment failure 261 – 262; Faustianism 264; rationality 263 – 264; virtue theory of receptivity 261 – 263 Smith, William H. 61 social cognition 80 social neuroscience 80 social ontology 34 Socrates 279, 280 Sources of Normativity, The (Korsgaard) 29, 145 “space of reasons” 12 speech: language and 128 – 129; Totality and Infinity 128 – 129; truth and 128 – 129 Stevens, Wallace 67 Stevenson, C. L. 270 strangers, and vulnerability 235 – 239 Strawson, P. F. 5, 214 – 219; reactive attitudes 214 – 219; on secondperson morality 214 – 219; Tomasello on 225 – 227; Wallace and 219 – 225 “Strawson’s Point” 5

302 Index subject: autonomous 246; Cartesian conception of 240; openness of 239; theory of, and virtue theory 263 – 265 subjectivity 56, 258 – 259; importance of sociality 246; as responsibility 259; sensibility as 239 – 241; theory of 253 – 265 summons 102, 107 supplication 102, 112 Tanner Lectures 64 temporality of valuing 64 – 68 theological voluntarism 7, 11 theory of the subject 263 – 265 Thompson, Michael 114 “Thouattitude” (Du-Einstellung) 89 “Thou-orientation” (Du-Orientierung) 89 “Three Dogmas of Desire” (Brewer) 207n72 Time and the Other (Levinas) 236 Todd, Sharon 253 Tomasello, Michael 210 – 214; “scaling up” 230n10, 231n11, 231n13; on Strawson 225 – 227; on Wallace 225 – 227 Totalité et infini, Levinas 83 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Levinas) 37, 125 – 135, 234, 235, 238, 247, 287, 290n13; and ethics 126 – 127; functional notion of truth 133 – 135; and justice 126 – 127; Levinas and Davidson 131 – 132; Levinas’s conception of truth and analytic tradition 129 – 131; place of truth 129; testimony of the other 132 – 133; truth, language, and speech 128 – 129; truth and the other 126; truth in 125 – 135 truth: Davidson on 131 – 132; ethics and 126 – 127; functional notion of 133 – 135; Heidegger, Martin 129 – 130, 136n12, 137n21; justice and 126 – 127; language and 128 – 129; Levinas’s conception of 129 – 131; the Other 126, 128 – 129; speech and 128 – 129; in Totality and Infinity 125 – 135

Umwelt 89 validity of second-person reasons 8 – 9 values: objective 31; temporality of 64 – 68 virtue theory 253, 254, 256; of receptivity 261 – 263; Slote’s, of receptivity 261 – 263; theory of subject and 263 – 265 voluntarism, theological 11 vulnerability 112, 234 – 235; appeal of 234; as aptitude 241; contemporary theories within Anglo American 235; inherent 244 – 246; inherent vs. social character of 242 – 247; in Levinas’s early texts 235 – 239; in Levinas’s later works 239 – 241; orphans and 235 – 239; pathogenic 242; during pregnancy 244; sensibility as subjectivity and 239 – 241; signifyingness of 240; strangers and 235 – 239; widows and 235 – 239 vulnerable individuals 247 Wallace, Jay 219 – 225; on interpersonal relations 219 – 225; on reactive attitudes 219 – 225; on Strawson 219 – 225; Tomasello on 225 – 227 “we-relationship” 90, 92 “Wider Significance of Naturalism, The: A Genealogical Essay” (Bilgrami) 204n1 widows, vulnerability and 235 – 239 Wiggins, David 195 Williams, Bernard 31, 67, 182, 280 – 281, 286 – 287 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 57, 276 – 277; Augustine quotation 172 – 173; ethical argument vs. ethical facts 276; Philosophical Investigations 171, 177; skepticism 169 Young, Iris Marion 88; on reciprocity 89 – 92 Zangwill, Nick 169