Psychology for the Other: Levinas, Ethics, and the Practice of Psychology 9780820703275, 0820703273

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Pursuing a Science of the Ethical

Psychology for the Other

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Copyright © 2002 Duquesne University Press All Rights Reserved This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the Publisher. This book is published by DUQUESNE UNIVERSITY PRESS 600 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15282 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Psychology for the other : Levinas, ethics and the practice of psychology / edited by Edwin E. Gantt & Richard N. Williams. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8207-0327-3 1. Psychologists — Professional ethics. 2. Lévinas, Emmanuel — Ethics. I. Gantt, Edwin E., 1965– II. Williams, Richard N., 1950– BF76.4 .P82 2002 150’.1 — dc21 2001006857 CIP

First ebook edition, 2014 eISBN 978-0-8207-0570-5

Pursuing a Science of the Ethical

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To Raymond and L. E., my parents — EG To Christian, Andra, Matthew, Michael and Lacey, my children — RW

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Contents Acknowledgments

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1 • Pursuing Psychology as Science of the Ethical: Contributions of the Work of Emmanuel Levinas Richard N. Williams & Edwin E. Gantt

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2 • Maternal Psyche Richard A. Cohen

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3 • Utopia, Psychotherapy, and the Place of Suffering Edwin E. Gantt

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4 • Pain, Exposure, and Responsibility: Suffering Pain and Suffering the Other Robert Kugelmann

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5 • Levinas: The Unconscious and the Reason of Obligation James E. Faulconer

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6 • Simplicity, Humility, Patience George Kunz

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7 • On Being for the Other: Freedom as Investiture Richard N. Williams

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8 • Diachrony, Tuché, and the Ethical Subject in Levinas and Lacan Suzanne Barnard

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9 • Levinas and Mainstream Psychology: A Conversation about Common Concerns Robert John Sheffler Manning & Michael Chase

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10 • A Levinasian Psychology? Perhaps . . . David R. Harrington

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Notes

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Bibliography Works by Emmanuel Levinas Secondary Works Cited

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About the Authors

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Index

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Pursuing a Science of the Ethical

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Acknowledgments We wish to acknowledge our debt to a host of individuals who assisted us in the preparation of this volume. First, we must begin with God, whose abundant blessings have sustained us at every turn. We also wish to recognize the long-suffering of our wives and our children, whose loving encouragement has been invaluable and without which we could not have completed this work. Likewise, we wish to acknowledge the assistance of our colleagues both here in the psychology department at Brigham Young University, as well as in other programs and at other universities throughout the world. In particular, we would like to thank Dr. Brent Slife, Dr. Bruce Brown, Dr. Steven Yanchar, Dr. Larry Jensen, and Dr. Gary Bunker for their unflagging commitment in helping to create a truly vibrant intellectual and spiritual community for scholarship in psychology here at BYU. Also, we would like to express our deep gratitude for the efforts of the anonymous reviewers of our manuscript, whose cogent and insightful comments served to strengthen and refine it in many ways. In addition, we would like to acknowledge the efforts of our editor, Susan Wadsworth-Booth, for her continually enthusiastic support for this project. And, finally, we would like to extend our deepest appreciation to Joshua Clegg for his conscientious and diligent efforts in preparing the final draft of this manuscript for publication.

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Pursuing Psychology as Science of the Ethical Contributions of the Work of Emmanuel Levinas Richard N. Williams & Edwin E. Gantt As Donald Polkinghorne recently noted, “A strange thing happened on the way to the new millennium; personhood was discarded from the realm of actuality. The person . . . has been argued out of the philosophical discourse” (1999, vii). We wholeheartedly agree with such an assessment, and add that the question of morality has likewise been all but dismissed as a subject of serious intellectual concern. This is perhaps nowhere more clearly the case than in the literature of mainstream psychology. In adopting the methods and philosophical justifications of a positivist, naturalistic science of human behavior, most psychologists have felt it necessary to abandon questions about morality and ethical obligation. Such concerns have, to many in the field, seemed more the province of the armchair metaphysician or theologian than of the serious behavioral scientist who as a matter of policy seeks an objective account of actual human affairs. Indeed, for the majority of thinkers in mainstream contemporary psychology, the question of “ought” ought never be confused with the question of “is,” and it is solely the question of what is in human behavior to which the trained psychologist should attend. This naive and deeply problematic perspective on the nature of morality and ethics is, however, coming under increasing attack — both from within and without the discipline. It is to this burgeoning critical literature that this volume adds its voice. 1

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In our modern world, psychology has achieved a degree of cultural significance and legitimacy which, in many ways, is unprecedented in the annals of academic history. It has become, in the words of a recent president of the American Psychological Association, “a core discipline for other social sciences concerned with human behavior” (Fowler 1990; our italics). In truth, psychology has come to occupy this unique territory in part because a number of other academic disciplines and cultural institutions have slipped from the central positions which they had formerly occupied. Those institutions out of which we as human beings have traditionally distilled our identity, and within which we have been able to find both place and purpose in the world, have, at an accelerating rate, slipped and given way, leaving us vulnerable to a despondency of spirit both personal and cultural. Many authors, both in and out of the discipline, have noted the curious fact that in contemporary Western culture psychology has come to compete for and in large measure assume that ontological space once occupied by religion (see, for example, Funkenstein 1986; Hooykaas 1972; Szasz 1978; Vandenberg 1991). However, religion has not been unique in this regard. A number of other institutions vital to our continued social and cultural livelihood seem also to have been displaced in the moral and ethical discourse of our age. One finds in recent decades that a great many of the issues once believed to be the special province of philosophers, governments, educators, community, and family have been transferred to the domain of psychology in the hope that they might find some scientifically sound resolution. The observations we are making here about the state of contemporary Western culture are by no means new. One can easily trace their origins back to Nietzsche’s devastatingly deconstructive critique of the entire metaphysical project he saw as the defining feature of the Western philosophical tradition. Edmund Husserl, the father of phenomenology, and a philosopher who otherwise held little in common with Nietzsche, also conceived of his own work as a response to what he saw as the fundamental crisis of European culture (see Husserl 1965, 1970). Furthermore, to the extent that the contemporary Western intellectual project has exported itself beyond the borders of

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Europe and America, this same “crisis” is fast becoming recognizable in a number of other cultures as well, albeit in varying forms and fashions (see, for example, Moghaddam 1987, 1990). Contemporary psychology, concomitantly with its sincere desire to improve the quality of human life — and, indeed, in large measure because of this desire — may be a primary vehicle for fomenting and sustaining this crisis of meaning. As a discipline, psychology developed well after the defining features of Enlightenment rationality (i.e. objectivism, determinism, mechanism, and individualism) were firmly in place. In the positivist environment of late nineteenth century modernism,1 many scholars presumed psychology could and should be grounded in the conceptual assumptions, empirical methods, and experimental techniques of the more explicitly naturalistic sciences. Ultimately, the physical sciences were selected as the most appropriate models after which psychology might fashion for itself a disciplinary identity. For, by measure of their outstanding theoretical and technological advancements, the physical sciences (most particularly Newtonian physics) had more than proven themselves fit models for any endeavor aspiring to bring order and relevance to the study of the world, particularly if a significant degree of disciplinary or scientific legitimacy were desired. The promise of certainty was in the air, and, as the noted historian of psychology, Thomas Leahey (2000), has rather pointedly observed, psychology quickly developed “physics envy.” Among those who are most often given credit for locating the discipline of psychology firmly, if uncomfortably, within the realm of natural science, the figure of John B. Watson is perhaps the best known. Watson’s (1913) stinging critiques of both Wundtian and Titchnerian introspectionism as the study of consciousness and its contents served to provide later psychologists with a secure foundation upon which they were able to build a naturalistic “science of behavior.” That behaviorism ultimately dominated psychology for over half a century (at least in the United States) speaks to the extent of his influence — or, perhaps more appropriately, to the tenacity and perdurance of a natural science bias among those who sought to understand human behavior. However, we argue that this natural science bias in psychology

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is endemic to the “crisis of meaning” that besets our age, and to psychology’s marked inability to adequately respond to that crisis. Interestingly, many who locate themselves solidly within the modernist tradition have, nonetheless, come to share the concerns we have articulated here — a general malaise of meaning and a loss of moral identity and vision. They attribute much of the problem, however, to the current cultural and intellectual ascendance of what has come to be known as “postmodernism” (see for example, Smith 1994). The “postmodern turn” (Gergen 1992) as it has been referred to, is in many ways not a unified movement. Rather, it embraces an expanding panoply of positions united mostly in their common opposition to the intellectual project of modernist philosophy. As West states: Postmodernists are critical of all of the most characteristic assumptions of the orthodox Enlightenment. They reject the universal pretensions of natural science and the ‘instrumental’, ‘objectifying’ or ‘reductive’ (sometimes also ‘male’ or ‘masculinist’) rationality it embodies. They also reject universal claims made on behalf of moralities founded on pure reason or an essential human nature. . . . By contrast, postmodernism defines itself, on one level at least, by its rejection of any commitment to modernity or Enlightenment, including the more nuanced commitment of Hegel or Marx. In its most radical form, the antihumanist critique of the subject problematizes all the fundamental categories of modern western philosophy. (1996, 190)

Postmodernism, thus considered as a broad and radical reply to all things cultural, has staked out for itself the task of exposing the problematic nature of the most deeply held beliefs and seemingly selfevident truths of its intellectual predecessors (cf., Kvale 1992, 1–16 and Rosenau 1992). Grounding all knowledge in the social and the historical, postmodernism rejects outright claims to apodictic or transcendent knowledge, seeking rather to simply recognize the everchanging contingencies of social and political discourse and delighting in the unfettered “play of signifiers” (Derrida 1978). Postmodern thought has provided many compelling critiques of the metaphysical and epistemological excesses of the modernist era, offering refreshing alternatives to the determinism, individualism, and

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alienation that characterize the psychology of the modern era. It seeks to overcome both idealism and scientism (Merleau-Ponty 1962; Rosenau 1992), and provide a psychology more faithful to human experience and potential. Postmodern thought, according to Steiner Kvale seeks to replace “a conception of a reality independent of the observer with notions of language as actually constituting the structures of a perspectival social reality” (1992, 2). In the broadest terms, postmodern psychologies are grounded in the realization that persons are not things, and should not be conceptualized or studied as such. The postmodern corrective, however, does not come without a cost. The cost will be seen as minimal or great in proportion to one’s disillusionment with the problems and excesses of our tradition and one’s commitment to the postmodern alternative.2 Critics of postmodernism argue that, however well it may respond to the problems of the modernist tradition, postmodernism, as an alternative, comes at too high a cost. These critics argue that many, if not all, postmodern perspectives inevitably end up in relativism, and, finally, in a kind of nihilism (e.g., Bauman 1993; Capaldi and Proctor 1999; Norris 1997; Schrag 1992; Smith 1982). To the extent that many postmodern positions do in fact lead to moral and epistemological relativism, we believe they cannot offer an intellectually satisfying alternative to the philosophically problematic inheritance of modernism. Rather, they can offer merely the exchange of one type of alienation for another. Contemporary psychology finds itself at the center of the fundamental intellectual issue of our age: the struggle taking place between traditional modernist thought and the forceful critiques of postmodernity. It is a struggle as significant as any yet faced by the discipline, and one that will no doubt force a thorough rethinking of the entire psychological enterprise. Oddly, however, the psychological community as a whole has been slow to recognize the critical nature of this struggle, and to come to grips with its many far-reaching theoretical and practical implications. Psychology, in this sense, has lagged behind many related disciplines in education and in the humanities, where a good deal of discussion and evaluation of these issues has already taken place. Many

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scholars in philosophy, art, literary theory, history, feminist studies, and pedagogy have made considerable progress in their investigations of the various postmodern perspectives, and in bringing them to bear forcefully on that part of the human world which is proper to their area of study (see, for example, Anderson 1995; Borgmann 1992; Gaggi 1989; Hiley, Bohman, and Shusterman 1991; Rosenau 1992). Perhaps it is because of a deeply entrenched disciplinary allegiance to the natural sciences and natural scientific methods that psychology has thus far been less than enthusiastic in confronting many of the objections being raised by those in the postmodern camp. Unfortunately, we lack the space here to explore all of the issues involved in this conflict between modernism and postmodernism, much less to then bring such an analysis to bear on the subject matter of psychology. Nonetheless, we will attempt to set forth some basic definitions and problems which, in our estimation, represent the most important philosophical burdens psychology must bear if it wishes to define itself in a theoretically coherent and intellectually relevant manner in the current intellectual climate. We will then briefly sketch representative modernist and postmodernist positions on these issues, arguing that they are both intellectually unsatisfying and ultimately self-defeating. Finally, we will articulate a perspective, alternative to both modernist and postmodernist positions, from which psychology might address the issues of genuine importance to the discipline and to the broader culture. This perspective will be taken up further by the other writers in this volume. Following this introductory essay, Richard A. Cohen provides a lengthy exegetical analysis of several key sections of Levinas’s last major work, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, to elucidate Levinas’s unique conception of the psyche, its origins, its dimensions, and its inherently ethical nature. Cohen shows how, for Levinas, the psyche is not first a cognitive entity, or even a dynamical structure, but rather a moral event, an event of “sensibility deeper than rationality.” Ultimately, Cohen argues that a properly Levinasian conception of the psyche must see it as the “inordinate responsibility of being-for-theother-before-being-for-oneself.”

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Starting from the notion that certain problematic utopian presumptions lie at the core of three of the most widely practiced normative traditions of psychotherapy (viz., Freudian psychoanalysis, Rogerian client-centered therapy, and existentialist psychotherapy), Edwin E. Gantt examines the philosophical, moral, and ethical implications of adopting such therapeutic frameworks. Gantt argues that because each of these three traditions privileges an idyllic conception of mental health and well-being, achievable only through strict adherence to restrictive codes of prescribed beliefs and behaviors, they ultimately reduce human freedom and possibility. Drawing upon certain themes in Levinasian thought, Gantt challenges psychotherapeutic practice to break from its absorption in an imaginary social order so as to fulfill an ethical obligation to “dwell-with” another in the here-and-now immediacy of his or her suffering. Dovetailing with Gantt’s concern for the meaning of suffering in the psychotherapeutic endeavor, Robert Kugelmann examines the case of Sarah, a woman whose workrelated injuries cause her considerable pain and anguish. However, Kugelmann notes that the meaning of Sarah’s pain cannot be adequately understood from within either a purely naturalistic or subjectivist perspective. Rather, he argues, Sarah’s pain is a moral event that reveals the fundamentally ethical nature of human sociality. Although the unconscious is often the centerpiece of theorizing in psychology and psychotherapy, James Faulconer suggests that current conceptions of the unconscious are both intellectually incoherent and morally misleading. He argues that “a fully developed psychology must study what is unconscious, but it must do so without assuming that the unconscious and consciousness have the same structure.” To this end, Faulconer argues that Levinas provides a way of reconceptualizing the unconscious “as implicate in psychological behavior, rather than as an entity or state of affairs either prior to or consequent on individual conscious behavior.” Moving outward somewhat from these more traditional concerns of therapy, George Kunz addresses three key features of everyday human experience that have typically been neglected or ignored in mainstream psychological discourse: simplicity, humility, and patience. Kunz maintains that because the dominant

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ethos of the social sciences is one in which altruism and empathy are denied and universal egoism embraced, there has been little or no room in mainstream psychology for any serious discussion of genuinely other-centered action. In light of this deficit in the discipline, Kunz uses Levinasian phenomenology to articulate a new psychological paradigm that more fruitfully describes the human experience of simplicity, humility, and patience. Supplementing his reading of Levinas by drawing upon a wide range of philosophical thinkers — including Heidegger, James, MerleauPonty, and Reid — Richard Williams examines the way in which its commitment to deterministic explanation has prevented psychology from rendering an account of human action that preserves agency and meaning. Levinas’s grounding of metaphysics in the ethical rather than in the autonomous ego provides grounds for an alternative view. Williams argues that freedom as possibility requires moral content and moral “space” within which people can act. The ultimate act of freedom is to give oneself for the other. Although, at first glance, one might presume the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to have little in common with that of Levinas, Suzanne Barnard’s analysis of the ways in which these two thinkers conceptualize subjectivity and ethics suggests that there may be significant moments of rapprochement in their work. She develops the notion that, for both thinkers, the development of self requires a “traumatic” disruption of consciousness that can only come from a radical alterity — something that can neither arise from nor be incorporated into the traditional ego. In the spirit of dialogue, Robert Manning and Michael Chase, a philosopher and a psychologist respectively, offer up an imaginary conversation between mainstream psychology and Levinas himself. The conversation highlights some central points of difference and commonality between Levinas’s ethical metaphysics and the perhaps less apparent assumptions and motives that have underlain and given rise to contemporary psychological theories. Manning and Chase are particularly sensitive to the implications of Levinas’s thought for social psychology.

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Finally, David Harrington offers up a cautionary note about the possible dangers of establishing a Levinasian perspective for psychology. It would be a mistake to assume that Levinas provides an ontology which in turn gives rise to a system of precepts and postulates that can simply be substituted for those on which traditional psychology has relied. Rather, Harrington maintains, Levinas’s thought constitutes a constant critique of the sort of intellectual systematizing that has routinized ethical and psychological thought to the detriment of both fields. Emmanuel Levinas, in this sense, represents, perhaps, what is most important in an intellectual enterprise capable of coming to grips with our humanity: radical critical self-examination. Levinas’s work shows us how such examination can ultimately lead away from self-absorption and generate the fortitude that will enable us not to flinch in the face of the other and the ethical obligation revealed there.

M ODERNISM AND P OSTMODERNISM It is obviously impossible, in the context of an introductory essay such as this, to deal with all modernist and postmodernist positions. In fact, it might even be argued that the tremendous diversity found among contemporary schools of thought is so great that they cannot be captured without being caricatured by such a simple rubric. Some would argue that use of any form of the word “postmodern” has become problematic because it will always oversimplify and mislead (Madsen 1992). While we recognize this problem, we share with other scholars the belief that there is sufficient commonality among a substantial number of contemporary intellectual positions that it is possible to speak of them in terms of their relation to the modern tradition and a recognizably “postmodern” movement in contemporary thought and culture (e.g., Baynes, Bohman, and McCarthy 1987; Gergen 1992; Kvale 1992, 1–16; Lyotard 1984; Madison 1988; Rosenau 1992; West 1996). Since it is not important for present purposes to defend a characterization of any particular positions as “postmodern,” we will instead present two very broad conceptualizations that we feel fairly represent the modern and postmodern

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perspectives on certain critical issues at the heart of the contemporary intellectual crisis. Granted, any scholar may well exempt him- or herself from our critique by arguing that he or she does not espouse a brand of psychology that fits our characterizations. Further, scholars may reject our characterizations as being too broad, or argue against painting with such broad brushes as “modernism” and “postmodernism” in the first place. However, our intent is to represent positions that inform psychology’s most lively and penetrating intellectual discourse. We hope that readers will be moved to consider the issues we are laying out, rather than concentrating on the insoluble problems entailed in labeling positions and placing them in a modern/postmodern taxonomy. Throughout, we will maintain that if psychology does not develop a perspective enabling it to address the contemporary cultural and intellectual crisis, it will become to a great extent irrelevant — not only within the intellectual discourse of the academic community, but in the culture at large. In fact, we strongly suspect that, to a significant degree, it may already have become so. Granted, it may persist for a time as an important social and cultural institution — primarily due to the lack of any immediately viable alternatives — but, far from tendering authentic solutions to the cultural crisis, psychology will continue to perpetuate the very difficulties it should be addressing (cf., Cushman 1995). Ultimately, if psychology is to rescue for itself anything more than a merely historical relevance, it must be willing to recognize that the philosophical grounds upon which it has sought to found itself as a natural science (i.e., determinism, individualism, mechanism, etc.) are in fact the very grounds that have given rise to the crisis of meaning that psychology now finds itself confronting.

H UMAN A CTIVITY AS M ORAL A CTIVITY Because of its unfortunate adoption of natural scientific epistemology, coupled with an unyielding theoretical commitment to reductive causal explanations, contemporary psychology is singularly ill-equipped to account for human action in any manner that might preserve its

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essentially moral character.3 By reducing the rich and varied complexities of our human world to causal substrates involving the necessitated interplay of what are, in theory, isolated or isolatable forces (whether internal, or external, or some combination of the two), psychology cannot help but rob human existence of its inherently moral content. In the sterile and hermetic environment of dependent and independent variables that scientific psychology calls home, substantive questions about the manifestly moral content of lived-existence become not only epiphenomenal, but, ultimately, absurd. However, before proceeding along this line of argument any further, we must take a moment and clarify what exactly is meant here by the traditionally ambiguous term “moral.” Taken in a rather broad and simple way, we will understand as moral anything — or more appropriately, any event — that has some meaningful implication or consequence in the lives of human beings. In other words, the moral is that which makes a meaningful difference to a human person in a given human context. Obviously, we also find the obverse formulation to be the case; that is, that a given act or event is genuinely meaningful precisely and only to the extent that it is morally relevant in human affairs. Thus formulated, we can see that any activity in which a person might engage, whether it be solitary reflection or public speaking, writing prose or poetry, apathetic indifference or selfless service, is a moral activity in that it fundamentally makes a meaningful difference in the lived experience of real human beings, the actor as well as others. In acknowledging that a given act “makes a difference,” we are immediately faced with needing to account for the nature of that difference. In addition, we are forced to recognize that not all such differences are of equal significance or “worth.” It may seem unnecessarily obvious to say so, but it is imperative that we realize that the essence of difference is that all meanings are not the same. For, to see something as making a difference at all is to already deal with difference, and therefore, with the worth of the meanings entailed in it. The meaning and morality of acts or events are inherent in the difference(s) they make in the world of persons concernfully engaged in activity.

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What the meaning of an act is, therefore, is in no way separate from the implications and consequences of that act — that is to say, from the difference it makes to persons in matters that they or someone else care about. In traditional psychological theory informed by modernism, the “recognition of differences” has typically been cast as a merely perceptual or cognitive problem, the direct result of some type of cognitive assessment or judgment. It is assumed that we are cognitively endowed so as to be able to stand apart from what is immediately perceived in order to assign a particular meaning to it from within our own highly privatized, individual mind. However, a postmodern critic would propose that, as historically situated beings with access to the world only as it is sociolinguistically constructed by and for us, we are never able to achieve the sort of privileged position or objective distance that would be necessary in order to autonomously assign particular meanings to particular perceptual events independent of our socially and culturally contextualized participation in them. This is simply because it is in difference that an act can stand out at all and be recognized and articulated as meaningful. But in standing out as difference, the act is already meaningful, and thus is not waiting around for us to assign its meaning. For example, an act of kindness in the same instant that it is seen as an act of kindness, and different from an act of hatred or indifference, is already meaningful. Furthermore, the meaning it has consists in its difference from other acts that we can recognize, such as violent and indifferent ones. Difference, and its role in meaning, is important at another level also — the level of the actor. It is also the case that an act of kindness will have meaning to the extent that the person engaging in the act could have genuinely done other, different acts (e.g., harming, refusing to offer assistance, ignoring the situation, and so on). This is to say that making a difference presupposes by its nature the potential for an actor to do differently. Thus, making a difference and having the wherewithal to do differently are inherently bound up together in any understanding of human action. Insofar as the capacity to “do differently” is involved in the essential character of agency,

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then it follows that agency and morality are likewise inherently bound together. They are co-constitutive. Where one is, the other must also be. One of the fundamental conceits of modernist thought has been the claim that individual minds possess the capacity to decide significance and assign meaning. The necessary precedent of this position is that human events (which, modernism would contend, are not fundamentally different from any other type of events) have some pristine and neutral existence while waiting for meaning to be assigned to them. It is this perspective on life and meaning that has subtly ensnared even the most rigorous of traditional, absolutist thinkers, those who would never deliberately pursue a relativistic position in a moral and epistemological matters. This is because it is obvious that not all people recognize and assign meaning to such pristine and neutral experiences and events in the same way. Thus, the meaning they have, and the difference they make is “up to the individual,” and thus, relativistic. Once it is allowed that, at least in some fairly prominent sense, events exist in a morally and meaningfully neutral form, the seeds of moral and epistemological relativism are sown in the fertile soil of modern life and cultures. What is too often forgotten in contemporary psychology is that cultures are much older and wiser than we. Cultures and traditions lend meaning and morality to human acts of all sorts and also provide the grounds out of which differences can and do arise, the grounds upon which human beings, as members of cultures, interpret their own and others’ actions morally. Postmodernism, in its most basic and least problematic form, is a call to remember this imprescindible role culture plays in the meaning of human events. As postmodernism evolves into more radical species, culture takes on an ascendant role, becoming not only the grounds upon which humans make meaning, but the creator of meaning (cf., Williams and Beyers 2001). This is seen in the structuralist postmodernism found in Marxist and much feminist thought, and in the more radical species of narrative and social constructionist theory. The relativism that creeps into even modernist theory as “perspective” comes into full bloom in postmodernism. But the relativism, it should be remembered, is the same.

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Acknowledging that the seeds of epistemological and, consequently, moral relativism are found in both the modernist and postmodern perspectives does not detract from the more important point we are making here — that human behavior is fundamentally and essentially moral. Moral relativism is, after all, a perspective on morality. It could not arise in the absence of the recognition of the question of morality in human action. To illuminate our claim that human behavior is best understood as essentially moral we will take a mundane example from psychology. We submit that people for the most part seek therapy not in order to obtain a cure for an illness, even though they may employ such language in discussing their reasons for seeking therapy, because it is the culturally accepted language for discussing psychological problems and therapies in today’s world. We propose, in contrast, that people seek therapy hoping for help with what are essentially moral problems. They seek help because they are making a difference they do not wish to make, either in their own or others’ lives. Or, they are failing to make such a difference. Or, other people are making differences in their lives that they do not want. Or, they are evaluating their lives in light of such differences. People present themselves for help because they are struggling with the meanings of their lives. They are having difficulty establishing and maintaining satisfactory relationships, they are failing in the work of the world, in fulfilling their cultural obligations, or in finding an identity — which is a meaning — within the culture they inhabit, physically, historically and meaningfully. All of these possible motives for seeking therapy are instantiations of meaningful difference. At their most basic level, psychological problems are moral problems. One of the consistent failures of our discipline has been refusing to recognize and deal with them on moral grounds. In fact, psychology — for reasons we will address later — has really sought to avoid questions of morality.

W HY P SYCHOLOGY HAS FAILED TO UNDERSTAND HUMAN ACTIVITY AS MORAL It is important to keep in mind that meaning and morality inhabit what we might refer to as the “region of difference.” That is, meaning

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and morality instantiate meaningful differences, and as meaningful difference, they constitute the grounds for evaluation and assessment. Thus, they can not be the products of cognitive assessments. At the same time, meaning and morality are not relegated to the domains of private emotive excess. Because contemporary psychological theories have tended to try and ground meaning and morality in cognitive processes or private emotive experience, they have not successfully accounted for meaning and morality in human action. Current theories of cognition and emotion make these into products of simpler determining processes. The deterministic nature of these processes destroys possibility and thus difference. It is because it destroys difference that contemporary psychology cannot deal with meaning. It has been argued elsewhere (Williams 1987) that meaning demands possibility. Traditional theories and models of psychology negate possibility in their adherence to mechanistic and necessarily deterministic views of human activity and explanations of its origins. Contemporary psychologists, in situating psychology within the natural sciences, have adopted the models, metaphysics, and methods of the natural sciences as appropriate for explaining human action (see, e.g., Bem and Looren de Jong 1997; Downing 2000; Robinson 1985; Williams 1990; Falconer and Williams 1985; Slife and Williams 1995). The explanatory task of psychology thus becomes to account for the “motion” or behavior of natural objects — and most of the mechanism and determinism that currently inform accounts of the natural world have been imported into accounts of human beings. Mechanism and determinism, as part of the legacy of modernism, destroy difference (and thus meaning and morality) because they search for the ultimate principle or force of which particular events, including human behaviors, are simply necessitated variations. All differences among human events are, therefore, in some important sense superficial and incidental, while, at their foundation, they are all manifestations of the same principles or processes. As is often expressed in the rhetoric of our statistics and methods classes, “subjects bring with them to an experimental situation ‘error variance’.” The psychologist’s task is seen to be more difficult than that of

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other natural scientists chiefly because of the greater complexity of the “natural objects” psychologists have chosen to study. This argument will be very familiar to all engaged in the current and ongoing confrontation between the hard-headed, positivistic, empiricistic models on the one hand, and the more humanistic, “philosophical,” and postmodern approaches on the other. This is, we believe, the liveliest debate our discipline has incited in the recent past. We have neither time nor desire to review this confrontation and its deep schisms and substantive controversies. The short form of the argument is as follows: Ancient Greek philosophy, as it came to be interpreted through subsequent ages, set the entire Western tradition, including psychology, on the course it still follows. Psychology’s insistence on mechanistic, causal, and even structural explanations are vestiges of the Greek metaphysical project (Robinson 1995). We have sought explanation of all things (the Many) in terms of the necessary, the unembodied, the unchanging and atemporal (the One). Although this project has taken many guises over the centuries it is still fundamentally intact. In modern psychology it is at the heart of our empiricism, positivism, mechanism, naturalism, and determinism. These explanatory constructs destroy agency — they make it impossible to account for human action in agentive terms because they destroy difference. It has been argued elsewhere (Williams 1987, 1992, 1994) that agency is not possible — cannot be made sense of — in such a deterministic system. Without agency, morality is at least a difficult if not insoluble question. It is a question that cannot be sensibly nor satisfactorily dealt with, and thus, one better left alone. However, as has been argued since the ancient Greeks themselves, agency is necessary for morality. If agency cannot be made sense of within a naturalistic, deterministic psychology, neither can morality. Williams (1992) has also recently proposed that agency, if it is to be understood, should be reconceived in terms of “having the world truthfully,” rather than in terms of making free (cognitive) choices from among alternatives. In view of the present discussion of meaning and morality, this is to say that agency as “living truthfully” amounts to the proper, effective, i.e., appropriate recognition of the differences

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inherent in an act or situation. Such difference will always be embodied in the concrete activity which acknowledges and articulates those differences. In other words, agents participate in the world in a way that truthfully articulates the differences something makes — the morality of that activity. We lose agency to the extent that we are impervious to those differences, or to the extent that we live in a world without difference, a world of simple necessity. Agency, then, becomes moral action and truth becomes a moral, and therefore, a human question, and not a metaphysical one (Williams 1992). In simplest terms, traditional psychology, because of its mechanism and determinism, leads inevitably to moral (and epistemological) relativism. The morality and meaning of an act are determined by whichever mechanical, causal forces happen to be operating at a particular time, in a particular situation. Because it (the act) necessarily follows from such antecedent conditions, the act cannot be otherwise than it is — things cannot be different. Thus, the difference disappears, and with it, meaning and morality. Any act thus determined cannot be judged as moral or immoral because, first, there is no possibility or difference within which the morality can inhere. Also, any judgment of morality will itself be necessary and determined and therefore not a judgment at all, but a conditioned and necessitated event. Judgments, if they are necessitated by laws and structures cannot be moral judgments. Finally, since all acts and events naturally and necessarily follow from extant causal conditions, the acts and events can only be sensibly evaluated relative to the extant conditions, thus inevitably resulting in epistemological relativism (cf., Husserl 1970). It might be argued that even a determined act might still have meaning for us as individuals because we can, after all, construe it and endow it with meaning. However, if we recognize that ultimately the act is determined and has no meaning, even for the actor, we cannot long sustain such attempts at meaning-making. To do so would be to inhabit a world of one’s own making — a fool’s paradise. What this means is that contemporary natural scientific psychology will not destroy meaning so long as we do not really teach it to people, or so long as they do not take it seriously.

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In the human world we all inhabit, based on our phenomenological experience, events and acts make a difference. They have effects, and are thus essentially moral. But we are left in contemporary psychology with no way of accounting satisfactorily for why they make a difference — or how this can all be so. This gives rise to an incipient nihilism, the spirit of which haunts our discipline and our larger culture around its edges. This nihilistic spirit, the direct result of the relativism that follows from determinism, also threatens to overwhelm our own phenomenal experience precisely to the extent that contemporary psychology becomes influential in defining for us our actions and relationships.

T HE P OSTMODERN A LTERNATIVE Many scholars have recognized the problem we have outlined here, and how it accrues in contemporary psychology given its roots in a particular reading of modern, enlightenment philosophy. They have rejected mechanism and determinism of the sort found in the discipline, proposing, as an alternative, a view of human beings as fundamentally free meaning-makers. The distinctly postmodern strain of this project rejects Greek metaphysics and its search for the necessary and absolute as well as the enlightenment pursuit of certainty. The postmodern move in contemporary intellectual endeavor, in its rejection of traditional metaphysics and rational certainty, provides cogent arguments against modernism. However, only a superficial analysis is required to show that the going price of rejecting metaphysics and certainty is radical and pervasive relativism. Some postmoderns embrace such relativism willingly, others reluctantly, but as we and others (e.g., Bauman 1993; Capaldi and Proctor 1999; Norris 1997; Schrag 1992; Smith 1982) have noted, nearly all do end up embracing it. It is this seemingly inevitable relativism that has engendered the most severe and lively criticisms of postmodernism by traditionalists. The irony is that traditionalists have pursued certainty and anchored it in metaphysics precisely to save morality from relativism. As we have seen, however, in contemporary psychology at least, the traditionalist project

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has made such relativism nearly inescapable. We fear the traditional remedy (traditional metaphysics as a remedy for the relativism of postmodernism) has killed the patient (meaningful human action). Be that as it may, most species of postmodernism have embraced relativism, in some cases as a perhaps lamentable, but necessary consequence of the death of metaphysics and, in other cases, as a protection against what is perceived as the moral tyranny of modern and traditional approaches to ethics. In psychology, alternatives to traditional positivist approaches have ranged from the relatively unsophisticated “third-force” psychologists of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, to the more critically sophisticated perspectives of social constructionism (e.g., Burr 1995; Gergen 1994a; Shotter 1993), existentialism (e.g., van Deurzen-Smith 1997; May 1983; Yalom 1980), and deconstructionism (e.g., Caputo 1987; Parker and Shotter 1990; Rosenau 1992). In each of these forms, however, there has been a seemingly inescapable epistemological, as well as moral, relativism. If there is no metaphysical absolute to serve as an anchor for truth, and thus for morality, and no real possibility for certainty regarding such, then alternatively, morality (and knowledge) are grounded in simple consensus — and consensus is notoriously ephemeral, shifting easily with time and circumstance. At best, morality is anchored in certain “local moral orders” (Harre 1984; Gergen 1991). But the local nature of these orders belies their relativity. They cannot fundamentally anchor a nonrelativistic morality; neither can they avoid the divisiveness of a thoroughgoing cultural relativity. A relativistic account of morality fails in some fundamental way to “take morality seriously.” That is, people do not experience their moral and meaningful worlds relativistically. To them their acts and the acts of others matter, and matter deeply. They make a fundamental and far-reaching difference. Postmodern perspectives, because they offer no firm ground for understanding or evaluating these differences, effectively destroy them by leveling difference into sameness, thus emptying the moral potency out of life.4 A psychology committed to relativism can only hope to divest people of their moral sensibility. That

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is, the project is to teach them not to take the moral sense and meaning of their lives and cultures so seriously. One might even go a step further and instruct people that the morality seemingly inherent in their culture is illusory as well. We may well succeed, following this tack, in relieving those whom we reach (our clients and students) of their guilt and sense of moral uneasiness, but in so doing we may create a void in life and culture; a moral and meaningful vacuum our discipline is not yet prepared to fill (cf., Sass 1992). We also assume, thereby, that meaning and morality really are illusory and abandon the question of truth. Such a move would place people in the uncomfortable position of, in Philip Rieff’s (1966) classic line, “being free to choose and having no choice worth making.” We ought, as a discipline, to go very slowly in this regard — we ought to check and recheck our figures before we reach such a conclusion and embark on the promulgation of such an understanding of life, self, and culture.

R ECONSIDERING THE M ODERN -P OSTMODERN D ILEMMA This fundamental problem, the confrontation of modernism and postmodernism, is, in our view, the fundamental intellectual question of our age. The import and ramifications of this confrontation are seen clearly in the discipline of psychology where questions of the meaning and morality of human action are directly encountered. It is in response to these issues that the potential contribution of the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas can be seen and articulated most clearly. Although long recognized among his colleagues in French and German phenomenological circles, it has only been in recent decades that the work of Levinas has begun to achieve widespread recognition in the philosophical discourse of the English-speaking world.5 Born on 12 January 1906 in Kovno, Lithuania, Emmanuel Levinas was raised in a strictly orthodox Jewish family in which the study of the Talmud was carefully observed. During his childhood in Kovno, and later Kharkov in the Ukraine, he obtained spiritual and intellectual nourishment in reading not only the Hebrew Bible, but also the great Russian authors Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev,

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Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy (see Levinas 1985, 22). In 1923 he registered at the University of Strasbourg, where, after a brief experiment with Latin, he began to pursue a formal study of philosophy. Here, in addition to a rigorous study of the traditional philosophical curriculum, Levinas was drawn to contemporary philosophy; especially the writings of Henri Bergson and Edmund Husserl. In 1928, Levinas traveled to the University of Freiburg in order to study with Husserl and learn more of phenomenology. During this time, he first came into contact with the work of Martin Heidegger, whose Being and Time had just been published in 1927, and whose academic reputation was already beginning to surpass that of Husserl in many of Germany’s most elite intellectual circles. Despite having spent a lifetime formulating a philosophy that is fundamentally antiHeideggerian in nature and focus, this text of Heidegger’s remained in Levinas’s estimation one of the five “finest books in the history of philosophy” (Levinas, 1985, 37).6 Indeed, as Herbert Spiegelberg notes, in his encyclopedic treatment of the phenomenological movement, “Husserl’s and Heidegger’s philosophies are the starting point of Levinas’s path of thought” (1994, 614). Following his year of studies in Freiburg, Levinas moved to Paris where he quickly completed his doctoral dissertation, which was published in 1930 as The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology. The book is still in publication and enjoys wide-ranging respect for the depth of its analysis and its continued significance to contemporary phenomenological studies. Additionally, being the first work to appear in French entirely devoted to Phenomenology, it helped to usher in a distinctly new phase in French philosophy.7 Levinas was 24 years old at the time. At about this time Levinas took French citizenship and married Rachel Levy, a friend he had known from his childhood days in Kovno. As a French citizen, Levinas was drafted into the French army in 1939 and mobilized to fight against the invading armies of Hitler. After his capture at Rennes, he was made a German prisoner of war, and spent the remainder of the war in a camp for Jewish French soldiers near Hanover, Germany. In between periods of forced labor, he managed

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to find time to study in the prison library and became familiar with the writings of Hegel, Diderot, Rousseau, Proust, and others. Although his wife and daughter,8 Simonne, managed to escape detection and imprisonment by the Germans, most of Levinas’s Lithuanian family were murdered in the Nazi death camps. After the war and an appointment as director of the Oriental Israelite Normal School, Levinas resumed his philosophical efforts by preparing a short but significant text he had been working on during his imprisonment, which was published in 1947 as Existence and Existents. Additionally, during this time his old friend and dissertation director, Jean Wahl, requested that he give a series of four lectures at the Philosophical College of Paris, which were also published in 1947 and entitled Time and the Other. While Levinas’s move away from an orthodox Husserlian phenomenology had been readily apparent in his dissertation, these two works mark a significant and sustained critique of the Heideggerian ontology that had so assisted him in his evaluation of Husserl. As such these two works, though brief and sketchy in parts, constitute the essential groundwork for Levinas’s ongoing critique of not only Heideggerian philosophy but also the whole of our Western intellectual tradition. Although a large number of articles and reviews were published in the ensuing years, the two works for which Levinas is perhaps most well-known are Totality and Infinity (1969), which resulted in an appointment to the Sorbonne in Paris, and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1998d). As Cohen has noted, the titles of these two works, “offer clues to his criticism of traditional philosophy” (1994, 122). In the one, the notion of “Infinity” is contrasted with that of “Totality”; in the other, “Being” and “Essence” are situated opposite an “otherwise” and a “beyond.” Ultimately, it is in the paradoxical and enigmatic nature of these contesting terms that Levinas’s work takes up its philosophical challenge: to elaborate the ethical significance and moral meaning of the face-to-face human encounter, while avoiding the reification or essentialization of that meaning in terms of an all-encompassing Being or depersonalizing “Will to Power.” Emmanuel Levinas passed away on December 26, 1995 in Paris.

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He was just a few weeks from celebrating his 90th birthday. The past decade has seen an increase in the number of translations of his major works and some lesser known philosophical and religious essays. The accelerated translation of such works, beginning with Totality and Infinity in 1969 and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence in 1981 and, more recently, Outside the Subject (1994) and Alterity and Transcendence (1999) has led to a vibrant and thriving discussion among American and English scholars regarding the radical possibilities engendered in the Levinasian project, both in light of and in contrast to such central thinkers as G. W. F. Hegel, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Buber, and Jacques Derrida. While Levinas shares much in common with each of these thinkers — and has, in many ways, benefitted from each of them — his work nonetheless represents a dramatic shift away from the tradition common to all that each of them, in one way or another, seeks to privilege. Levinas has chosen a radically different aim for his work: the elucidation of ethics as first philosophy (philosophia prima) beginning in the asymmetrical relation to the Other, the relation of the face-to-face. Before we address the particulars of how Levinas’s rethinking of the problem of the other responds to the problems and issues we have raised in this essay, we need to speak to possible objections to our reading of Levinas and to our contention that his work is relevant to psychology in the first place. Levinas’s thinking has stimulated various readings. Some scholars, for example, might argue that Levinas has little in common with the “postmodern turn” we have described above; perhaps, considering his work to be more that of a metaphysician, an ethicist, or a Talmudic scholar dabbling in philosophy. Additionally, while we have emphasized Levinas’s place in the phenomenological tradition, there are no doubt those who would contend that he abandoned that tradition and its concerns (see, for example, Davis 1996, 1–33). Other scholars see a major break in theme and purpose between Levinas’s earlier works, such as Totality and Infinity and his later works, such as Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (cf., Strasser 1978). Some familiar with Levinas’s work might also maintain, in

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keeping with it strongly antisystemic emphasis, that any attempt to distill anything so systematic as a psychology — let alone a set of therapeutic practices — will inevitably do violence to Levinas’s own project. We recognize this range of opinion regarding his work. Indeed, there are substantial differences among the readings of Levinas that inform the work of the contributors to this volume. However, we, and the other contributors, believe that there is much in Levinas’s work that has relevance for the theories and practices of psychology, even if we take these things from his work only by implication, illumination, or intuition. We believe his work alerts the entire discipline to some things of great import that it has forgotten — things which, if reunderstood, can significantly impact for good our intellectual efforts at understanding human beings, as well as our efforts to enhance the ethical tone and the abiding quality of our clients’ lives. In this introductory chapter, we have taken the position, with Spiegelberg (1994) and others (e.g., de Boer 1986; Moran 2000; Wyschogrod 2000), as well as Levinas himself,9 that he is best understood as a thinker whose roots are in the soil of phenomenology, but who has taken phenomenology into new ground — the ground of the ethical and the interpersonal. As Spiegelberg suggests, “It is phenomenology, but a novel phenomenology. Perhaps one can formulate the final verdict as follows: Levinas has enlarged the perspectives of phenomenological thought by opening up a depth dimension” (1994, 648). We also see a continuity in purpose and focus between the earlier and later works of Levinas, seeing the latter as more a refinement and a redirection toward different audiences, reflecting a maturing of thought more than a change of mind. Indeed, as Peperzak has pointed out, writing of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, “This book, the result of intense meditations that parted from Totality and Infinity, expressed not so much a ‘turn’ or Kehre, as some commentators have said, but rather an intensification and radicalization of the thoughts reached in 1961” (1993, 7). It is beyond the scope of this volume for us to adequately defend our own reading over other possible readings of Levinas’s work. In this volume we want to introduce his work chiefly to psychology, and

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other social sciences, without losing, obscuring, or oversimplifying to the point that it loses the insight and power that drew us to it in the first place. We have been willing to sacrifice nuance, but we believe we have retained the spirit of the work. There would be no psychology if there were no “problem of the other.” In our minds, psychology has never successfully understood the problem, much less addressed it. The extant attempts to do so, constituting all the modernist and postmodern approaches to psychology, have largely played themselves out. Levinas, because he takes us back to the other as the beginning of any understanding of human being, offers a new understanding, and a way to “unproblematize” the other. We believe Levinas’s work to be unique in the way it responds to the epistemological and moral difficulties of both the modernist and postmodernist versions of relativism. This is not, however, to suggest that we believe the work of Levinas to mark yet another intellectual epoch, as though he were simply initiating some manner of “postpostmodernism,” which would constitute the next (chrono)logical step in the monotonous evolution of ever-increasingly trendy philosophical thought. Rather, we see in his work an attempt to resuscitate a philosophical tradition that stretches back in the history of ideas at least to Plato’s question of the Good, or that which is beyond Being.10 As such, Levinasian phenomenology represents the attempt to ground first philosophy in the ethical encounter of the Other, rather than in the workings of Husserl’s (or Kant’s) transcendental ego, or Heideggerian ontology or thought about Being. For Levinas, first philosophy, however it has been developed, is not really “first,” because it requires that we first assume, even perhaps without acknowledging the assumption, the fundamental and irreducible relation between that which is absolutely other and the same (i.e., the cogito, the ego, or the I). This relation, this absolute alterity, resists, or rather contests, absorption or comprehension into the totality of universal Being. This is the essence of Levinas’s response to modernism and its traditional metaphysics. Levinas makes a similar response to modernism and its notion that certainty consists in the activity of an individual mind. In opposition to the notion that all realities and truths are ultimately

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reducible to the activity of an autonomous subject, or “the Same,” Levinas argues that this absolute alterity overflows the rational capacities of individual subjects and instantiates them in ethical obligation. It is this obligation that gives rise to (or calls forth) our rational capacities. Rational capacities do not give rise to understanding of alterity. Because both modernist and postmodernist thought have begun their analyses by meditating upon the being of the individual (the Same), they have neglected that space wherein difference can occur, and they have systematically overlooked the alterity in the face-to-face encounter with the Other.11 Because difference demands otherness it cannot exist in any meaningful way for individuals as individuals. Thus, for there to be genuine difference such that meaning may occur, there must be an “a priori being-with” that which is genuinely other. The otherness of this Other is concretized in the face of an-other human, a face which speaks and, in speaking, demands of us, from a position “above” ourselves, an accounting for the very existence we enjoy and have assumed to be ours by individual right. It is in this speaking, in the existence and exercise of language “primordially composed in a plurality of interlocutors” (Levinas 1969, 2), that the ethical obligation is preeminently revealed. The Other, by existing face-to-face with us, contests at every point our presumed right to a “place in the sun”12 and, thereby, resists our attempts to totalize and circumscribe all difference within the categories and rational conceptualizations of the Same. This resistance, the brute fact that once encountered, the Other never disappears, no matter how we cognize or rationalize or define her away, takes its most immediate and poignant form as suffering. Suffering, not threat, is the salient apparition of the other. Ultimately, in Levinasian phenomenology, the narcissistic monism of both modernism and postmodernism is to be supplanted by a fundamental sociality; a sociality born in the ethical relatedness of the Same and the Other (cf., Davis 1996), and one which does not devolve into nihilistic relativism (Gantt 2001). Any analysis of human being that takes the individual as the ontological starting point will not only fail to resolve the problem of the other, but will also fail to retain meaning or morality in its analysis.

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This is so whether that being is construed as consciousness, ego, self, or reinforcement history — in the modernist tradition — or as a location in a moral discourse or a local moral order — in the social constructionist species of the postmodern response. There is considerable irony here. Levinas essentially accuses the postmodernists of not being radical enough. Those postmodernists who want to speak of the importance of sociality fall short of an account of it because they still, in some sense, conceive of the problem as getting sociality “into” the individual being or getting an individual being out of sociality. In both cases, the individual is the entity in contrast to whom others — the sociality — are defined. Many social constructionists will undoubtedly recoil at this criticism. Of all strains of postmodern thought, social constructionism may well be the one that takes sociality most seriously. Indeed, within a social constructionist framework, all things human, including morality and individual identity, are socially constructed. If, however, identity and morality are merely social constructions, if the social order and the constructing process are ontologically a priori, then both identity and morality (difference) are compromised — as severely as they are within any traditional modernist framework (Gantt 2001). If identity is socially constructed, then so is any individual’s sense of difference or meaning. Some differences are given, and others are unavailable. By the same token, one’s sense of the other and of relationship to the other is given — not primordial. A socially constructed being can take on only those socially constructed obligations which the preexisting sociality makes available because difference, obligation, and morality are derived only from the social structures and processes that underlie all human reality. Social constructionism can either accept this and end up in a type of structural determinism indistinguishable from the metaphysical determinism that characterized modernism, or assert (without evidence) that social constructive processes are somehow absolutely indeterminate and end up losing any sense of secure identity or meaningful difference. Socially constructed differences (or senses of differences) are ephemeral and insecure. For the other to be real, and otherness fundamental, the same must, in

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some sense, be equally real and subject neither to social construction nor deconstruction. The question remains, then, how otherness and the same can both be understood in this way. It is in addressing this question that the genius and profundity of Levinas’s work is most clearly seen. And this is the essence of its importance for psychology. If one takes the individual, the “same” as the beginning point, then meaning and morality (the recognition of difference) are simply judgments by or about individuals. However, precisely to the extent that the individual is an individual, and powerful enough to make such judgments, the individual becomes its own grounds; it is alienated from the Other. Since morality demands difference, and individuals do not manifest difference — since others are necessary to be different from — there can be no morality in individual acts or judgments. In a view that takes individuals as fundamental, then, one’s moral behavior is judged by the extent to which it corresponds to either metaphysical principles or social consensus. In both cases, those judgments will be subject to any causal influences, processes, and limitations seen to operate and interfere with or affect cognitive and emotive functioning. As we have seen, morality and meaning are lost in such a causal network. One judges moral behavior based on those same processes and limitations. This is precisely where, if the analysis we have made here is valid, contemporary psychology fails in giving an adequate account of human moral action, slipping instead into mechanism, determinism, and relativism. The radical alternative suggested by Levinas begins its analysis of human being not with the same — individual consciousness or social construction — but with the alterity of the other that grounds both identity and experience. Levinas suggests that our beings, our identities as individuals, are emergent in the concrete relation with the Other. In other words, our life comes to have meaning and take on character only in our relatedness to the other as we first respond to the Other. Furthermore, this relationship is immediately and primordially one of ethical obligation. Life, understood as the very structure of subjectivity, or understood as concrete occupations of daily living, is a beingfor-the-other.

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What is more important, perhaps, is that Levinas does not ground this sense of obligation, in any cognitive functioning or process of socialization which would allow one to “see” and “understand” or “internalize” such obligation. That would make ethics secondary to social structures or psychological functioning that produce such cognitions, and destroy the ethicality of it — or at least ameliorate or weaken the fundamental obligation. And this is precisely the move both traditional psychology and postmodernism have taken. Instead, Levinas places the obligation prior to such psychological processes, locating it at the very beginning point of our being human. To be a human being at all is to stand in obligation to the other. No sophisticated cognitive capacity or developed interpersonal sensitivity are necessary for the existence or the recognition of this obligation. It is in this sense that Levinas is a phenomenologist. He undertakes a phenomenological investigation into the experience of being human and finds, at the origin of that experience, the ethical obligation to the other (Spiegelberg 1994). Levinas offers a sort of originative allegory to show how we come to be as ethical beings in this sense. It involves nothing more sophisticated than the (noncognitively mediated) “recognition” of the otherness of the other and the empirical fact that all I have might just as well be the Other’s. At the most primitive level, I have no claim to anything as an individual that does not require a certain amount of self-justifying. As a matter of fact, as this line of reasoning suggests, it is in moral justification that the modern notion of selfhood comes to be. One’s identity as an individual only makes sense and is sustainable only in the face of the otherness (alterity) of the Other. And that face instantiates a fundamentally ethical call. This is the essence of difference. For Levinas, then, the ethical, rather than the metaphysical or the cultural, is the touchstone for human existence. Sociality inheres in this fundamental ethical obligation; ethical obligation does not derive from self-conscious awareness of sociality. All human activity becomes fundamentally ethical, deriving its meaning out of the ground of infinite obligation and difference, the absolute otherness of the other. And finally, this obligation is not complex, requiring

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cognitive sophistication, careful socialization, or arcane social construction. It is obvious and available. Much of contemporary psychology, just as much of contemporary culture, by assuming or invoking cognitive and social complexity, aims to obscure and cover over meaning and morality. The aim is the obscuring or annihilation of difference. Levinas offers an anchoring for truth alternative to both traditional metaphysics and reactionary relativism. And, if agency is “having the world truthfully” (Williams 1992), this same anchor is also the grounding for human agency. We are agents (and individuals) to the extent that we recognize13 and shoulder the infinite obligation to the other and respond truthfully in light of this to that obligation in the face of the other. In doing other than this, we spend our time totalizing, inhabiting an illusory world, a world concocted by and for the self, but which does not in fact exist, a false world composed of explanations and strategies designed to deny and avoid differences, the otherness of the other, and our fundamental obligation. The painful fact is that in so doing we destroy the meaning and morality of our lives. And in a real sense we destroy ourselves because we have our being only in and through obligation to the other. We thus lose our agency and spend our time in the world created by modern culture and promulgated by modern psychology — a nihilistic world expunged of meaning and morality.

I MPLICATIONS It is clear, we hope, that Levinas’s work presents a genuine and radical alternative to both traditional approaches to psychology and their postmodern alternatives. It offers a grounding for human being and human action in which meaning and morality are not reduced or relativized. It offers an alternative stance to the metaphysical determinism of the tradition and the facile social consensus of much postmodern thought. It can, we believe, save us from relativism and offer an account that takes seriously both truth and agency, saving the discipline thereby from irrelevance. One last observation concerning Levinas’s work is important for

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purposes of this essay. Richard Cohen (1990) points out that Levinas’s notion of the obligation to the other and the absolute otherness of the other are deeply rooted in Jewish religious tradition where God is manifest always in and through the face of the Other (see also, Handelman 1991). Every such face and the obligation it occasions are at the same time intensely personal and particular and universal and absolute. Levinas’s work makes its contribution to the problems that beset psychology in part because of his having taken religion seriously. He seeks the metaphor that grounds his explanation in religious tradition and not in the social or natural sciences. We contend that the social and natural sciences are suffering a severe shortage of metaphors for understanding meaningful human action and morality, and the metaphors they make available have no power to render an understanding of these human phenomena. Our discipline, and perhaps our contemporary Western culture, must either be content with our individualistic and mechanical metaphors or their postmodern counterparts — thereby accepting moral relativity and surrendering any attempt to render human behavior meaningful — or the discipline must move outside itself (perhaps, as unthinkable as it may seem to the discipline at large, even into religion) to find new metaphors for accounting for human being. Our hope is that, as a discipline, we will have the foresight and courage to do the latter. We suggest the work of Emmanuel Levinas as a powerful and fruitful alternative discourse for psychological understanding.

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Maternal Psyche Richard A. Cohen “The psyche is the other in the same without alienating the same.” — Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence

T HE S UCCESS OF P SYCHOLOGY We are obsessed with psychology. Today, as never before, the seriously troubled individual turns to psychology rather than to family, friends, coreligionists or God. We are embarrassed not about seeing a therapist, but about being embarrassed to see a therapist. Nor is it simply troubled individuals who turn to psychology. The healthy also turn to it. Psychology explains everything, including all the previous explanations, from family to friends to work to leisure to religion to God. The self-help section of the bookstore, where every book is invariably a “best seller,” dwarfs the religion and philosophy sections, which are now often combined with “occult” books. All things nonmaterial have become psychological or sociological. Or, rather, everything spiritual or ideal, everything that hitherto inspired humanity, everything high or transcendent, has become human, a human projection, a human project. Heidegger called our time the age of “subjectivization,” willfulness. Earlier, Franz Rosenzweig distinguished our time as the epoch of the human, in contrast to the medieval epoch of God and the ancient epoch of Being. For Paul Tillich religion is “culture.” For Mordechai Kaplan it is “civilization.” For Carl Jung it is “depth psychology.” One could go on; the reductions are everywhere. In the fields of literature, philosophy, theology and religious studies, things have come to such a pass that “otherness” has now not only 32

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come into question but has become the central question. No longer vexed by the particular problems of the reality of other minds, the veracity of truth, the authority of values, or even the existence or interventions of God, otherness, alterity, the other-than-self, now stands in need of serious defense, at least in academia. We find ourselves in a world whose meaningfulness is increasingly explained by psychology. Or perhaps we are just increasingly finding ourselves each in his or her own psychological world. Psychology, not metaphysics, supports and explains our new monadic lives. The explanation for the stunning success of psychology is twofold: it has taken over the “soul,” and it has become scientific. In place of the vague and haphazard “care for the soul” and “spiritual exercises” of religion, or philosophy’s exhortations in the name of “the rational part of the soul,” “the charioteer,” we now have a deeper truer science of the psyche — psycho-logy. In place of the vagaries and personalities of wisdom, we have knowledge. Psychology will finally fulfill the Delphic imperative guiding Socrates and Western philosophy: “Know thyself.” Psychology will finally decipher the medieval allegories of Venus and Psyche, the pilgrim’s progress of the soul guided by love. The psyche will now have a more reliable guide, not love but knowledge, truth. “Sapere aude,” “Dare to know!” said Kant, embark on an “exodus from self-incurred tutelage.” More radical, Marx takes freedom to its limit: “You have nothing to lose but your chains.” Commandments, authority, tradition, loyalty, tutelage, are the chains. The reductions are enormous, the liberation staggering. No wonder, then, that having appropriated the prestige and displaced the ancient and immense territory of soul and spirit, hitherto the domain of religion and philosophy, psychology has quickly become the preeminent — or at least the most popular — human science. Who can resist its claim to answer the ancient mysteries and satisfy our modern vanities, antiquating the discourses and mentalities it exposes as mystification, legerdemain, wish fulfillment, projection, delusion, obsessive-compulsion, reaction formation, repression, infantilism, hallucination, and so forth. A whole new jargon has come into vogue. Nobody is any longer anybody’s fool. With only a dash

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of cynicism and a pinch of exaggeration, who cannot see in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — the therapist’s bible — recipes for all the components, perspectives and world views constructed across history in the name of religion, theology, and philosophy. Their innocence — pretended or sincere — is finally exposed. Finally, at long last, dry land: a science of the soul, secular salvation. The soul and the vast reaches to which it belongs (religion, the holy, mysticism, God, theology, philosophy, metaphysics, to name a few) have been funneled into the psyche and the immanent logic of psychology. All visions, visitations, vocations, invocations, including revelation itself, would have purely psychological explanations, or at least natural explanations. They would all be projections, coming not from the outside in, but from the inside out. Ludwig Feuerbach, struck by this idea, still thought of these projections as humankind’s highest aspirations, its highest ideals, its glory. In the name of truth, Nietzsche and Freud will sink the higher far lower. Nietzsche’s (1967a) disenchantment in On the Genealogy of Morals makes Freud’s pale in comparison. The fault of religion is not that it is false. Of course it is false, but so too is science. The fault of religion is that in the face of almost universal human suffering its methods, its techniques, its promises, and its consolations, not only fail to provide genuine or lasting relief, they actually exacerbate the believer’s problems. They make sufferers sicker, weaker, more enervated, more — rather than less — slavish. In contrast, Nietzsche disdainfully turns from spirit to the body. He advocates a healthy diet, mountain air, walks, hiking, vigorous exercise and perhaps even a war or two. These and not prayer, meditation, fasting, good works, “love of the neighbor,” guilt, will be the panacea, the way to genuine health, a new innocence, strength, joy. Nietzsche’s books are intended for the kitchen or backpack, not the study or chapel library. Upon discovering Gustav Flaubert’s words: “One cannot think and write, except sitting,” Nietzsche (1967a) exclaims: “Nihilist!” (471). At a time when philosophy reeked, as he thought, of religious faith under a variety of names — metaphysics, idealism, dialectical materialism, criticism, science, and so forth —

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Nietzsche proudly took on the mantle of “psychologist” or “physiologist,” or at worst “philosopher of the future.” All the best and highest values (and any others are beneath contempt) are too small, too petty, too human, variations on asceticism, variations of the “only will hitherto”: the will to nothingness. In Nietzsche’s favor, it should be noted that despite the hyperbolic and decadent character of his critique, itself a symptom as much as diagnosis,1 he did rebel against the diminution of humankind, fearing most the “last man,” he who would blink and accept — everything, anything, good, evil, no matter. Psychology’s logic is inexorable: all meaning comes from the psyche, hence is immanent, psychological, even if some psychology is perforce also social psychology. All other explanations that claim to exceed the immanence of the psychological or sociological, are merely mythological, the psyche masking itself from itself and are unmasked by psychology. Interpretive alternatives, whether traditional world views, personal visions, religions, philosophies, indeed any systematic or ongoing recognition of any exterior authority — including such mundane elements as the prestige of character, parents, family, friends, community and common sense — despite the best of intentions and a wisdom tested by time, increasingly appear to be outmoded, ineffective, unreliable, obsolete, forced, arbitrary, risky, in a word “subjective,” nonscientific, interpretations lacking in adequate self-consciousness, if not expressions of outright stupidity or malice. The individual, aided by the resources of a scientific psychology, would stand alone, daring to know. Each psyche becomes a world, the world. And yet, paradoxically, this grandiose enlargement of the self has never seemed so small. Alienation, estrangement, isolation, “the lonely crowd,” anomie, loss of meaning, and now, the question of otherness, haunt the modern psyche and its brave new world. The modern inflation of the subjective and the autonomous does not derive solely or even fundamentally from the influence of modern ego-oriented psychology. This is not to say that having displaced family, religion and philosophy, the influence of psychology does not contribute its fair share to the decline and marginalization of authority. However, beyond psychology, what has made much of religious and philosophical

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perspectives obsolete is an inflated opinion regarding the range and significance of science as such. To its credit, as Spinoza (1989) has made this abundantly clear in his Theological-Political Treatise, science has freed religion from many false claims. But to its discredit, or more exactly to the discredit of a certain misreading of science, instead of freeing religion for its proper domain, i.e., for worship and moral development, and for its proper significance, i.e., for that which is deepest and provides guidance, science has come to be seen as a substitute for religion and the “spiritual” altogether. Science has become a religion, not only in the sense that Nietzsche pointed to, namely, that “one has faith in truth,” but even more broadly in the sense that it is the totality of our world view, our only world view. The success of psychology is, it seems to me, perhaps the most outstanding evidence for this displacement. Science and its hard-headed “objectivity” are increasingly becoming our pride and deepest point of view, the last word in everything. This is occurring despite the fact, obvious to anyone who knows science genuinely, that science tells us and can tell us nothing about the “whys and wherefores” of human existence. Its facts, by themselves, as facts, as a totality, are independent of values. What we are increasingly seeing, then, as we lose sight of the proper role of science, as science takes the place of morality, reverence, and wisdom, is that soon we will have no morality, reverence, or wisdom whatsoever. True science involves a community of trained inquirers hard at work testing and refining truth claims against evidence. There is nothing wrong and much that is right about this. Its negative simulacrum, however, the “ideology” of science as a substitute for religion, has much that is wrong and little that is right about it. As Heidegger saw, it yields individuals bound to no authority but their own willfulness. It yields what Arnold Gehlen (1980), calls “the new subjectivism”: subjectivism all the way to a loss of contact with reality and significance (passing in academic circles today under the name “deconstruction”). Knowledge shall set all humankind free . . . from the values of family, community, tradition, merit, command, religion, God, now seen to be no more than arbitrary human-created “values,” products of crafty

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rhetoric and craftier politics, authoritarian rather than authoritative. Authority itself has become authoritarian, or so we are told by an intellectual avante garde. But what will the iconoclasts do or say when all the icons are broken? Where will the avant garde be when it has nothing to leave behind? Who can forget Erich Fromm’s question: What is freedom for when it has only been freedom from? Have we reached the point where we have forgotten that it is easier to destroy than to create, easier to tear down than to build up, easier to scoff than to revere? Without rejecting modernity, that is to say, without rejecting science, Levinas stands radically against these developments and the imperial inflation of psychology that is part and symptom of them. His countercriticism is precise: the problem is not with science, knowledge or truth, but rather with their hegemonic inflation, with the philosophy of science as totality. Levinas stands against the idea of the psyche reduced to its immanent logic, to what science can know of it. This in no way means that Levinas defends the irrational. Levinas embraces science, but he embraces ethics more closely. On the basis of ethics, and its relation to religion, he finds compelling support for science. So too psychology must remain scientific — Who could argue otherwise? — but as knowledge, it must acknowledge and integrate its deeper roots in ethics because the human psyche is from the first and always ethically determined. Psychology must become what it always has been: wisdom. To reduce ethics away in the name of an imperial scientism is to lose both the psyche and the genuine logos of psychology. Section four of this essay will explore Levinas’s conception of ethical subjectivity in more detail. Before turning to Levinas’s conception of the “inspired psyche,” however, let us first briefly review some of his general comments regarding psychology. This excursion will be brief because the weight of Levinas’s original contribution, or potential contribution, to psychology lies not with his occasional remarks, but rather with his ethical metaphysics and the repercussion that metaphysics has for a nonreductive conception of selfhood.

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COMMENTS ON PSYCHOLOGY, PHENOMENOLOGY, PSYCHOANALYSIS, FREUD In his many writings Levinas has discussed and commented on psychology, and psychoanalysis and Freud more particularly. These discussions and comments do not, either singly or as a whole, make up the locus of Levinas’s potential contribution to a rethinking of psychology. Still, if we are to be thorough in our grasp of Levinas in relation to psychology, they merit our attention. The most sustained discussion of psychology is found on the final pages of chapter seven of The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Here, however, Levinas is examining psychology in the narrow context of a technical question regarding the significance and depth of the phenomenological method and phenomenological science. It is a matter of the difference between psychology and phenomenology. Very early in his career, Edmund Husserl had called phenomenology a “descriptive psychology” or “phenomenological psychology.” Later he shed the name “psychology” altogether. Levinas discusses psychology, then, in order to elucidate Husserl’s mature conception of its radical difference from phenomenology. Though radically different, psychology is nonetheless “strictly parallel” to phenomenology in every particular. The findings of one discipline are precisely mimicked by the other. But, and this is the all important difference, their ultimate sense differs. Psychology and “psychological consciousness” remain for Husserl “natural” or worldly, like all nonphenomenological sciences, while phenomenology and its “transcendental consciousness,” by utilizing the strict method of “epoche” or “reduction,” a deliberate bracketing or suspension of realist belief, and a concomitant reflective awareness of consciousness or “intentionality” as meaning-giving, attain the absolute, i.e., the final, constitutive origin of all meaning.2 Phenomenology, then, is depth psychology purified of ontological presuppositions (which is why Husserl at first called phenomenology “descriptive psychology”). Or, to put the difference in yet another way, psychology is one natural science among many, pursuing the logic of its particular and distinctive subject matter, the psyche, while

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phenomenology, in contrast, is philosophy, a “rigorous science” at once transcending and accounting for the whole. Though Levinas’s discussion of psychology and phenomenology in chapter seven of The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology sheds little light on Levinas’s own conception of the psyche, it does indicate what will always be his dissatisfaction with any purely psychological account of reality. For Levinas psychology does not get to the root of things, does not reach ultimate significations or ultimate significance. This point, the limitation of psychology, follows from the methodological distinction summarized above, but even more obviously from Husserl’s earlier critique of “psychologism” in the “Prolegomena” to his Logische Untersuchungen of 1900. There, in a sustained and unrelenting exposition, Husserl attacked any purely psychological account of signification as a relativism, and hence as skepticism, lacking in truth, and hence as contradicting its own claims to scientific validity. It is worthwhile to make one final comment concerning Levinas’s discussion of phenomenology in chapter seven of The Theory of Intuition. It is quite interesting — in terms of discerning the point of departure of Levinas’s own thinking — to note that in addition to the limitation of psychology revealed in the contrast Husserl makes between psychology and philosophy (phenomenology), in the final two paragraphs of this same chapter Levinas will argue that the phenomenology which is strictly parallel to psychology must itself be supplemented by an account of “intersubjectivity.” Years later, in two sentences, one in 1947 in Time and the Other and the other in 1961 in Totality and Infinity, based on what are by now his own independent phenomenological studies, Levinas will criticize Freud for having begun his theory of psychoanalysis with libidinal desire and pleasure without having delved into their deeper and proper ontological significance. Once again, psychology is not deep enough. Elsewhere and related to this criticism, Levinas will declare: “I am not at all a Freudian, consequently I do not think that Agape comes from Eros” (1991, 171).3 One can turn to section four of Totality and Infinity, “Beyond the Face,” to read Levinas’s brilliant non-Freudian account of eros and its relation to ethical subjectivity.4

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In other comments, based on his own account of the extreme sincerity and frankness of the face-to-face, on the ethical subjectivity which Levinas will characterize as “Saying” (Dire), and the extreme attention or wakefulness that constitutes ethical consciousness, in Difficult Freedom (1990a) and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1998d), Levinas accuses psychology and psychoanalysis, along with sociology (and on some occasions Marxism, structuralism, linguistics and political economy as well), for being too suspicious, for reductively detecting “symptoms or superstructures” (Levinas 1976, 266) where straightforward meanings are intended by interlocutors.5 Here psychology is accused of falsely being too deep, as it were, of reading meanings into significations at the expense of more immediate and important significance. For Levinas, as we shall see, it is the other who speaks to me, captivates me, obligates me, not the other’s complexes, or bank account, or nationality, though these and other similar dimensions of sense certainly have a role to play. In attending to symptoms and superstructures psychology is diverted because it misses the root of meaning. It misses that metaphysical complex of alterity and sensibility that constitutes an original ethics, discussed below under the heading “maternal psyche.” Interesting though they may be, the scattered comments on psychology, Freud, and psychoanalysis found in Levinas’s writings neither present sufficiently determinate analyses nor cross the threshold of originality enough to merit exceptional notice. More significant to the theory and practice of psychology is Levinas’s radically ethical account of the psyche, and the status of the psyche in the ethical metaphysics that underlies the few explicit comments made about psychology. Let us turn now to Levinas’s conception of ethical subjectivity.

M ATERNAL P SYCHE Levinas does not define the self cognitively. Hence he does not “define” the self at all, does not consider the self to be a specification of a genus, an instance of a generality, or a part of a whole. Despite Lacan, who thinks of the self constituted as a mirroring of itself, the

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self for Levinas is not first a spectacle, an object seen from the outside. The self is the first person singular. However, singularity must not be confused with individuality. Every spatial-temporal entity is individual, unique because no other entity occupies the same space at the same time. But this uniqueness does not constitute selfhood. Kant already saw something like singularity in his account of the “parallogisms” of reason in the “Dialectic” of the Critique of Pure Reason (1998). The self could not know itself, not because all the data was not in, but because the knowing self essentially exceeded the self known. For Kant, however, the impossibility of objectifying the self was understood in epistemological terms, as a rupture or breakdown in knowing. For Levinas, the human psyche — ego, self, subjectivity, soul, I — is from the first not a scientific object, not even a failed or deferred scientific object, but a moral event, an event of sensibility deeper than rationality. Singularity is a function of moral responsibility, the irreplaceability of the moral agent. Moral selfhood is at once both singular and social: singular as social, social as singular, precisely because both these terms, the singular and the social, must be understood originally in moral rather than epistemological terms. For the moment, however, let us first appreciate the shift in grounds Levinas’s account requires. What does it mean positively and concretely for the human self not to be, or not to be originally an object or spectacle seen from the outside? An examination of Levinas’s reading of Husserl, influenced partly by his teacher, Charles Blondel, reveals Levinas’s account to be both concrete and rooted in the intersubjective. Nonetheless, it does not mean, as one might think, that selfhood will be presented as the intersection or node of interactions or transactions within a social network or differential (e.g., as seen in Freud and Jung), or that it is the motivational zero point of certain social values (e.g., as seen in Kohler, Maslow, Adler, and Erikson). Rather, more deeply and specifically, it means that selfhood emerges as the bearer of obligations and responsibilities for the other. The human self, in other words, is constituted by — constituted in, constituted as — the inescapable exigencies of moral obligations and responsibilities. The self, one might say, is pressed into service, service to others. It does not volunteer, it is enlisted.

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Beneath or rather better than the for-itself of reason, beneath or rather better than the for-itself of willfulness, in the passivity of its very sensibility, the self is for-the-other. The self is therefore not an entity with moral qualities, a substance with moral attributes. To say “the self is for-the-other” does not mean that first there is a self and then this self becomes “for-the-other,” but rather that insofar as the self is for-the-other it is itself. Its original way of being is moral. Or, to say this differently, to be originally is to be morally. “To be or not to be,” Levinas has written, “is not the question” (1985, 10). The question is to be or not to be good. The self lived in the first person singular, me, myself, I, is a singularity deriving its singularity, its irreplaceability, its nonsubstitutability — what Levinas, borrowing religious language, calls its “election” — from its moral responsibility to and for the other. Moral sensibility, in other words, cuts deeper than the instincts of animal sensibility, the willfulness of human desire, and the reflection of human reason. One is stunned or, to use one of Levinas’s term “traumatized,” by the other. But the impact of the other is not a brute force, it is a moral force: the responsibility to respond, obligation to and for the other. Responsibility for the other thus cuts deeper than egoism’s foritself. One is chosen before choosing. Here, it seems to me, lies Levinas’s great insight and achievement. The absolute primacy of morality and, built on morality, of justice. Here, too, lie fertile grounds for an ethical reconfiguration of psychology. To have seen that the core of what it is to be human, the distinctively human, the very psyche, is from the first and at bottom to be conceived — and not merely conceived but lived — within the imperative vectors of morality and justice, rather than in terms of the motivations, drives, and interactions of instincts or knowledge, creativity or productivity, technology or ontology, or aesthetics — this is the challenge of Levinas’s thought. No doubt the circuits of the for-itself are potential forces, the very forces of evil, but they are now seen to be refusals of a deeper moral force, the pacific force of goodness, the prior moral authority commanding the self from the heights of the other. This sort of thinking provokes an upheaval in thought. It requires a reversal of thinking

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that Kant wanted but could not accomplish: thought grounded in morality.6 When Levinas characterizes the psyche as a moral psyche he means that it’s “for-the-other” is from the first a moral event. It is moral more essentially, as it were, than essence itself.7 That is to say, selfhood is for-the-other more deeply than its essence, substance, will, reason, transcendental ego, substance-as-subject, freedom, will-to-power, resoluteness, Gelassenheit, and all the formulae of self-sameness — whether individual or participatory — philosophy has proposed for selfhood hitherto. For Levinas, in contrast, the self stands in relation to a far greater transcendence than the alterity recognized and integrated into these formulae, namely, the transcendence of the other person. Here selfhood is selfhood not through syntheses of self-identification, whether mine or the world’s (spirit, substance, etc.), but rather as a “nonidentity” “put into question,” “de-nucleated” by the other. The self is thus a disequilibrium, not such that it loses itself, is annihilated, is nonbeing, but precisely such that it finds itself wholly given over to the other in moral responsibility for the other — all the way, unto death. The self is “for-the-other” before it is for-itself — chosen before choosing. Its very existence is as “the-other-in-the-same,” the “other in me.” These abstract formulae, repeated by Levinas again and again in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1998d) and elsewhere, are in no way meant as “glosses” on an already constituted self, or as metaphors for something else, but rather as the most general or all encompassing articulations of an exceedingly concrete imperative disordering of the self as understood in every previous expression. These are the most basic formulae of Levinas’s ethical wisdom, of his conception of the psyche. What do they mean?

S ENSIBILITY AND S IGNIFICATION To flesh out the meaning of these seemingly abstract expressions, in this section we are going to turn to Levinas’s most sustained discussion of the psyche. This occurs in the third chapter, “Sensibility and

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Proximity,” of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1998d). When Levinas speaks of the psyche elsewhere in his writings (for example, in Totality and Infinity)8 he does so in the direction of the trajectory articulated in that chapter. Levinas begins by linking the psyche to a sensibility exceeding Husserl’s notion of intentionality. For Levinas the psyche is a breach and not a bastion of self-consciousness. Levinas’s deepest account of this breach has to do with its time: “dia-chrony,” the self pierced by time’s transcendent dimensions, the irrecuperable past and the unforeseeable future, which for Levinas come to the self as a function of the time of the other.9 Since Kant, and in some sense even earlier in Augustine, philosophers have understood that time is “the form of subjectivity.” Until the contemporary period of thought such time was more or less dismissed in the face of “eternity.” Now, since Bergson, the issue has been to show precisely the nature of inner time and its relation to other forms of time such as “clock time” or historical time. Bergson (1960, 1965) showed that clock time, or the time of a “time line,” is not really time at all but the measure of motion, hence a spatialized “time.” Inner time, which is genuine time, in contrast, he named “duration,” and characterized it in terms of a creatively developing interpenetration of past, present and future. Levinas’s notion of diachrony, in contrast to Bergson’s duration, while referring still to “the form of subjectivity,” refers to the self not in continuity with past and future, but rather ruptured by an “immemorial past” and an “unforeseeable future.” For Levinas what is key to time is the alterity of its dimensions, not their continuity. Thus Levinas breaks with the more harmonious images of identity one obtains when thinking of time in terms of projections and continuities as in Bergson, but also with the syntheses of “retentions” and “protentions” in Husserl’s “inner time consciousness,” or Heidegger’s existential version of Husserlian time, the “ecstatic” syntheses of “temporality,” time as futural projection and historical retrieval. For Levinas in contrast to all these visions of inner time as extensivity, the psyche is diachrony, and diachrony is ruptured time, self pierced by a past and a future not its own but the other’s.

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The key to the intrusions of past, the pastness of the past, and future, the futurity of the future, that constitute the psyche as diachrony is that they are not produced by the subject. If they were they would reduce to one form or another of projection or synthesis, which is exactly what Levinas rejects. How, then, can the other affect the self without either being reduced to self or inaugurating a war of absorption, other-into-self or self-into-other,10 that is to say, how can the other affect the self, or the self be affected by the other, such that otherness retains its transcendence? Levinas’s answer is, of course, by means of moral transcendence, the transcendence that demands more than can satisfy it, putting a “more” into a “less.” Here Levinas speaks of this alteration of the self in terms of time (i.e., diachrony). The psyche, ruptured by diachronous time, is affected by the moral alterity of the other. Such alterity retains its alterity insofar as it is received by a self inordinately responsible for the other. It is quite interesting, then, that diachrony, which is to say, time, the psyche, and morality, all arise together. Furthermore, the moral other can have this effect on the self precisely because it affects the self beneath or beyond or across the identifying power of the self’s reason and will, reaching the self in its very sensibility, that is to say, in its sensibility as a passivity. This “inspiration” of the self in its passivity, due to its sensible vulnerability to the other, leads Levinas to name the morally affected body, the psyche as responsible in its depths for the other, “the maternal body.” Levinas’s first reference to the psyche in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1998d) is positive and rich. Indeed in the transcendence of intentionality diachrony is reflected, that is, the psyche itself, in which the inspiration of the same by the other is articulated as a responsibility for another, in proximity. Sensibility is in this way situated back in the human exception. But one has to go back from this reflection to the diachrony itself, which is the-onefor-the-other in proximity. It is then not a particular signification. 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. (67)

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While the penultimate image — “a hand that gives even the bread taken from its own mouth” — is without doubt a striking one, the final image — “the maternal body” — is even more powerful: the other literally within oneself. One can hardly imagine the “one-for-the-other” in any greater sense than that portrayed by the image of the woman “with child,” sharing the same body, and, metaphorically, the same blood. The other morally encountered is “in-me” as if the other were literally in my body, the other’s pain my pain, the other’s suffering my suffering. The psyche is born in this introjection. But it is introjection of a very special sort: moral introjection. To go beneath reflection, beneath “thematizing consciousness,” beneath Husserlian intentionality altogether, to find the genuine concreteness of the psyche is to see the psyche as responsiveness to moral exigency, to moral imperative. More aware, more alert, more vigilant, more conscious, if one can say this, than self-consciousness, is the moral acuity of psyche. It is interesting that in emphasizing the above point, Levinas is returning to the very parallelism in Husserl that he had treated more than 44 years earlier in The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology (1973), the alleged “strict parallelism” between phenomenology and psychology. Here he writes, “between the signification proper to the sensible and that of thematization and the thematized as thematized, the abyss is much greater than the parallelism constantly affirmed by Husserl between all the ‘qualities’ or ‘theses’ of intentionality would allow one to suppose. This parallelism would imply the equivalence of the psyche and the intentional. In renouncing intentionality as a guiding thread toward the eidos of the psyche, which would command the eidos of sensibility, our analyses will follow sensibility in its prenatural signification to the maternal, where, in proximity, signification signifies before it gets bent into perseverance in being in the midst of a Nature” (1998d, 68; emphasis in the original). What is remarkable about this claim is that Levinas exactly reverses the priorities that Husserl, like all philosophers, had insisted upon in the name of phenomenological philosophy. For Levinas it is not thematizing intentionality that augments and completes psych-ology, as Husserl wanted, but rather the reverse. It is the psyche — as

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diachrony, proximity, maternal body — that exceeds and supplements thematization and ontology, in a word, that exceeds philosophy as hitherto conceived. Of course, while pointing out this radical reversal, we must not neglect to say that for Levinas, as for Husserl regarding phenomenology, this new status of the psyche in no way suggests an endorsement of the relativism of “psychologism,” a point that Levinas emphasizes in the above citation by using the term eidos. Levinas will see the psyche as a deeper structure than self-consciousness, and his writings will be efforts to articulate this structure, to present to readers “the eidos of the psyche,” however daunting a task the presentation of such a structure in writing may be. We will return to this point — the question of Levinas’s discourse — again.

S ENSIBILITY AND P SYCHE The above remarks present Levinas’s notion of the “psyche” as it appears at the end of subsection two, “Sensibility and Signification,” of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. We now turn to subsection three, “Sensibility and Psyche.” The psyche is the form of a peculiar dephasing, a loosening up or unclamping of identity: the same prevented from coinciding with itself, at odds, torn up from its rest, between sleep and insomnia, panting, shivering. It is not an abdication of the same, now alienated and slave to the other, but an abnegation of oneself fully responsible for the other. (1998d, 68–69)

We have seen that this “peculiar dephasing” is diachrony, the self ruptured by “times” not its own but the other’s. The other has already passed before being constituted in the memory of the self, hence passes in an “immemorial past” from the viewpoint of the self. The other is also yet to come, coming from “unforeseeable future,” beyond the farthest projects of the self. Both this past recalcitrant to memory and this future recalcitrant to forecast, disturb the self-present of the self. Levinas speaks of the psyche in terms of attention, “between sleep and insomnia,” as an alertness, a wakefulness, a vigilance. In the face of the other’s radical alterity, the self, though disturbed, indeed overwhelmed,

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is nonetheless neither annihilated nor alienated. Rather, it finds itself, “torn up from its rest,” disabused of its complacency, because taken up in greater exigencies: responsibility for the other. In the form of responsibility, the psyche in the soul is the other in me, a malady of identity, both accused and self, the same for the other, the same by the other. Quid pro quo, it is a substitution, extraordinary. (1998d, 69)

For Levinas the nonidentity of the self has higher priority, is more important, is better, than the complacency of identity. The self is in the accusative, responsible to and for the other. The psyche is like a “malady” because it is a shattering prior to identity. The nonidentity shattered is shattered insofar as it rises to a higher cause than identity: being for the other before oneself. In a footnote to the above citation Levinas (1998d) writes: “The soul is the other in me. The psyche, the-one-for-the-other, can be a possession and a psychosis; the soul is already a seed of folly” (191). Because the psyche is an extreme proximity and vulnerability, it is also liable to a nonmoral collapse, liable to genuine psychosis. “The soul is a seed of folly” because the healthy soul, the healthy psyche — to say “moral psyche” is a redundancy — is not an armed self-enclosed fortress but an openness to the other, and hence also the possibility of malady, dishabilitating vulnerability, illness, mental breakdown, psychosis. One can be mentally ill because one can be morally responsible! The road from mental illness to mental health is not to create from a shattered ego a fortress ego, but to regain one’s obligations, one’s responsibilities to and for the other. The other is neither enemy nor demon, but rather “the poor, the widow, the orphan, the stranger,” one for whom my concern makes sense. The road of morality is a rocky one, and not just in and of itself: one is tempted on the one hand by refusal of the other, by “hardness of heart,” immorality, evil, and on the other, there is the danger of collapse, of excess, of psychosis and folly. Moral maturity — the psyche — is not a given. The animation, the very pneuma of the psyche, alterity in identity, is the identity of a body exposed to the other, becoming “for the other,” the possibility of giving. (1998d, 69)

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Levinas does not separate pneuma and psyche in his analysis of the “soul.” The vulnerability of the body is at the same time its exposure as psyche, its capacity to “suffer for the suffering of others,” a formula Levinas uses elsewhere to speak of the morality of the onefor-the-other. In a conversation with the author in 1986 about Heidegger’s account in Being and Time (1962) of the difference between the “present-to-hand,” (i.e., objectivity, object relations) and the deeper structure Heidegger sees in the “ready-to-hand,” (instrumental relations, the “in-order-to”) which lead ultimately to Dasein, the “being-there” of human being, Levinas remarked that Heidegger had altogether neglected not only the hand that begs but also the hand that gives. This means that all meaning — the significant — does not refer back to my being, as Heidegger and a long philosophical tradition have thought, even though it can always be referred back to my being or to the being of which I am a part (“world,” “Geist,” “earth-sky-gods-mortals,” “Be-ing,” “Concept,” “Will,” “will to power,” “substance,” “essence,” “idea,” and so on). However, what is meaningful originates in my being responsible to and for the other, originates in the disordering of my being by the other. To make this distinction between the beginning of meaning in the for-the-other and the recuperation of meaning in the for-itself, Levinas distinguishes “saying” (dire) and “the said” (le dit), or, for our purposes, the “psyche” and “system.” Thus his account of the psyche turns from diachrony and incarnation to the “signifyingness” and signification that diachrony and incarnation imply. The signifyingness they [“the affective, the axiological, the active, the sensible, hunger, thirst, desire, admiration”] bear in a system, in the said, in the simultaneity of a particular language, is borrowed from this prior psyche, which is signifyingness par excellence. In a system signification is due to the definition of terms by one another in the synchrony of a totality, where the whole is the finality of the elements. (1998d, 69)

Levinas distinguishes that which derives its meaning from its place within a differential network of signs, whether a system or a deferral of signs, “the synchrony of a totality, where the whole is the finality of the elements,” from the more profound meaningfulness of “the

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sensible, hunger, thirst, desire” which derive their significance not within a differential network of signs, but precisely by piercing through such networks, breaking up synchronies, upsetting totalities, coming from the “outside,” “exterior,” “other,” with demands more demanding than signs referring to signs, demanding more attention, demanding my attention, demanding me as attention, me as moral attention. Such demands are better, morally superior, than the demands of organized and organizing signs. They are more meaningful. And the meaning of systems, synchronies, totalities, “the said,” derives ultimately from this more excellent, more compelling moral significance. This deeper meaning, however, can be and too often is suppressed, ignored, neglected, shut out, and otherwise refused. To understand the psyche in its moral character must not be confused with miraculously making the world moral, on the one hand, but neither with an “objective” account of the psyche on the other. It is indeed clear that the psyche can thus have a sense like any other term of the language stated, showing itself in the said, in tales or writing. A psychic fact can have sense as referred to another psychic fact, like any element of the world of the experience called exterior. (1998d, 69)

Just as the other person can be refused, the depth structure of the psyche itself can be — and usually has been — refused by theory. Indeed, it is likely to be refused by theory insofar as theory or science naturally tends toward the orderly, the synchronic. Levinas is not opposed to science, he is opposed to the confusion of explanation and explained. He is opposed to the confusion of the disorder at the source of order for yet another order. “Chaos theory” would be precisely what he opposes. But for Levinas the breakthrough of the other into the self is so fundamentally and so essentially out of order that it is “otherwise than being or beyond essence.” The other is always more than the I bargains for, more than the I wants, more than what the I can handle. Yet the self is response in the face of this excess. The true self is precisely an insufficiency, a “trauma” that is not psychotic but precisely the psyche qua responsibility for the other. Here what Levinas is noting is that not only can and do people refuse one another, ignore

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one another, behave indifferently to the suffering of others, but theory and theorizing too can and do betray the genuine meaning of the psyche as for-the-other. Theory, in the name of objectivity, not only shies away from morality, but the “object” of morality exceeds its grasp — and thus, paradoxically, even in the name of objectivity it loses its truth. The meaning of perception, hunger, sensation, etc., as notions signifies through the correlation of terms in the simultaneity of a linguistic system. It has to be distinguished from the signifyingness of the-one-forthe-other, the psyche that animates perception, hunger and sensation. (1998d, 70)

Such phenomena as hunger, sensation, and desire can be distinguished according to two levels of meaning: the “objective,” signification as the manner in which they make sense within a system; and the “subjective,” signifying in the sense of making demands upon the self. It is precisely this exigency — this “Saying” — that escapes “the Said” and yet is the very animation of the psyche. By an exasperation or “abuse” of language Levinas forces his readers to attend to the difference between the said and the saying that animates it. Levinas’s language — the hyperbolic style of his discourse, the overloading of sense he demands, the “rhetoric” of exigency — peculiar though it may be — is anything but the “violence” of which Derrida accused it.11 It is an ethical exacerbation parallel to that of morality itself, an effort to awaken a “saying,” or a glimpse at the “saying” that underlies and conditions the significations “said.” It is an effort of rhetoric — good rhetoric — that must be continually renewed and continually resaid. By means of this philosophical exegesis, reawakning meanings more awake than all meaning, Levinas points to the sparks or traces of the signifyingness that lie at the root of all signification, the one-for-the-other. The said shows, but betrays (shows by betraying) the dieresis, the disorder of the psyche which animates the consciousness of, and which, in the philosophical order of the said, is called transcendence. But it is not in the said that the psyche signifies, even though it is manifested there. Signification is the-one-for-the-other which characterizes an identity that does not coincide with itself. (1998d, 70–71)

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The said, the thematized, the represented, cannot “capture” the disorder of the living psyche. It is fascinating, in terms of Levinas’s intellectual itinerary, that we see him here going so far as to question the strength of the term “transcendence,” which in Totality and Infinity (1969) carried much of his effort to exceed the said. But the said must be continually resaid, each word much be continually revivified. What Levinas is pointing to in his writings is the psyche, the very animation of the body, the very “lived,” as it were, of the “lived body.” The distinction and difference Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological studies uncovered between the “corps-propre” (lived body) and the “corps” (body as object) depend not, as he thought, on ontology, however much revised, as in the brilliant formulations of The Visible and the Invisible (1968), but rather on the psyche, that is to say, as a function of moral intersubjectivity, saying as distinct from the said. Levinas’s claim — radical as it may seem — is that moral intersubjectivity, the one-for-the-other, is literally the animation of the body, that is to say, the human body is not merely an animal vitality. If one has ever witnessed a body “living” solely by means of a mechanical life support system, and the difference between such a body and the person one knew, then one graphically understands what Levinas means by saying that animation itself depends on social interaction. In this sense the psyche — the one-for-the-other — lies at the ground of humanity, and in relation to it, as we have said already, evil and inhumanity would be second-order phenomena, the refusal of a prior humanity. Statements such as these quoted above, and the care with which Levinas writes, show clearly that Levinas is very aware that he is stretching and must stretch language, pushing to its limits to show a signifyingness beyond the bounds of linguistic systems. Of the vulnerability of the animated body, the “maternal body,” for example, he will speak of a “passivity more passive than all passivity.” Of the impact of the other, proximity, he will write of “the immediacy of the other, more immediate still than immediate identity in its quietude as a nature” (1998d, 84). He must betray the betrayal inherent in what is said to allow a glimpse at the saying underlying, animating, giving life to language. There are no “magic words,” and Levinas’s work, as we

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are now seeing with the term “psyche,” is a constant renewal by ever greater exegetical affirmation, commentary upon commentary upon commentary in an unending process of enhancement and augmentation of a core meaning ever slipping away into the false objectivity of thematization. To betray the betrayal of language, Levinas will often resort, as we shall see, to “religious” terminology to express the rupture of the psyche which is itself original signifyingness. In fact, shaking up the I, disrupting the complacency of the ego, meaning comes to grasp the self, the self does not grasp it. To capture this movement to the self Levinas will use the peculiar formula: “God who comes to mind,” even naming one of his books with this expression. This “coming to” “constitutes” the self not as some mythological figure outside the self, but precisely as the insufficiency of the self’s response to the other, which is to say, positively, as a responsibility always required to be more responsible to the other in and as one’s own self, a self thus “more immediate still than immediate identity” — the psyche. Levinas will also use “psychological” terminology, speaking of “trauma,” “psychosis,” “obsession.” The psyche is obsession, obsessed with the other, obsessed by the other, obsessed for the other. The psyche or animation is the way a relationship between uneven terms, without any common time, arrives at relationship. Non-objectifiable, non-contemporaneous, it can only signify non-indifference. An animate body or an incarnate identity is the signifyingness of this nonindifference. (1998d, 70)

Again, animation, incarnation, are inseparable from the psyche, from “non-indifference” to the other, which is why we speak of the “maternal psyche.” The self is exposure, vulnerability, response — moral response, a giving, caring for the other’s needs. Levinas uses a striking formula, “bread taken from one’s own mouth” given to the other, to concretize or specify the significance of this responsive-giving sensibility which is the psyche. “Signification signifies . . . in nourishing, clothing, lodging, in maternal relations” (77). There is nothing dreamy or “spiritual” about Levinas’s account of the psyche. “The other’s material needs are my spiritual needs,” Levinas has said, quoting the

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words of an important nineteenth century Lithuanian talmudist, Rabbi Israel Salanter (1810–1883). Nothing could be more immediate, more concrete, more pressing than the other’s suffering. The psyche is nonindifference to the needs — both spiritual and material — of the other. Incarnation, the psyche, is thus an interhumanity, “fraternity.” For this reason, beyond morality, Levinas will also see “the latent birth of justice in signification” in the psyche (71). This is to say that not only morality, my obligation to the other, but justice, my obligation to all others, derives from and inheres in the maternal psyche. We have shown that the one-for-the-other characteristic of the psyche, signification, is not an ordinary formal relation, but the whole gravity of the body extirpated from its conatus. It is a passivity more passive still than any passivity that is antithetical to an act, a nudity more naked than all ‘academic’ nudity, exposed to the point of outpouring, effusion and prayer. . . . It is the passivity of being-for-another, which is possible only in the form of giving the very bread I eat. But for this one has to first enjoy one’s bread, not in order to have the merit of giving it, but in order to give it with one’s heart, to give oneself in giving it. (1998d, 72)

In contrast to conatus, “perseverence in being,” a term Levinas borrows from Spinoza but broadens to characterize the essence of the self qua for-itself, the psyche is “outpouring, effusion and prayer.” Invoking this religious terminology, Levinas here follows a long Jewish tradition for which prayer is sacrifice, self-sacrifice.12 But again following a long Jewish tradition, such a self must not be mistaken for an ascetic self. Responsibility for the other, even infinite responsibility, must not be confused with asceticism. There is no self-denial here for the sake of self-denial, that is to say, for the sake of the self. This is why Levinas speaks of “prayer,” and “giving the very bread I eat.” Rather than denying, Levinas is speaking about giving, giving clothing, shelter, food, warmth, but a giving that is also a giving of the self.13 It is thus the positivity of the for-the-other, a for-the-other whose acuity is felt to the extent that the self, in its sensibility, is sensible to the value of pleasure, indeed tends by itself toward enjoyment, toward satisfaction, contentment, such that in giving itself over to giving to the other,

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to suffering for the other’s suffering, the psyche is sacrifice and hence prayer. To sum up, Levinas’s “notion” of the psyche as revealed in “Sensibility and Psyche” and “Sensibility and Signification” (1) requires conceiving selfhood more deeply than the synthesizing circuits of selfconsciousness or willfulness; (2) comes to the self insofar as the self is for-the-other before for-itself; (3) is the internalization of the basic moral imperative imposed by and in responsiveness to the very alterity of the other; (4) manifests itself as the “me” or “I” of “my” responsibility to and for the other, the self as the singularity of obligation to the other; (5) contains responsibilities and obligations more significant, more meaningful than any other significations even though and precisely because they do not originate in the self but from the other, and hence are the “an-archic” origin and give meaning to all significations; (6) is the very animation of the body, its incarnation, it life; (7) connects one person to another across a global interhumanity of such sensibility, caring for one another; (8) is the ever disturbing moral task of providing for the real needs of the other (and others: justice); (9) is experienced by the self as sacrifice because of sensibility’s countervailing but natural tendency toward its own self-satisfaction, contentment, complacency. This conception of the psyche is built upon and serves as an elaboration of Levinas’s original conception of time as diachrony: the psyche as the time of ethical intersubjectivity. In the following section, on the basis of selected citations, I will examine various additional insights regarding the psyche found on the subsequent pages of Otherwise than Being which develop these insights.

I NSOMNIA , I NSPIRATION , E LEVATION , E XPIATION , P ROPHECY , R EVELATION , H UMANITY The psyche is disturbed in its responsibility to and for the other to the point of “insomnia”. It is set up as it were in the accusative form, from the first responsible and not being able to slip away. This impossibility to slip off even into death is the point where, beyond the insomnia which can still be

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dissimulated, the subject is a saying, an uncovering oneself to the other — a psyche. (1998d, 85 and 192, n. 16)

Related to this use of the term “insomnia” we might think of our earlier use of the term “obsession”: the other obsesses the self, the self is obsession with the other. Levinas resorts to a psychological language not to characterize the psyche as unhealthy, however, as Nietzsche did — for Nietzsche human consciousness as such is essentially sick14 — but rather to lend impact to the immediacy, the directness, the implosion of the other in the self, and the self as an alert moral responsiveness to this imposition. This image of the psyche as insomnia is in keeping with Levinas’s characterizations in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1998d) and, increasingly in his later writings, of moral consciousness as a “wakefulness,” a “vigilance,” an “extreme attention.” Proximity, the self’s moral singularity, irreplaceable before the other, hence its individuation as a self through an extreme sense of obligation and responsibility, is for the self like an “insomnia,” the self kept awake not by itself but by the other. “This insomnia,” Levinas writes, “is the psyche” (87). The insomniac wants to sleep but cannot. A person would rather not be troubled by another, but there before the other, the self — me, no one else, psyche — is troubled, a moral self, and rises to the occasion and aids the other. Another of Levinas’s formulae for the psyche is the biblical “here I am” [Hebrew: hineni], referring to an availability, a vulnerability, a responsiveness to the call of the other. But lest this troubling of the self, the psyche, “insomnia,” seem like a terrible affliction, we must not forget that it is actually an “inspiration.” Let us remember the citation at the head of this article, the very “definition” of the psyche: “The psyche is the other in the same without alienating the same” (112). It is the non-alienation of the self in its obsession with the other that leads Levinas to the religious language of inspiration, meaning both “breath” (respiration, inspiration, expiration) and the “spiritual” (in Hebrew: “ruach” = “breath” = “spirit”). I am summoned as someone irreplaceable. I exist through the other and for the other, but without this being alienation: I am inspired. This

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inspiration is the psyche. The psyche can signify this alterity in the same without alienation in the form of incarnation, as being-in-one’s-skin, having-the-other-in-one’s-skin. (1998d, 114–15)

The self as for-the-other is as such irreplaceable. Hence only in this way is the self truly first person singular, in a word, itself. Paradoxical as it may sound to logic, the self is itself when and only when it is forthe-other. And it is itself to the extent that it is for-the-other. The self is thus a deepening process: the more one gives the more one is. One does not give in order to receive, but by giving one becomes oneself. This “dialectic” of a giving that is a receiving is the “inspiration” of the psyche — its “election,” as Levinas elsewhere calls this inspiration. In using the latter term Levinas is recalling the Jewish sense of a “chosen people,” meaning a people chosen for the humility and greatness of moral responsibility. Both of these terms, “inspiration” and “election,” do not refer to dreams or beautiful ideals. Rather they refer concretely to incarnate beings, self and other, others who are needy, a self that can help the other materially. Thus the other does not affect the self in some ghostlike or imaginary “kingdom,” or in another world, but viscerally, in one’s skin, like a turning of the self inside out, naked, exposed to the other’s needs as if they were one’s own. Earlier I called this the self as its “brother’s keeper.” “I am my brother’s keeper” is for Levinas literally true: the I is I as, and insofar as, it is its brother’s keeper. Such is election, or what Levinas is here calling the inspiration of the psyche. One’s very breathing is for-the-other: “what we are here calling oneself, or the other in the same, where inspiration arouses respiration, the very pneuma of the psyche” (116). Inspired by the other, not only does one respire for the other but, let us add, one can expire for the other too — responsibility goes all the way to death, being-for-the-other unto death. Such is the transcendence of the other that is at the same time the depth of the self. The psyche as “inspiration” is one of Levinas’s ways of expressing the “ambiguity” or “ambivalence” of a self whose ownmost selfhood is “put” into it by the other. Selfhood — first person singularity, psyche — is not alienated by introjection, but rather raised up, lifted to its proper moral stature, again, elected to moral responsibility. Levinas calls the

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subjectivity of the subject, its very psyche, a possibility of inspiration. It is the possibility of being the author of what has been breathed in unbeknownst to me, of having received, one knows not from where, that of which I am the author. In the responsibility for the other we are at the heart of the ambiguity of inspiration. (1998d, 148–49)

Another term for this inspiration, one that, like the term “inspiration,” captures the sense of being penetrated by another but being uplifted , not alienated, by this intrusion is “elevation.” Inspiration, heteronomy, is the very pneuma of the psyche. Freedom is borne by the responsibility it could not shoulder, an elevation and inspiration without complacency. The for-the-other characteristic of the subject can be interpreted neither as a guilt complex (which presupposes an initial freedom), nor as a natural benevolence or divine “instinct,” nor as some love or some tendency to sacrifice. (124)

The moral self is not what it would be by itself independent of or indifferent to the other. This morality of “non-in-difference,” as Levinas also calls it, does not derive from some inner sanctum, some innate moral “tendency,” “love,” “divine ‘instinct’” or “natural benevolence.” The heart must be circumcised, as the Bible expresses this, for such is not its original condition. Levinas thus rejects the hypotheses of those, like the eighteenth century British moralists such as Shaftsbury and Hutcheson, who posit an innate moral sense. These positions are based on a false optimism, a wishful thinking about human “nature.” “By nature” humans are as capable of evil as of good. This point hardly has to be emphasized in our century of gas, gulag and Auschwitz. Neither, then, does Levinas abide by what he considers to be mystifications such as the hypothesis of a divinely implanted moral sensibility — a moral “soul” or God’s “love” given somehow miraculously at birth or conception. Neither, finally, does morality depend on a detached and self-contained freedom, for example the radical freedom of fichte’s self-positing ego or the equally radical freedom of Sartre’s for-itself. Such a freedom, absolute, cannot suffer the other’s suffering, but can only reduce non-ego to the ego. Levinas characterizes the psyche as “elevation” because the moral psyche, the maternal psyche, is more and not less than it is by itself. It is not its own ground,

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neither an island nor a fortress, hence it is, to invoke another Levinasian term: “anarchic.” An anarchic liberation, it emerges, without being assumed, without turning into a beginning, in inequality with oneself . . . in the undergoing by sensibility beyond its capacity to undergo. This describes the suffering and vulnerability of the sensible as the other in me. The other is in me and in the midst of my very identification. (1998d, 124–25)

The moral self is elevated above itself through its being for-the-otherbefore-itself. It is this, and this is the task it is. This way of being is therefore not a form of self-esteem because it is in no way a selfsatisfaction. Rather, to the contrary, it is an insufficiency, a “fissure” or “de-nucleation” at the heart of identity — “like a cellular irritability; it is the impossibility of being silent, the scandal of sincerity” (143). Chapter four of Otherwise than Being is entitled “Substitution.” Levinas explains that this chapter is the “germ” of the entire book (1998d, 193, n. 1) which is “built around” it (xli). The notion of substitution, which we have already touched upon, is yet another way to understand the psyche. Levinas will speak of it as “expiation.” As “skin turned inside out,” the other-in-the-same, transformed in responding to the other, elevated by rising to the other’s needs, the self is an “expiation” for the other, and it is so precisely by putting itself in the other’s shoes. It is the null-place in which inspiration by the other is also expiation for the other, the psyche by which consciousness itself would come to signify. The psyche is not grafted on to a substance, but alters the substantiality of this substance which supports all things. . . . Substitution is not the psychological event of compassion or intropathy in general, but makes possible the paradoxical psychological possibilities of putting oneself in the place of another. (1998d, 145–46)

Once again challenging the notion of subjectivity as source or ground of all significance, here, as with the overloading of the Husserlian notion of “intentionality” that we saw earlier, the psyche as a substitution of the self for the other “alters the substantiality of this substance which supports all things.”15 This expiation is not a compassion, sympathy, or empathy because the self does not rest in-itself-for-itself

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and add these emotions to its own feelings, to its own identity. Rather, as expiation, the psyche is an uprooting of the self-sameness such that the other, as Levinas says, “orders me by my own voice” (147). The psyche is for-the-other as a suffering of and for the suffering of the other. Regarding the psyche as expiation Levinas cites Dostoyevsky’s words from The Brothers Karamozov: “We are all responsible for all for all men before all, and I more than all the others” (1985, 98 and 101; see also 1981, 146). Referring to this disordering of the self by the other for the other, in an article entitled “God and Philosophy,” with the words of the prophet Micah (1:3–4) in mind, Levinas says of the impact of the other that inspires expiation: it “devastates its site like a devouring fire, catastrophying its site” (1989a, 176). Of course, in our concern to grasp the intimate sensibility of the psyche, let us not forget, too, that the I expiating for the other does so not do so by basking in its own exquisite feelings, but far more concretely, by feeding the hungry, sheltering the exposed, comforting the hurt, healing the sick, defending the oppressed. To stretch the reader’s consciousness beyond the habits of thought, Levinas is not afraid to use religious terminology. In Otherwise than Being, a philosophical work, to be sure, he speaks of the psyche not only in terms of “prayer” and “inspiration,” as we have seen, but also in terms of “prophecy” and “revelation.” Just as he does not hesitate to appropriate the language of psychology when necessary (“obsession,” “psychosis,” “insomnia”), he turns to religious terminology to indicate the extraordinary transformation of a being-for-itself into a being-for-other through moral responsibility and obligation. He does so to capture the excess of alterity “put” into the self by the other, yielding a responsibility in the self for-the-other without limit, an infinite responsibility including a responsibility for the other’s responsibility and the other’s life. In his public discourse Levinas will not speak of a person’s alleged direct contact with God, of religious experience or faith. When brought into public discourse these “experiences” may well be inspiring testimonies or provide personal witness, but they lack the compelling rhetorical force required by philosophical discourse. When confused for philosophy they inevitably turn into overbearing

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imposition, totalizing, and violence. But the language of ethics does not suffer from this limitation. Its impositions — responsibilities and obligations — are constitutive of our deeper and better self, our psyche. Indeed, morality is precisely the “reversal” of the desires of the self such that in place of narcissistic desires, desires for self-satisfaction or self-aggrandizement, the moral self desires what is least desirable: the other’s welfare, the other’s well being. And this desire — inspired, elevated — is precisely the psyche. It is also, for Levinas, the height of “prophecy” and “revelation.” The psyche is prophecy because its words, while its own, have been “received” as moral command from the other. Levinas is certainly not referring to any sort of spiritual ventriloquy — talking in tongues or spirit possession — for the self he means is a self morally inspired and not replaced or taken over. Levinas consistently opposes the model of a “participatory” self, a self absorbed into and factotum for nature, world, master or state. The psyche is a responsibility for the other, and not some slavish submission to the greater power of exterior forces. One may indeed be violated, forced by superior powers, but such is not the moral self in its moral being. Levinas rejects mythological consciousness and cults of participation where one becomes — willfully or not — part of a larger whole, losing the self in vertigo. Hence the term “prophecy.” Prophecy, for Levinas, is anything but the loss of self. Rather it is the self shattered by awesome obligations, the self qua irreplaceable, singular, morally responsible — ordered. Like the biblical prophets, one obeys a higher and better command prior to one’s own desires or one’s contractual consent. In his article “God and Philosophy” Levinas writes of the situation where I make myself the author of what I understand, inspiration. It constitutes, prior to the unity of apperception, the very psyche in the soul. In this inspiration, or prophesying, I am the go-between for what I set forth. . . . Prophesying is pure testimony, pure because prior to all disclosure; it is the subjection to an order before understanding the order. . . . It is in prophesying that the Infinite passes — and awakens. As a transcendence, refusing objectification and dialogue, it signifies in an ethical way. It signifies in the sense in which one says to mean an order; it orders. (1989a, 184)

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Levinas is clearly making reference to and “universalizing” the significance of the celebrated sequence of the response of the Jews who, at the foot of Mount Sinai, in response to God’s offer to give them the Torah, respond by saying: “We will do and we will obey.” [Hebrew: Na’asey v’Nish’mah] (Exodus 24:7). Contrary to Socrates, for Levinas one does not first know the good in order to be able to do the good. To do the good one must first be responsive to the order of the good. Cain’s question: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” is for Levinas already too late, already evil. We call prophecy this reverting in which the perception of an order coincides with the signification of this order given to him that obeys it. Prophecy would thus be the very psyche in the soul: the other in the same, and all of man’s spirituality would be prophetic. (1998d, 149)

All of human spirituality would be prophetic because the very selfhood of the self, its psyche, would be moral response before all else. Levinas does not believe that the root formulae of religion are dogmatic declarations of faith such as: “I believe in God,” or “I affirm that God exists” or “is good,” or “My Lord and Savior is. . . .” These are words, “the said,” and words can lie. “To bear witness to God is precisely not to state this extraordinary word, as though glory would be lodged in a theme and be posited as a thesis, or become being’s essence” (149). Rather, bearing witness to God is precisely the psyche as inspired, elevated, prophecy — loving the neighbor before oneself. “It is sincerity, effusion of oneself, ‘extraditing’ of the self to the neighbor. Witness is humility and admission; it is made before all theology” (149). The psyche, Levinas will say, is the “Here I am” [Me voici], available to the other, ready to serve. And thus, finally, Levinas can speak of the psyche as “revelation.” “Here there is an inversion of order: the revelation is made by him that receives it, by the inspired subject whose inspiration, alterity in the same, is the subjectivity or psyche of the subject” (156). Levinas’s exposition in Otherwise than Being goes on to show that the maternal psyche, the “inspired subject,” requires and demands justice, too, a concern for others beyond the other whom one faces

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immediately and before whom the I is fully responsible. And the requirement for justice means the need for measurement, science, philosophy, courts, and all the institutions required for good government. To discuss this topic properly, however, goes beyond the confines of this discussion of the psyche. It needs to be mentioned, nonetheless, so that no one mistakenly thinks that the psyche is an affair of morality alone, or that morality can remain moral without justice, that is to say, without measure and law, without public institutional protections and equal treatment before the law, which are necessary — in our unredeemed world — to preserve the more fundamental inequality that “defines” the psyche, namely, the height of the other and the humility of the self. It is in the name of this central inequality, the psyche itself, the-other-before-itself, maternal, that the more distant, objective, yet fair equalities established by justice are required. They are required to protect all others, all of humanity, oneself included. This humanity, is the final, broadest, most all-inclusive sense of the psyche in Levinas. Thus in the concluding chapter of Otherwise than Being, Levinas will write of “the psyche, humanity” (1998d, 178), as if these two terms — the one the most singular, the other the most universal — were interchangeable, as ultimately they are.

C ONCLUSION For Levinas, the psyche is the inordinate responsibility of beingfor-the-other before being-for-oneself. No one can doubt that one can be evil, one can be less than one’s better self, one can refuse the other, ignore the appeal, reject the call, turn aside “the poor, the widow, the orphan, the stranger,” take one’s own “place in the sun” at the expense of others. And to some extent we are always doing that, always insufficiently ourselves, never finished with morality, not yet at our full height. Deeper or higher than such egoism, and giving its usurpation its meaning in the first place, is the inspired self, the maternal psyche, concerned for others in its very being. The expository journey into the psyche elaborated in Otherwise than Being reveals a self successively characterized as for-the-other, proximity, diachrony,

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responsibility, substitution, animation, incarnation, signifyingness, nonindifference, fraternity, passivity, nakedness, exposure, prayer, insomnia, irreplaceability, inspiration, election, elevation, disorder, anarchy, suffering, vulnerability, catastrophying, prophecy, fissure, denucleation, expiation, prophecy, revelation, and finally humanity. The structure of the self takes on all these meanings because it is not an object or thing or essence or substance, not a state of being, but a life lived with others. Its fundamental nonidentity is greater than identity because it is better. Higher than the self-sameness of identity is responsibility for the other, and ultimately for all others. At bottom, one cannot remain faithful to the deep structure of the self and at the same time separate the prescriptive from the denotative. My first person singularity, I, me, myself, the psyche, is constituted as a moral Atlas. Each and everyone upholds the whole world. Such is righteousness. The burden of the world is surely too heavy, and surely can be dropped — who can doubt the existence of evil, in oneself, in others — but goodness, kindness, consideration, solicitude, justice do not thereby go away, do not thereby stop their inordinate appeals. Quite the reverse. To repeat the words of Dostoyevsky that Levinas is fond of citing: “We are all responsible for all for all men before all, and I more than all the others” (1985, 98 and 101; see also 1998d, 146).

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THREE

Utopia, Psychotherapy, and the Place of Suffering1 Edwin E. Gantt In recent years an increasing number of thinkers, arguing from within such postmodern frameworks as hermeneutics, deconstructionism, poststructuralism, and social constructionism, have shown that normative psychotherapy is not the objective and value neutral enterprise it has often taken itself to be.2 Rather, they contend, it is a deeply value-laden, moral, and political project (see, for example, Cushman 1993, 1995; Kirk and Kutchins 1992; Prilleltensky 1989; Richardson, Fowers, and Guignon 1999; Richer 1992; Stigliano 1993). Many within this critical, postmodern movement have demonstrated that psychotherapy’s longstanding claims of possessing objectively verifiable, ahistorical knowledge and goals reflect specific cultural traditions and sociohistorical contexts (Cushman 1990, 1995; Danziger 1979; McNamee and Gergen 1992; Taylor 1989). These authors have further argued that psychotherapy’s claims to value-neutrality and objectivity are not only philosophically dubious but in fact engender numerous socially and politically dangerous possibilities. As Cushman has recently noted, “Psychotherapy is a cultural product and, like all cultural products, it both REFLECTS and REPRODUCES its cultural context. Because the cultural context is in part composed of moral traditions embedded in political structures, psychotherapy is unavoidably a moral practice with political consequences” (1993, 103). In an earlier work the same author (1991) pointed toward these political consequences noting that “any scientific theory which explains current psychological ills through universalist, intrapsychic explanations 65

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exempts the current socioeconomic system from responsibility. Regardless of its form, any discourse that is said to be free of political influence or to have authority from the gods is dangerous” (1991, 217). In line with such insights, a number of other authors (Barclay 1993; Foucault 1987; Laing 1967; Sampson 1977; Schacht 1985; Szasz 1991; Woolfolk and Richardson 1984) have also demonstrated that normative psychotherapy, as a moral and political project, is intrinsically invested with a variety of ideological commitments and utopian presumptions. In the view of these thinkers, at the core of any normative psychotherapy there is a set of socioculturally motivated ideological assumptions — usually taken as factual givens — regarding the ultimate reality or “truth” of the world. These core assumptions are utopian truth claims, in that they not only make specific assertions about how the world really is, but also how it, in the idyllic, can or ought to be. A primary intent of this chapter is to explore some of the utopian presumptions which lie at the heart of three widely practiced normative psychotherapy traditions: that is, how Freudian psychoanalytic, Rogerian client-centered, and some of the so-called “existentialist” traditions have conceptualized the psychological good life. In addition, some of the belief systems and value commitments which are prescribed by these traditions for the achievement of that good life will also be discussed. It will be argued that in having unreflectively privileged a particular utopian model of mental health and human well-being, as well as a particular set of beliefs and behaviors, these approaches ultimately reduce human freedom and subvert the ethical priority of responsibility and suffering. By way of contrast, the chapter will briefly explore an alternative conception of psychotherapy that seeks to radically reunderstand the psychotherapeutic situation so as to avoid the conceptual and ethical dangers into which utopic thought has too often led us. In this alternative, the practice of psychotherapy is seen to occur within the fundamentally ethical context of the face-to-face relation (Levinas 1969); a relation in which we break with the narcissism of an imaginary social order to “dwell-with” the Other in the here-and-now immediacy of

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human suffering. The alternative discussed here is strongly influenced by the thought of Emmanuel Levinas.

P SYCHOTHERAPY AND THE U TOPIC I MPULSE The utopian ideals latent in the theory and practice of Freudian, Rogerian, and existential psychology naturally revolve around some conception of the true character of human well-being and the ultimate aim or purpose of human existence. Each begins its theoretical work with the presumption — usually unarticulated and inexplicit — of an idyllic world of mental health and psychological wellness, where fully functioning individuals are able to lead happy, productive, and fulfilling lives. Obviously, however, such a world is far from typical. Therefore, detailed and systematic accounts are given for the absence of ideal functioning. The accounts describe the worldly conditions that are the source of real-world anxieties and abnormality. This requires, in turn, the drafting of a set of specific proposals and prescriptions deemed necessary for the successful treatment of these abnormalities. It might be argued that utopic ideals play a negligible role in psychotherapy and the conception of mental health toward which therapies orient their clientele. The first line of argument contends that the theoretical demarcations of what constitutes mental health and normality are largely ad hoc formulations based on actual encounters with abnormality and suffering in the consulting room rather than on some overarching preunderstanding of health and the good life. Such a view would maintain that therapists merely induce appropriate images of normality from direct experience with the patently abnormal. Thus, normality is conceived of as that which the client is not, and health as the absence of whatever it is that is currently afflicting the client. This account of how conceptions of health emerge and influence psychological theory and practice is problematic, however, in that it amounts to a psychological version of the theological argumentum via negativa, in which the nature of perfection (i.e., God) can be shown only by reference to that which is not perfect. As Rollo May has pointed out in

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critique of such a negative approach, “Health becomes the vacuum which is left when the so-called neurosis is cured; or on the psychosis level, if a man can stay out of jail and support himself, we call that vacuum health” (1990a, 53). Suggestions that conceptions of health are derived in this quasi-empirical, ad hoc, and “negative way” are unconvincing because they fail to pay sufficient heed to the fundamentally a priori social and cultural situatedness of both theorist and therapist. Another argument that might be leveled against the thesis that utopic thinking underlies prevailing understandings of human health and functioning invokes pragmatism, that is, that psychotherapy is merely a pragmatic enterprise, employing whatever tools and techniques have proven useful in solving the various emotional and psychological problems of disturbed clients. This position is frequently advanced by those wishing to adopt a theoretical, as well as methodological, eclecticism regarding the psychotherapeutic project. On such a view, questions concerning the truth of any particular view of ideal human functioning and the means to achieve it are seen as mere distractions to the effective practice of psychotherapy. Psychotherapeutic practice is seen as little more than simple, scientifically prudent adherence to a practical course of action which has proven to have some sustained therapeutic effect with clients. On closer inspection, however, such an objection lacks serious substance. In adopting a pragmatic stance toward the practice of psychotherapy, one has already presumed to know, or at the very least to have access to, certain criteria of health and desirable functioning in light of which therapeutic success can be judged. Thus, within this sort of psychotherapeutic pragmatism, one detects a utopic ideal, rendered all the more problematic, and perhaps even more influential, owing to its ambiguous and clandestine nature.

P SYCHOTHERAPY AND THE G OOD L IFE When the utopic presumptions underlying any psychotherapeutic system are made explicit, one potential benefit is the clarification of

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the nature of the psychological “good life.” This makes it possible for a therapist to recognize and rectify the (bad) life of human suffering and distress. Whether this possibility is realized is, of course, contingent upon the client’s successful adoption of certain therapeutically prescribed belief systems and the implementation of particular behavioral regimens. In the case of Freudian psychoanalysis (laying aside recent and controversial Lacanian reinterpretations), the psychological good life is one in which the neurotic patient is able to free fixated libidinal energy from “phantastical attachments” in the unconscious so as to restructure the ego to be in greater harmony with external reality (Freud 1963, 456–65). The Freudian cure envisioned is one of “ego-freedom” (Freud 1964; see also, Iturrate 1990), in which the ego performs its function and the instincts are attended to in a manner consistent with the demands of a rational world that does not conform to our own wishes. All of this is accomplished as analytic interpretations are offered, insights experienced, and multiple transferences (and countertransferences) worked through via the psychoanalyst’s expert use of various therapeutically proven techniques (Rychlak 1981). In the traditional Freudian milieu, hope for the future (both of the individual and of the society) is not found in sexual license but in a life firmly rooted in the wisdom of scientific rationality and the “rule of reason” (Freud 1964, 1989b). As Maurice Friedman has thoughtfully pointed out, “Freud’s juxtaposition of the reality and pleasure principles and, later, of the love instinct and the death instinct affords him a delicately balanced realism that accepts the tragic limitations of life, yet believes in the melioristic possibilities afforded by reason when it operates in psychoanalysis as a neutral scientific instrument of inquiry” (1985, 11). Thus it can be seen that the Freudian utopia is one in which, rather than giving ourselves over to our basest emotions, we are instructed in the insights of psychoanalysis so as to no longer require all of those harmful repressions that bear down with such heavy psychic weight and render action irrational and neurotic. The promise is that we can be freed to investigate the potentialities of an existence in which our Oedipal conflicts are not so horrifyingly debilitating, our

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superego not so rigid and condemnatory, our ego not so strained trying to satisfy the competing demands of its intrapsychic neighbors and external reality. As Freud has said, “Our God, Logos, will fulfil whichever of these wishes nature outside us allows, but he will do it very gradually, only in the unforeseeable future, and for a new generation of men” (1989b, 720). Thus, it is reason, particularly psychoanalytic reason, that will ultimately lead us to a world more honest and true, more rational and real, than the one we now enjoy. The Rogerian, on the other hand, understands the psychological good life in terms of the “Fully Functioning Person” (Rogers 1961, 183–96). This is the individual whose self-concept has come into harmonic congruence with his or her own organismic valuing process via the open, accepting demeanor and unconditional positive regard of the empathic therapist. For the Rogerian therapist, the neurotic is to be assisted in an act of self-liberation from the onerous, self-imposed burden of needing to satisfy inconsistent demands made by others. In this self-liberation, the client is freed to actualize his or her own unique potential. Psychologically well-adjusted people are, thus, those “open to experience, trusting in their own organismic and visceral responses, accepting of their subjectivity as evaluators of their phenomenal experience, and willing to be a process of change” (Rychlak 1981, 615). The Rogerian utopia is one in which the “wisdom of the organic” reigns supreme and instructs each individual in an ethic grounded in natural, organic existence. Psychotherapy, for Rogers, is the “releasing of an already existing capacity in a potentially competent individual” (1959, 221) towards an “organismic commonality of value directions” (1970, 439). Rogers makes this point most clearly when he states that: Instead of universal values ‘out there’, or a universal value system imposed by some group — philosophers, rulers, priests, or psychologists — we have the possibility of universal human value directions emerging from the experiencing organism. Evidence from therapy indicates that both personal and social values emerge as natural, and are experienced, when the individual is close to his own organismic valuing process. The suggestion is that though modern man no longer trusts religion or

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science or philosophy nor any system of beliefs to give him values, he may find an organismic valuing base within himself which, if he can learn again to be in touch with it, will prove to be an organized, adaptive, and social approach to the perplexing value issues which face us all.3 (1970, 441)

Thus, in the Rogerian scheme, the utopic vision is articulated in terms of renewed reliance upon one’s ownmost organismic feelings and instinctual intuitions. If a release from distorted symbolizations and arbitrary conditions of worth can be therapeutically effected, then the “basic trustworthiness of human nature” (Rogers 1961, 194) can be free to accomplish the work of individual progress. In the Rogerian utopia, Eros (Passion) rather than Freud’s Logos (Reason), Dionysus rather than Apollo, provides the unerring guide to and unfailing sustenance of a fully functioning existence. Although sympathetic to the spirit of the Rogerian project, the existentialist movement in contemporary psychological and psychoanalytical circles seeks to ground its utopian vision of human possibility in a way that is philosophically quite divergent from both the Freudian and Rogerian models (May, Angel, and Ellenberger 1958; Yalom 1980). It must be acknowledged that Existential psychotherapy, like philosophical existentialism, is more of an attitude or temper uniting a variety of disparate approaches rather than an essentially unified approach (Friedman 1992). Nevertheless, there are a number of common assumptions which are shared by those identified with the movement. Drawing upon the writings of such thinkers as Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Martin Heidegger among others, existential psychotherapists find their utopic vision in a cult of acutely individualistic authenticity. In this milieu, human beings are “condemned to freedom” (Sartre 1956) and must create for themselves, ex nihilo, the meaning of their own existential worlds. Individual consciousness is understood to be the source of all possible meanings, and lived-experience is the immediate product of the inescapable meaning-granting activities of that consciousness. As ultimate authors of the meaning of our own existence and, thus, of that

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existence itself, we ultimately must assume total responsibility for our existence and its meanings. Here the psychological good life, most often referred to as “the authentic life” (e.g., Binswanger 1963), is one in which the individual accepts all of his or her life-possibilities so as to “appropriate and assemble them to a free, authentic own self no longer caught in the narrowed down mentality of an anonymous, inauthentic ‘everybody’” (Boss 1963, 47). In other words, mental health and wellbeing are to be found, not in the banality of the daily commerce of the crowd surrounding us, but rather in the authentic “willing” of the determined and decisive individual who resolutely accepts absolute responsibility for his or her own self-created existence (May 1990b). A principle goal in existential psychotherapy is to assist the client in adopting “a decisive attitude toward existence” and “willfully commit[ing] to some course of action” (May 1983, 10), whether it be “toward a creative love relationship or toward business achievement or what not”4 (May 1953, 175–76). Dread, discontent and neurotic despair, the inescapable results of attempting to evade the arduous fact of sole responsibility for “self, destiny, life predicament, feelings and . . . one’s own suffering” (Yalom 1980, 218), are to be therapeutically replaced with an intensity toward committed and decisive self-creation. For, as Paul Tillich has stated, “. . . the power of deciding makes men human” (1961, 44). Thus, in rejecting the Freudian and Rogerian gods Logos and Eros, the existential theorist articulates the utopic ideal of the individualist who, “upon experiencing anxiety in the face of the ultimate absurdity of life, lives intensely in the present and creates his or her own world through leaps of radical freedom” (Guignon 1993, 215).

T HERAPEUTIC P RESCRIPTIONS FOR THE G OOD L IFE As Barton (1974) has shown, the utopic worldviews of psychotherapy often play themselves out in the lives of both the clinicians who embrace them as genuine statements of truth and the often unsuspecting clients to whom they are taught (both directly and

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indirectly) during the course of therapy. In obtaining therapy the client comes away with a good deal more than a simple, context-free cure for their psychological and emotional ills. During the often lengthy course of most psychotherapeutic treatments clients are initiated into the language, customs, assumptions, and practices of an entire moral and political order from within which they are then to make sense of both themselves, their symptoms, and the world. This initiation equips the client, in effect, to live out the therapist’s theory. This is not simply an academic or intellectual exercise, but an “active moving into and shaping of his life in the light of the therapist-patient dialectic” (Barton 1974, 238). The clinician, as expert, stands in a unique position from which to invite others into a particular utopic worldview, in which their lives can be understood and their problems remedied. For example, in Freudian psychoanalysis, the patient learns to conceive of the world in terms of unresolved Oedipal complexes, unconscious drives, impulses, parapraxes, and repressions. Therapy teaches one that neurosis originates in traumatic events of the past. The patient begins to question and critique the “reality” of past events from within the more rational, reflective reality offered by the analyst. With a gradual refinement of analytic interpretation, the patient is able to see that thoughts and feelings are best understood in terms of a repetition compulsion originating in childhood, rather than as valid and meaningful responses to an immediately lived experience. Over the course of the psychoanalytic endeavor the patient comes to realize that questioning of or apprehension about the validity of the analyst’s expert interpretations constitutes an instance of resistance, and, as such, “interrupts the progress of analytic work” (Freud 1965). Quite literally any activity in which the patient might engage, whether it be canceling an appointment or the “sudden cure of a flight into health” (Freud 1963), is to be construed as one more bit of evidence for the resistance hypothesis. From within the psychoanalytic vision, cure and the attainment of the good life require leaving the here-and-now world of meanings that are the patient’s lived-experience and entering a truer, utopic world where understanding liberates one from symptoms and repressions.5

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From a perspective informed by Rogerian theory, the client must accept that neurosis is the result of having denied the viscerally experienced reality of his or her own feelings in order to fulfill the expectations imposed by others. Confident that “doing what ‘feels right’ proves to be a competent and trustworthy guide to behavior” and developing an “increasing trust in the organismic” (Rogers 1961, 189), the client becomes exquisitely attuned to the emotional dimension of existence. Under the client-centered regimen, the client learns to defer to it as the infallible guide to his or her own comportment, and the ultimate source of meaning and motivational power. The client is encouraged to “permit his total organism to function freely in all its complexity in selecting, from the multitude of possibilities, that behavior which in this moment of time will be most generally and genuinely satisfying” (Rogers 1961, 191). It is thus simply not commensurate with the characteristics or the potential of a fully functioning person that one question the validity or truth of one’s ownmost visceral experience. The prescriptive privileging of the world of subception, wherein one turns inward to find those actions and beliefs that will produce health and happiness and assure the full functioning and development of the whole person, is a turn to a utopic ideal. The ideal is that state of congruence and liberty from imposition from without in which the fulfillment of one’s own needs becomes not only permissible, but warranted by a higher good. In contrast to what takes places under auspices of both the Freudian and Rogerian models, the individual seeing the existentially oriented therapist is invited into a world in which angst, misery and suffering result from refusing to accept full responsibility for one’s own existential predicament (Yalom 1980). Carefully disabused of the illusion that psychological problems are caused by some force or agency external to oneself, the client is readied to appropriate his or her “ownmost authentic potentialities in letting ‘world’ occur” (Binswanger 1958, 194). As the client “becomes aware of his possibilities for living through listening to the call of his own conscience he can take them over responsibly, stand by himself, and thus make them part of himself ” (Boss 1963, 271). Clients are instructed that only in and through the

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“authenticity” of a solitary and resolutely individualistic existence can they transcend the mental dis-ease and emotional turpitude of the faceless crowd around them so as to “live purposeful lives of total autonomy and freedom” (Boss 1979, 278). Should clients doubt the validity of this manner of therapeutic instruction, they are patiently cautioned against flirting with the temptations of existential immaturity. They are warned that such activities cannot help but lead them back into the anxiety and neurosis plaguing all who lose themselves in the hubbub of the “anonymous, inauthentic ‘everybody’ ” (Boss 1963). For example, seeking one’s “worldmeanings” within and through a significant and communal sociality with others, or by believing in a transcendent power or being, one has already succumbed to the “on-moving lava of conformism, collectivism, and the robot man” (May 1990b, 270). To refuse the “terrible freedom” found in the hollowed-out solitude of a self-encapsulated individualism can thus only be construed as a faceless act of existential irresponsibility and cowardice. Any wavering in one’s passionate and decisive convictions, or questioning hesitation before the precipice of autonomous and unbounded self-creation, is immediately circumscribed within the existentialist’s theoretical totality as ultimately being inauthentic, immature, and self-deceived (Sartre 1956). The utopia of existentialism — albeit an ironic utopia — is a utopia of ultimate freedom and self creation. Often people must be initiated into this utopic ideal, taught to appreciate it, and schooled in its maintenance. It is a utopia that requires vigilance and exacts its own form of angst. But it is a utopia nonetheless, if for no other reason than that the alternative involves the dissolution of the person him or herself. Beside this utopia all else is inauthentic and destructive.

F REEDOM AND U TOPIA Despite a significant number of theoretical and practical differences, each of these otherwise diverse psychotherapeutic traditions is united by a commitment to a particular utopic vision. Explicit within the

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core formulations of each of their respective visions is a set of “therapeutic prescriptions” which delineate the conditions necessary for attaining an idyllic state of mental health and well-being. Inextricably bound-up with such prescriptions are the often numerous injunctions against particular beliefs and actions judged as inappropriate and therapeutically unproductive. Deviation from the prescriptions and proscriptions of a given psychotherapy is interpreted variously as denial, resistance, regression, and/or evasion of existential responsibilities. Each of these is, in turn, regarded as psychologically unhealthy and fundamentally detrimental to achieving the aims of psychotherapy and its utopic ideal. There is considerable irony in the fact that in order to achieve the therapeutic ideal of psychological and emotional freedom promised by the predominant schools, one must obediently submit to a narrowed-down, restrictive, and totalizing system of prescribed understandings and expectations — one must think and act rightly. Granted, the client is almost always free, at least in the legal sense, to reject the theoretical interpretations and practical injunctions of any given psychotherapy and discontinue therapy. Unfortunately, however, a client is not free to repudiate such interpretations and injunctions and still be judged sane within the dogmatic and totalizing construction of reality tendered by any particular therapeutic approach. One cannot genuinely exercise the will in rejecting the worldview of the therapeutic model and at the same time avoid its totalizing influences. To reject the model is to reject the utopic ideal and to relegate oneself to an inevitably diminished life. Parallel to this reduction of freedom in the client, there is an equally destructive reduction in the freedom of the therapist. The freedom spoken of here is the freedom to be entreated and instructed within and by the face-to-face encounter with the Other. As such it is the freedom to have one’s own theoretical and professional project interrupted and overturned by the infinite mysteries of another’s existence. When a therapist’s utopic vision and the prescriptions indigenous to a particular psychotherapeutic theory become more real and urgent than the concrete personhood of the client and the therapist,

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artificial barriers are erected between the world of client and clinician. The possibility of experiencing the truly interpersonal disappears — or, perhaps more accurately, is never allowed to come to light. The psychotherapist, thus trapped in the vision of an abstract utopia, is never quite able to see beyond the restrictive and inhibiting barriers of the narrow theoretical categories informing his or her own therapeutic practice. These barriers dissipate as we allow the immediacy of the concrete experience of both client and therapist to call into question the hegemony of our theoretical constructs, practical prescriptions, and utopic visions. Only in this way can we enter the interpersonal realm of the truly therapeutic. But, how is such a task to be undertaken? It is to this very question that we must now turn.

P LACE AND N OPLACE 6 The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has, in the estimation of many (see, for example, Gans 1988; Gantt 2000; Harrington 1994; Heaton 1988; Halling 1975; O’Connor 1991), gone farther than any other major theorist in both anticipating and explicating the principle characteristics of a more fruitful reconceptualization of the psychotherapeutic project. Although his work is primarily aimed at first philosophy, we can nonetheless find in Levinas a great deal that bears directly on many core theoretical and practical issues in contemporary psychotherapy. More specifically, Levinas’s work has engendered a consistent and systematic questioning of the status of the other and its relation to the I, the ego, or the same.7 His work is a provocative challenge to those philosophies (and the therapies derived therefrom) which seek to totalize, circumscribing difference (the not me) into the same (the for me) by preapportioning human possibility into a system of categories, principles, or properties. The question of the other8 is central to both the theory and practice of psychotherapy. Unfortunately, however, it is a question that has been too often neglected in the theoretical writings of the discipline, preoccupied as the discipline tends to be with issues of effective technique, normative treatment, and differential diagnosis. Questions

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regarding the otherness of the other (alterity), and the fundamentally ethical and moral responsibilities engendered in the face-to-face encounter with the Other, have been typically subordinate to questions of method and technique. As Heaton has shown, the fruit of such philosophical prejudice is that, “the cured individual and the psychotherapeutic system are simply correlated with each other. The system defines what cure is and the cure occurs because of the correct application of the method of cure generated by the system” (1988, 5). Ultimately, wherever psychotherapy looks it is able to find only itself. As Levinas (1969) has pointed out, however, by its very nature, otherness can never be completely comprehended or subsumed within a theoretical system, no matter how elaborate or sophisticated. The alterity of the Other, the very excess of otherness, will always overflow the arbitrary boundaries of whatever conceptual categories we might design. The Other qua Other can never be completely grasped or captured by any philosophy or technique grounded in the belief that knowledge and true interpretation of psychic events are given by therapeutic systems and those who have been trained to offer such within the therapeutic relationship. To enact a “therapeutic translation” in which the utterances of the Other are assimilated into the system of the therapist is an act of totalization, reducing the otherness of the Other into a simple component part of that which is self-same. Such “translations” do not allow the speaker, the interlocutor who questions, the Other who demands ethical response, to be truly other than. Instead, they force the speaker to become essentially one more homogenous element in a totalizing therapeutic system. By approaching the Other via the restrictive categorical terms of a particular therapeutic system, one ultimately closes down the possibility for truly meaningful, intimate interpersonal dialogue (Williams and Gantt 1998). In contrast to this sort of reduction, Levinas insists that we recognize the presence of the Other in the irruptive overflowing of categories and preconceived ideas revealed in the fundamental inexhaustibility of language “primordially composed in a plurality of interlocutors” (1969, 73). It is in the revelation brought about in

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language that the other is approached in Desire. For, in Levinas genuine desire, “desire for the absolutely other,” as opposed to some physical or psychological need, originates in the call of the Other who is beyond comprehension (cognitive or otherwise) and thus exceeds any image or representation one might construct. This call is not to be confused with that of some anonymous process of Being, like that articulated in the work of Heidegger and others, but is rather the call of that which is over and beyond or otherwise than Being. It is the summons of the other emanating in the face of the person who stands before us, and in whose very existence there is a command for ethical response. Fundamentally, for Levinas, the call of the Other is given in the language of Biblical commandment: “Thou shalt not kill!” Put oversimply, the very appearance of the Other, in the ethical occasion it affords, gives the Other a voice which speaks independently of whatever aims or purposes I (the same) might otherwise have in regard to him or her. In response to this appearance, this voice, I can refuse to allow it its own expression, thus totalizing the Other, or I can respond to the ethical demand and say, as Levinas is fond of quoting, “here I am” (me voici).9 In responding to the call of the Other, we suspend systems and their requirements, including those found in utopic agendas (as, for example, those of contemporary psychotherapy) and allow the Other “as teacher and master” (Levinas 1985) to instruct and enlighten our world in and through the epiphany of the face-to-face encounter, rather than attempting to envelop the Other in the dim illuminations of our own meager light. It is, Levinas maintains, to allow the Saying (of the other) to unravel the Said (of the same). To meet the Other face-to-face means, at the very least to forsake the egoistical arena of the conquering, masterful self (Cushman 1995) in order to enter an open space of welcome, discourse and interpersonal instruction. Here the work of psychotherapy must move away from the narcissism of abstract systems of treatment, wherein therapists see only what the system allows them to see, and toward fulfilling the ethical obligation to “dwell-with” another in the here-and-now immediacy of his or her suffering — the inevitable vicissitudes of daily life. This

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perspective allows, as Levinas notes, “a radical difference to emerge between suffering in the Other, which for me is unpardonable and solicits and calls me, and suffering in me, my own adventure of suffering whose constitutional or congenital uselessness can take on a meaning, the only meaning to which suffering is susceptible, in becoming a suffering for the suffering — be it inexorable — of someone else” (1988, 159). The point here is that it is in and through “sufferingfor” another that our own “useless suffering” can become genuinely meaningful. Thus conceived, dwelling-with, as a “suffering-with” in sufferingfor the suffering of an-other, becomes, in the words of Stephen Gans, “the necessary and sufficient context for analytic-therapeutic or ethical relatedness” (1988, 88). For it is in dwelling-with that I am called out of my own solipsistic self-regard and entreated to “cease living ‘as if’ by going through the motions, turned away from my fellow man in despair, and instead respond to the address of the face which touches my heart and asks me to tell the truth” (88). At the very least, the appeal of the Other is the command to refrain from the murderous10 violence of reducing him or her to a mere symbolic instance of an abstracted and interchangeable anybody. It is an invitation to “be without being a murderer” (Levinas 1985). Of course, I can always attempt to uproot myself from such responsibility. I can, Levinas says, “deny the place where it is incumbent on me to do something, to look for an anchorite’s salvation. One can choose utopia. On the other hand, one can choose not to flee the conditions from which one’s work draws its meaning, and remain here below. And that means choosing ethical action” (1990a, 100). In thus providing a nontotalizing context wherein the therapist can responsively attend to the other person as Other, dwelling-with also provides a genuine opportunity for desire to find ethical expression. As such, it is a “moment of un-concern” (Halling 1975) in which the therapeutic situation is no longer conceived in terms of an authoritarian totality: the one who will heal and the one in need of healing. To approach the therapeutic situation armed with a presumption of

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disease or defect in the client, which must be overcome through the transformative powers of a particular therapeutic system, is to foster a totalizing utopic vision. Dwelling-with is a standing open to the being of the other person as radical otherness. Rather than pursuing a particular mode of therapy with a particular client-type in order to realize a particular outcome (utopia), one stands open to genuine otherness — a world of mystery which cannot be adequately appropriated by preconceived categories or totalizing systems. In dwelling-with we give up the vain justifications of a self-serving utopic idealism.11 Instead, we offer ourselves up as a “being-for” in ethical response to the call of the other whom we find here before us: the stranger, the widow, and the orphan12 (Levinas 1969). As Levinas has said, “Utopia is not just vain in itself, it is also dangerous in its consequences. The man of utopia wishes unjustly. Instead of the difficult task of living an equitable life, he prefers the joy of solitary salvation” (1990a, 101).13 Thus, the call of the Other constitutes one in sociality; the Same is summoned to appear before an Other. It is a call to take upon ourselves the arduous task of “living an equitable life” in suffering-with and suffering-for the other person.

C ONCLUSION In conclusion, a word needs to be said in answer to the obvious objection that the Levinasian alternative presented here merely represents one more example of the sort of utopic idealism that we have been criticizing. Haven’t we just introduced yet another utopic vision of the “proper” manner in which to conduct psychotherapy; a way that would ensure a more fruitful psychotherapeutic outcome via the therapists’ increased sensitivity to the otherness of the other? Have we not suggested here that psychotherapy’s utopic ideal should be for the therapist to assume an ethically responsive openness towards the demands of the other, such that the client might thereby be freed to speak for him- or herself independent of the therapist’s totalizing theoretical system? And, finally, is not this altruistic notion of

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“dwelling-with” simply one more empathic technique among many that might be employed in psychotherapy’s idealistic quest to conquer the unnecessary pain and suffering of the client? While it is possible that the Levinasian alternative sketched out here could be appropriated in a manner that would preserve the basic characteristics of the utopic idealism against which the essay has argued, it could do so only by perversely altering the very insights in which the alternative is grounded. Ultimately, there seem to be at least three principle reasons why these objections fail to persuade. First, the overarching goal of psychotherapy under auspices of the alternative presented in this chapter is not to preclude or eradicate all human suffering, but rather to take it on in a radically ethical and responsive manner: as a “suffering-with” which is a “suffering-for” the other. Here there is no room for the utopic visions of an anesthetized existence in some future-state; there is only space in which the other (and suffering) can be welcomed with hospitality and reticence. Levinas asserts that this reticent attention to the other is to be “affirmed as the very bond of human subjectivity,” which would make “waiting for the saving actions of an all-powerful god [or therapeutic system] impossible without degradation” (1988, 159). Secondly, the richly fluid demands of the present moment, inextricably bound up with the “here-and-now” focus inherent in the Levinasian view, exist in direct contrast to the rigid and often selfstultifying ideals of the future-oriented “there-and-when” requirements of psychotherapeutic utopianism. This does not mean, however, that the future is of no consequence. It is, rather, to say that any speculative play within the horizon of imaginary future possibilities (in terms of treatment goals, outcome frames, and success measures, and so forth) must always be subordinated to the immediate demands of ethical response. Finally, it must be kept in mind that the alternative discussed in this chapter is in the first instance a call to the therapist rather than the client. As such, it should not to be regarded as merely a new theoretical formulation concerning the nature of clients. Neither should it to be taken as simply a new methodological or technical innovation in

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effective care and treatment. It is, rather, a call for the psychotherapist to admit his or her infinite ethical responsibility to the client as absolutely Other — a responsibility to attend first to the needs of the other.14 This is not to say that matters of technique or method have little or no importance in the theory or practice of psychotherapy. Rather, it is to assert that questions of method and technique are always and already subordinate to the demand for ethical response. Indeed, it is a type of felt ethical concern that always grounds our concern for method and technique and directs its application. Ultimately, the call to suffer-with is ethically prior and morally superior to any method or technique. And only when psychotherapy comes to admit this ethical priority will it perhaps become a genuinely therapeutic enterprise.

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FOUR

Pain, Exposure, and Responsibility Suffering Pain and Suffering the Other Robert Kugelmann Pain defies understanding in terms of the notions fundamental to psychology, as well as the Western philosophical tradition. In this regard, pain is, above all, a question. Psychological theories define pain in various ways: as a bare sensation, as a perception, and even as an emotion. The grounds for these theories are always physiological, the “gate control” theory of pain being among the most prominent (Melzack and Wall 1965). The role of endorphins and other neurotransmitters has complicated but not replaced the basic schema that Melzack and Wall described. The virtue of this theory is that it takes into account many of the variables in pain: the lack of a one-to-one correspondence between tissue damage and pain, the role of expectations and past experience, and the benefits of placebos and social support in the alleviation of pain. However, all attempts to explain pain in causal terms ultimately fail, because all pain is conscious pain. To account for pain, one must first give an account of consciousness, that is, one must give an account of subjectivity. In the phenomenological tradition, Frederik Buytendijk’s Pain: Its Modes and Functions (1961) is unsurpassed in its grasp of the physiological, psychological and philosophical contexts of pain. For Buytendijk, “pain . . . attacks man in his psychophysiological unity: he no longer experiences something confronting him, but in himself ” (125). Drawing on an insight of Bergson, Buytendijk sees helpless action as essential to pain: “To the inclination towards flight which follows a painful stimulus is added the inability to escape from pain” 84

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(121). Pain occurs not at a distance from subjectivity; it occurs in the subject. Pain happens to a self, to an “I.” To account for pain, then, would be to account for subjectivity itself. Other writers in the phenomenological tradition, both before (Scheler 1973, Sartre 1956) and after Buytendijk (Leder 1984–85, Schrag 1982) have addressed pain as a question with ontological implications. But in the works of none of these has pain held such a central place as in the writings of Emmanuel Levinas. In his work from the late 1940s through the 1980s, Levinas returns again and again to the question of pain, and it is “everyday pain” to which he gives the preeminent position. “I am going to lay stress on the pain lightly called physical,” he writes in Time and the Other (1987a, 69), “lightly called” because it seems to engage the person less existentially than moral or emotional pain. But Levinas defends his emphasis on physical pain for its significance in exposing subjectivity, despite the nonheroic, nonvirile nature of physical torment, writing, “in moral pain one can preserve an attitude of dignity and compunction, and consequently already be free; physical suffering in all its degrees entails the impossibility of detaching oneself from the instant of existence. . . . The content of suffering merges with the impossibility of detaching oneself from suffering” (1987a, 69). In these last lines, the phenomenological insight that Buytendijk voiced is heard, while in the first — the indication of the absence of freedom vis-a-vis pain — sounds a unique contribution to the analysis of pain, which for Levinas leads to the heart of subjectivity.1 The following chapter begins inductively with a description and a preliminary phenomenological interpretation of a situation in which pain is aggravated by interpersonal discord. Our understanding of this commonplace experience, often characterized as physical pain worsened by stress and emotional pain, can be deepened by examining it in the light of Levinas’s understanding of pain in subjective life. I shall suggest some parallels between Levinas and psychological theorists, especially the psychoanalysts; for Levinas’s account deepens certain psychoanalytic insights by showing their ontological significance. I will conclude with thoughts on the ultimate significance for

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psychology of Levinas’s position on the relationship between ethics and theory.

A P SYCHOLOGICAL S TUDY OF P AIN IN THE L IGHT OF L EVINAS ’ S T HOUGHT Pain is, in a way yet to be shown, a mystery. It raises not only the question of the existence of subjectivity, but also raises the question of the boundaries of subjectivity. It raises, moreover, the question of the discipline of psychology, since, as Levinas indicates, a desire to alleviate pain includes, but is not limited to, a will to power.

Suffering Pain, Suffering the Other: A Phenomenological Account 2 Sarah’s pain began after she fell at work. As a result of injuries sustained at that time, she had two surgeries — spinal fusions — and following the surgeries, she underwent rehabilitation, including physical therapy and biofeedback. She felt that she had been making progress in rehabilitation when family turmoil erupted: Her sister “took” her teenage son from her. Sarah stated that this trouble undid the progress she had gained in biofeedback. “From that moment of finding out that my child was gone and that my sister was behind it was really, it just sent me, it took me a long time to calm down enough to even think about being rational. I was angry, I was upset, and I was hurt and didn’t even know how anybody could do this to somebody.” After this incident involving her sister, pain returned in full force. “It was like immediately. It was just like shooting pains, in my arm, and in my neck. Then I started having migraines after that.” The spontaneous flow of her conversation expressed the intimate link between pain and her sister. “I mean I tried to stay calm and get through situations and do my breathing and all this other stuff but it just didn’t seem to work. And it was like the pain wouldn’t go away. And I couldn’t believe it, that she’d do that. I still can’t believe it but I decided at that point that that door was going to be shut until I decided to open it again.” An open “door” makes it possible for her sister to hurt her. The painful places in her body are the places where the door is. Pain itself

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is this door. When her sister hurt her, pain flared up. The place of pain is where she felt wounded by her sister. The painful place is where she is vulnerable to her sister. Her neck and back, the site of pain, resemble a sense organ, in that Sarah began hurting worse when her sister said and did hurtful things. Sarah feels interpersonal disharmony in her neck and back. The place of pain is a sense organ by being a location for receptivity to others, where they can reach the heart of the self. Sarah claimed that her family meddles in her life. “They put their two cents worth in all the time. Even though most of the time, it’s not what you want to, not what you need to hear. It’s like: Why would you say that? . . . Don’t call me at all, and just leave them alone long enough for them to realize that I’m serious and stand my ground.” Words wound her, exacerbating the pain she already feels. Pain troubles, disturbs, torments. The family’s critical attitude troubles, pains. Sarah seemed trapped in this vicious circle. In the location of her pain in the neck and back we can already see a troubled independent existence, a troubled stance — trouble having a backbone, as we say (cf., Straus 1980). Such does not demand we search for causes, but the manner of her “bodying forth,” of how she “finds herself ” (Boss 1979). The trouble with her sister and family is also isolation. She is cut off from them. Sarah must keep the door closed to protect herself from further pain, but this isolation intensifies her pain. It is not that these slights cause pain; it is that pain acts as a kind of “sounding board” (see James 1950, 2:450) for the social world. Pain resonates with the presence or absence of social acknowledgment. In psychological theories, pain has been classified as a sensation like vision or touch; pain is classified as a skin sense (Rey 1995, 280). This now controversial view (Baszanger 1998, 54) contains an important phenomenological insight, so long as “sensation” is not viewed in the abstract, apart from action, and so long as “skin” has more than biological significance. Pain is a movement of receptivity, a sensitivity to whatever touches, affects, troubles, encroaches. It is, more precisely, to be “unable to flee and to be unable to retreat, to know this

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impotence in a vain struggle to get out of oneself ” (Lingis 1981, 169). Pain has motor tendencies: irritability, contraction, withdrawal, anger, outbursts. As Sarah describes it, pain resonates with a moving toward and away from others. It entails a listening, a movement of receptivity, a movement that is thwarted, leaving one isolated. As skin sense, pain occurs on the boundary of the subject and participates with the world and with others. This is so even if pain is felt deep within, in the gut, the chest, the head. The received view of the kind of situation described here is that anxiety, arousal, stress and muscle tension exacerbate pain. This explanation, however, makes an undue differentiation between the social/ emotional and the physical. It suggests that there are two types of pain — the emotional and the purely physical — and that emotional pain can only aggravate an already existing and heretofore largely meaning-free physical pain. In Sarah’s account, then, insult and anger are painful in this psychological sense and, thus, serve only to intensify her preexisting physical pain. Another commonly offered explanation would be that Sarah somatizes her pain. If one means by “somatization,” not a conversion of the psychological into the physical, but rather the use of “physical symptoms to communicate personal distress” (Kleinman et al. 1992, 12), then Sarah somatizes. However, I avoid the term because it carries the prejudice of the distinction between the objective, anonymous body of the anatomists and the psychological life of the person. And it suggests that one type of pain is transformed into another in spite of differing ontological status. Listening to the way Sarah describes her pain and how it resonates of her fall and her sister inclines us in a direction other than toward the traditional sense of somatization. What the narrative suggests is that any pain affects and afflicts the self. The sister’s insult and the family’s meddling are experienced as a wounding. They afflict her in the same way and place in which she is already wounded. They are, in this sense, part of that pain. It may be that Sarah’s physical ordeal has made her vulnerable. Her “skin,” the surface of contact with the world and others, is already tender, and thus offers no insulation.

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The interpretation offered above of Sarah’s pain is already influenced by my reading of Levinas. Pain and suffering play a central role in Levinas’s analysis of subjectivity. He takes up and deepens an understanding of subjectivity found in the phenomenological tradition, but also continues and contributes to an older tradition of understanding human being with roots in antiquity and early modern philosophy. In his presentation of subjectivity, Levinas resembles van Kaam (1984) in psychology and Strasser (1957) in phenomenological philosophy. Moreover, as Manning (1993) shows, Levinas’s work can be seen as a constant dialogue with and critique of Heidegger, especially the latter’s analysis of Dasein. In a day when many would dissolve the self without residue into historical and social relations, Levinas affirms the peculiar substantiality of subjectivity because ethics, as he is wont to say, is his optics.

An Understanding of Subjectivity as Precondition for Understanding Pain In an early work, Time and the Other (1987a), when Levinas turns to the topic of suffering and death, it is to indicate the boundaries of existence, but not only in the Heideggerian sense that pain and its foreboding of death open up one’s being toward death. Rather, it is to show the limits of the powers and freedom of subjectivity. The subject is, as Merleau-Ponty also taught, in its basic sense, not an “I think,” but an “I am able” (1962, 137). Pain, especially in its inescapability, shows us where we are no longer able. And in this way it opens us beyond ourselves, beyond our existence, beyond our world and its present, to the other, who is mystery par excellence. For Levinas, subjectivity is the “I.” In a way that resembles the work of some psychoanalytic and object relations theorists, Levinas defines the I, the self, by the fact that it is bounded. The terms “solitude,” “separation,” “atheism,” and “autochthony” are some of the terms he uses to state the way that subjectivity exists. In an interview, he said: the fact of being is what is most private; existence is the sole thing I cannot communicate; I can tell about it, but I cannot share my existence.

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Solitude thus appears here as the isolation which marks the very event of being. (1985, 57–58)

This solitude or incommunicability is primary, once I am. But it is not an autonomy that is independent of the world. As he discusses in Totality and Infinity, the I grounds itself by “living from . . .” the world, and in the ability to so live, is happy. What we live from does not enslave us; we enjoy it. Need cannot be interpreted as a simple lack, despite the psychology of need given by Plato, nor as pure passivity, despite Kantian ethics. The human being thrives on his needs; he is happy for his needs. . . . Living from . . . is the dependency that turns into sovereignty, into happiness—essentially egoist. (1969, 114)

The I is grounded in what we might call a pleasure principle, so long as we do not reduce enjoyment to physiology; the I is grounded in a healthy narcissism. As the phenomenological philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, states, “The conscious metaphysics that starts from the moment when the being is ‘cast into the world’ is a secondary metaphysics. It passes over the preliminaries, when being is well-being” (1964, 7). Or as Winnicott puts it, transposing the ontological discourse into a psychological key, “In the course of the emotional development of the individual a stage is reached at which the individual can be said to have become a unit. . . . This is a stage of ‘I am’ and. . . . At this stage the child can say: ‘Here I am. What is inside is me and what is outside me is not me.’” (1971, 130). For Winnicott, as for Levinas and Strasser (1969), I exist in the first instance in the second person singular before I am in the first person singular. Or, to cite Levinas, “the separation that is concretized through the intimacy of the dwelling” (1969, 156) is an autonomy that is at home in itself and in the world, insofar as this autonomy has been welcomed in hospitality. The primacy of pleasure and the welcoming of this pleasure in the economy of subjectivity is the condition of possibility for the “I” to come into existence. To cite the title of Mahler’s (1975) book, Levinas is addressing the birth of the human person, an event that introduces something new into being.

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The way of the self is not limited to enjoyment, although traditional egoism is always characterized in this way, a characterization Levinas reexamines in terms of dwelling, work, economy, and contemplation. Levinas argues that freedom, autonomy, and the conatus essendi are the essence of the self as it has been understood in the dominant tradition of Western thought from Plato to Heidegger. The pursuit of knowledge and of truth does not change this structure of the self, for knowledge neutralizes the otherness of whatever is known by making it what I know, grasp, possess. Philosophy, in particular ontology, “issues in the State and in the non-violence of the totality, without securing itself against the violence from which this non-violence lives, and which appears in the tyranny of the State” (Levinas 1969, 46). When knowledge is autonomous in this way, all knowledge is power, and not only scientific knowledge, because to know is to possess, to internalize, to conceptualize, even if all knowing is not know-how. Yet there is more than the autonomy of the self for Levinas, also expressed by Winnicott’s pairing of the “I am” with the “Here I am.” Levinas develops this thought about the I as at the disposal of the other (Peperzak 1993, 25). For Levinas, an I is not fully an I until it has its subjectivity “vested” in responding to the Other who calls from outside the existence of the I. For Levinas, “interiority thus does not exhaust the existence of the separated being” (1961, 226). He discusses this understanding of the “investiture” of the self with allusion to the story of Abraham’s call away from his homeland: “justice summons me to go beyond the straight line of justice, and henceforth nothing can mark the end of this march; behind the straight line of the law the land of goodness extends infinite and unexplored, necessitating all the resources of a singular presence. . . . The I is a privilege and an election” (245). The Other who faces me and calls me to task is, according to this analysis, an exteriority that I cannot assimilate, an exteriority that I find, affecting me within myself. The psychoanalytical anthropologist, George Devereux, writing on countertransference, claims that the psychoanalyst “understands his patient psychoanalytically only insofar as he understands the disturbances his patient sets

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up within him. He says: ‘And this I perceive’ only in respect to those reverberations ‘at himself’” (1967, 301). Although Devereux, like Winnicott, speaks the language of psychoanalysis, their insights converge with Levinas on this understanding of the self as implicated in depth by the Other.

Subjectivity and Pain Enjoyment and the reflexivity of enjoyment produces the separateness of the self or the “same,” (Levinas 1969, 147). Therefore, Levinas writes, “Suffering is a failing of happiness. . . . The personality of the person, the ipseity of the I, which is more than the particularity of the atom and of the individual, is the particularity of the happiness of enjoyment” (115). Happiness is the precondition for suffering. First, only subjectivities undergo pain and the occurrence of pain indicates the presence of subjectivity. Secondly, pain constitutes an assault on subjectivity, an assault on the “primary movement” (116) of subjectivity, that is, on enjoyment. It strikes at the selfhood of the self (Buytendijk 1961, 161) by undermining the boundaries of the self constituted by enjoyment. Pain both intensifies existence and constricts its possibilities. Pain intensifies existence insofar as pain rivets me to myself. The inescapable quality of pain reveals the extent to which I am burdened with my being, the extent to which I am laden with myself. This is for Levinas neither a play on words nor an indication of a latent psychophysical dualism in his thought. It does indicate the materiality of existence, a materiality that is not accidental to the self, that is not comprehensible in terms of an opposition of the self to the body. The very upsurge of the I happens with the taking up of and mastery over existence, an event that Levinas refers to as a transformation of “being” from its verbal to its substantive form. This transformation is an assumption, a taking-a-stand, both a mastery and a burden. While in enjoyment, in existence as ex-stasis, we move out from the stance of our existence, in pain we are pinned in place. In Levinas’s words: “The whole acuity of suffering lies in this impossibility of retreat. It is the fact of being backed up against life and being. In this sense suffering is

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the impossibility of nothingness” (1987a, 69). This “impossibility” refers to an inability to escape the present, the self, in the agony of pain: If only I could not be! Thus the writhing, the grimacing, the impatience, and irritability of pain. Hence the desire to flee it through the elimination of consciousness, in sleep, stupor, death. For consciousness is presence, being in the present, is essential to the I. “Here I am” is the self. In pain I am trapped here, the isolation, the burden of being accentuated, brought to a pitch. The flight from pain affords profound insight into the human condition. Even as pain intensifies existence, accentuating its materiality, pain also reveals subjectivity’s exposure to the other. In chilling passages in Totality and Infinity, Levinas refers to the effect of hatred, torture, and death in simultaneously illuminating and obscuring the self as well as the otherness of the other. In pain, the I is exposed to the other. Using the term “will” to name the I in this passage, Levinas states: “In suffering reality acts on the in itself of the will, which turns despairingly into total submission to the will of the Other. In suffering the will is defeated by sickness. . . . But we still witness this turning of the I into a thing” (1969, 238). The distance between the self and pain is “negative,” as Bakan (1971) observes, which introduces us to the paradox of a subject, bound to its consciousness, that feels itself becoming a thing. In pain, the I is at stake. I exist at the limit of myself in pain. This at once marks the end of myself in death and my exposure to the other. For Levinas, the confrontation with death occasions an opportunity for a conversion of the self from its egoism, its fight for life. In contrast to Heidegger, for whom death is my ownmost possibility, Levinas emphasizes the alien aspect of death, that it comes from the outside, that I cannot grasp it. There is not only the feeling and the knowledge that suffering can end in death. Pain of itself includes it like a paroxysm, as if there were something about to be produced even more rending than suffering, as if despite the entire absence of a dimension of withdrawal that constitutes suffering, it still had some free space for an event, as if it must still get uneasy about something, as if we were on the verge of an event beyond what is revealed to the end in suffering. (1987a, 69)

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Death is not known, not because I cannot return from the dead to describe what it is like, but because “the very relationship with death cannot take place in the light. . . . The subject is in relationship with what does not come from itself. We could say it is in relationship with mystery” (70). The power, autonomy, freedom, activity, virility of the subject does not extend to death: With death, “something absolutely unknowable appears” (71). My death is never present for me; it remains invisible, outside my being, mysterious in the sense that I cannot possess it. It will have me when it comes.

Pain and the Other At the limits of my existence, I confront what I cannot bring into the light. The essential thing for Levinas is not the finitude of existence but the otherness of what confronts me beyond my here and now. Pain and death interrupt the solitude and autonomy of the self and, paradoxically for a generation accustomed to existentialist thought, Levinas concludes: “My solitude is thus not confirmed by death but broken by it” (1987a, 74). Pain and death focus the attention in another direction than that of knowledge and power: “Consequently only a being whose solitude has reached a crispation through suffering, and in relation with death, takes its place on a ground where the relationship with the other becomes possible” (76). Death is not the only “thing” beyond my being; so is the Other. The boundary or “crispation” of my existence indicates what lies beyond it: mystery, meaning the other, death, the future, what I cannot know, where I cannot be. This exposition of Levinas’s thought on the topic has primarily drawn from Time and the Other. The topic, however, is deepened in Totality and Infinity. Levinas writes, “My death is not deduced from the death of the others by analogy; it is inscribed in the fear I can have for my being. . . . The unforeseeable character of the ultimate instant is not due to an empirical ignorance, to the limited horizon of our understanding, which a greater understanding would have been able to overcome. The unforeseeable character of death is due to the fact that it does not lie within any horizon” (1969, 233). Beyond all the horizons

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of my existence, then, in an elsewhere and a not yet (and in a sense, an already passed) lies what I cannot grasp: It is death, and it is the Other: “The Other, inseparable from the very event of transcendence, is situated in the region from which death, possibly murder, comes” (233). Death opens on to the interpersonal order. Bearing in mind again that Levinas addresses not death reduced to biology, but the death of an I, we can understand the simile in the following statement: “In the being for death of fear I am not faced with nothingness, but faced with what is against me, as though murder, rather than being one of the occasions of dying, were inseparable from the essence of death, as though the approach of death remained one of the modalities of the relation with the Other” (234). In other words, the fear of death is “not the fear of nothingness, but the fear of violence” (235), insofar as I face what I cannot assume or grasp, which will overpower the I. But why does Levinas state that the approach of death is “as though” the approach of the Other? It is because death like the Other breaks my autonomy. Pain and the intimations and fear of death that can accompany it end the solitude of the self. Levinas indicates the supreme ambiguity of the relationship with mystery that marks death and the Other. This outside, over which I am powerless — even though I can attack and kill the other — makes hope as well as fear possible. The mystery of death and the Other “renders possible an appeal to the Other, to his friendship and his medication” (1969, 234). Where there is still consciousness, hence where there is still time, there can be hope. In Existence and Existents, Levinas writes: “What produces the thrust of hope is the gravity of the instant in which it occurs. The irreparable is its natural atmosphere. There is hope only when hope is no longer permissible” (1978, 89). The fear of death can open to hope, for while I fear, there is still time. Hope in turn makes patience possible. Patience is “mastery,” i.e., consciousness or subjectivity, yet simultaneously, “the passivity of undergoing” (1969, 238). Patience is triumph in passivity. Levinas sees in hope and patience not simply the piety of the powerless in the face of overwhelming odds, but a transformation of the I when I face the mystery of the other and death, which I can never

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possess. “This situation where the consciousness deprived of all freedom of movement maintains a minimal distance from the present, this ultimate passivity which nonetheless desperately turns into action and into hope, is patience — the passivity of undergoing, and yet mastery itself ” (238). Thus, facing death and the other, opening one’s self in pain, makes for a “conversion” of the I: “in patience the will breaks through the crust of its egoism and as it were displaces its center of gravity outside of itself, to will as Desire and Goodness limited by nothing” (239). To move in this direction is to move toward the fullness of the I in responsibility for the other.

The Pain of the Other The mystery of death and the other, to which pain leads us, helps to account for Levinas’s puzzling insistence that the “first word” of the other is: Do not kill me. To Levinas, “The face is what one cannot kill, or at least it is that whose meaning consists in saying: ‘thou shalt not kill.’ Murder, it is true, is a banal fact: one can kill the Other; the ethical exigency is not an ontological necessity. The prohibition against killing does not render murder impossible” (1985, 87). The other as Other, beyond but vulnerable to my powers, is exposed to me, and the other as Other addresses me from that outside, from that elsewhere that “presents” death in all its forms, and in its essential form as the death of a self. More specifically, this death from the outside is not simply death; it is murder (death to a self ). That is the context in which the face of the other reveals itself. The other’s face says “Do not murder” in that the other speaks. To face and to speak are synonymous. Speech “is perhaps to be defined as the very power to break the continuity of being” (1969, 195). The other and speech are unimaginable for me; I could not have concocted them by analogy from myself. The other establishes a new relationship, one that exceeds my grasp: “the ethical relationship which subtends discourse is not a species of consciousness whose ray emanates from the I; it puts the I into question. This putting into question emanates from the other” (195). Levinas insists that the face and the first words of the other convey neediness. But he does not offer a Hobbesian vision of mutual limitation of egoism in order that we both

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survive, for that vision views human relationships from the outside, where the pair are symmetrically placed and interchangeable.3 The face-to-face relationship, according to Levinas, is not symmetrical, because no one can substitute for the I. For Levinas, the other “is situated in a dimension of height and of abasement — glorious abasement; he has the face of the poor, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, and, at the same time, of the master called to invest and justify my freedom” (1969, 251). The other calls me out of myself not to self-abnegation but to the completion of being an I: to be an I is to desire the other, is to be responsible for the other. For Levinas, “this changing of being into signification, that is, into substitution, is the subject’s subjectivity, or its subjection to everything, its susceptibility, its vulnerability, that is, its sensibility” (1998d, 14). This fullness of the self as signification, as subjected to the other, as “hostage” has no analogue in contemporary psychology. It is a thought that psychology has yet to think. It means, however, that the other’s suffering and pain “is unpardonable and solicits me and calls me” (1988, 159). Psychology, in the form of pain management and psychotherapy, seeks to help people find meaning for their pain. In bio-psycho-social medicine and health psychology, pain and illness are “teachers,” especially about limits of personal ambition. This secularized theodicy (justification of pain) is a hydra-headed activity in contemporary psychotherapy. To this, Levinas’s thought offers opposition: “For an ethical sensibility . . . the justification of the neighbor’s pain is certainly the source of all immorality” (163). The ethical stance undercuts as critique, as skepticism, the practical and economic activity of psychotherapy, without, however, invalidating it. The ethical “anarchical” (for Levinas, this term means that the ethical is prior to the truth of ontology and positive science) directs attention to the claim that others have on the self. The self as signification, as hostage in an asymmetrical relationship with the other, is called to “help [the other] gratuitously” (165).

Pain and The Cry for Justice Returning to the description of Sarah and her pain, Levinas’s thought opens a new aspect to us. In light of this new understanding, Sarah

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cries for justice. This cry is not a pain management problem nor even specifically a psychological theme. But it runs throughout Sarah’s narrative and, indeed, throughout all the narratives I have heard from patients in a pain management program. They cry for healing for their pain and they cry for justice. They have been injured, and the wrong needs to be righted. At the heart of Sarah’s complaint was the charge that her sister made her pain worse. This claim could be taken as psychological naivete, indicating a deficiency of ego-boundaries, a projection of an internal object as Winnicott describes it: “Unsatisfactory experiences lead to the existence and the strengthening of things or forces felt to be bad within. These until bound, or controlled or eliminated, are internal persecutors. The child knows of their existence and threat by a sense of pain or illness” (1988, 84). There is, however, a more basic phenomenological claim being made by Sarah, regardless of any diagnostic indication in her statement: Pain is a disturbance (in Devereux’s 1967, 325 sense), an “and this I perceive,” occurring at the boundary of Sarah and her sister, as the boundary and connection between them. The phenomenological point is that the pain is as much not Sarah’s as it is Sarah’s. That is, pain is not her private property. Psychology has tacitly defined pain as private property, whether pain be called a sensation, perception or behavior. Pain belongs to the individual, according to the received view. With the aid of Levinas, we conclude that pain is not understood if grasped as private property. Pain is a “disturbance” that occurs across the separation from the other. Pain is incommunicable, a mode of someone’s being, but pain does not belong to him or her, as property that can be held or discarded. The upsurge of pain in the relationship disturbs or troubles it, incommunicable yet occurring across the gap. Insofar as I am faced by an Other in pain, the disturbance happens, prior to my decision to take it up or not. In this sense, with Winnicott and Devereux, we can say that the troubling is unconscious, first and foremost. With Levinas, the face of the Other judges me before I decide to be a defendant. Sarah who speaks accuses me, psychology, and the helping professions in her plea. Her pain troubles. What this situation means is that

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this pain, suffered in Sarah and the others, becomes my responsibility. This conclusion is an outrage against the disciplined compassion of professional ethics. It smacks of sentimentality: How do we know that Sarah’s complaint is justified, when we have not heard from the others? Such a questioning gets to the heart of the matter, namely, that pain is an ethical relationship before it is anything else. It is the pain of the self and the reality of the other. The work of Levinas would place the cry for justice first among the considerations in any account of pain. What could be more urgent when one is injured than that a wrong be made right? Levinas addresses this cry for redress: “Pain cannot be redeemed. Just as the happiness of humanity does not justify the mystery of the individual, retribution in the future does not wipe away the pains of the present. There is no justice that could make reparations for it. One should have to return to that instant, or be able to resurrect it” (1978, 91). Economic growth and progress do not justify suffering, since even if the future could produce paradise on earth, the human misery that paved the way for it would be sacrifices to an idol (Berger 1974), nothing more. Functionalist responses to pain, the efforts of pain management to help the injured to return to productive economic positions and to help them not be wards of the state, conduct themselves, from a Levinasian perspective, within this larger drama of justice and the impossibility of undoing the wrongs done. As Levinas writes, “The caress of a consoler which softly comes in our pain does not promise the end of suffering, does not announce any compensation, and in its very contact, is not concerned with what is to come with afterwards in economic time; it concerns the very instant of physical pain, which is then no longer condemned to itself, is transported ‘elsewhere’ by the movement of the caress, and is freed from the vice-grip of ‘oneself’, finds ‘fresh air’, a dimension and a future” (1978, 91). Consolation, in opening a future, “owns” the pain of the Other, even if the other’s pain is not experienced except as disturbance. Consolation, which breaks the economic and psychological construction of pain as private property, as the internal state or behavior

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of an autonomous individual (Gergen 1991, 164), is not a professional activity. It is as gratuitous as it is basic. Consolation does the impossible, we might say with Levinas, by taking on what it cannot assume and thus opening up a future.

B EYOND K NOWLEDGE : L EVINAS ’ S C HALLENGE FOR P SYCHOLOGY Levinas’s thought not only has much to offer psychology in terms of insights and modes of thinking, it challenges a basic assumption of all psychology, including humanistic and phenomenological psychologies. His questioning is not primarily ontological, that is, not primarily concerned with the nature or being of the self. He contests the primacy of ontological questions. For Levinas, ethics is first philosophy. This fundamental position affects his entire account of subjectivity, and in order to understand subjectivity and pain in the light of Levinas’s thought, the primacy of the ethical requires attention. Thought, speech and writing always occur in a position. This position or stance has a structure: I, here, now. An I always exists in the present, as a presence. While I can pretend that my thought has an atemporal and acorporeal vantage point, it does not, even if some thoughts endure beyond the moment of their production. Moreover, the structure of thought, speech and writing is such that thought is discourse, first of all addressed to someone else: “. . . the essence of language is the relation with the Other” (1969, 207). Levinas calls the relation with the Other the “ethical relationship.” The primacy of the ethical relationship means that ethics precedes truth, that truth arises only in the context of the ethical. This position turns psychology upside down, because usually ethics is seen as grounded in a view of the person or of nature. But for Levinas, “ethics is an optics. But it is a vision without images, bereft of the synoptic and totalizing objectifying virtues of vision, a relation or an intentionality of a wholly different type” (23). The primacy of the ethical opposes the primacy of the ontological, and the latter marks contemporary psychology, even existential and phenomenological psychology. When ontology is primary, the quest

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for knowledge is primary and, “ontology . . . is really a philosophy of power, wherein the subject dominates and controls the other” (Manning 1993, 94). In a time when the play of power/knowledge is of the utmost importance, when power operates through comprehension rather than through repression, Levinas’s call for the primacy of the ethical relationship deserves serious consideration. His analysis grounds itself in what he calls the radical asymmetry between myself and the other, based on “a concrete moral experience: what I permit myself to demand of myself is not compatible with what I have the right to demand of the Other” (1969, 53). This radical asymmetry situates thinking squarely in the “I” position, and not in a disembodied and asocial observer of existence. The other calls me such that the “I” exists in the accusative or objective case: as the “me” called. Psychology has in recent years absorbed much Continental thought, including that of Husserl, Heidegger and, more recently, Foucault. While the assimilation of that thought has been in the service of human emancipation and in opposition to the “predict and control” mindset of scientistic psychology, a reading of Levinas leads to the conclusion that the intention to foster emancipation does not necessarily escape the philosophy of power. Levinas does not simply remind us of the Golden Rule or introduce yet another view of the self, but challenges the ground of our discipline. Ethics as “first psychology” means at least to call into question the discipline’s fundamental commitments. This is a preliminary exploration in this direction, in the service of an “anarchic” psychology, to borrow a term from both Levinas and also from Jacques Ellul (1993). For both, anarchy does not mean disorder or revolution, the charms of the avant-garde, but a refusal of power. For psychology, it means critique, skepticism toward the positive contributions of psychology without seeking to replace them with a better or a more humane science. It means “the ascendancy of the other is exercised upon the same to the point of interrupting it, leaving it speechless” (Levinas 1998d, 101). It means that the claims of psychology are relative, and that the claims of ethics, as William James affirmed a century ago, have greater weight.4

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FIVE

Levinas The Unconscious and the Reason of Obligation James E. Faulconer A N O VERVIEW OF L EVINAS The philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas opens the possibility of thinking of psychology in a new way by arguing that ethics — for Levinas, the nonreductive relation of the subject to the Other — is the foundation for both cognition and behavior. In a series of works over approximately 30 years (Existence and Existents [1947]1978; Time and the Other [1948]1987a; Totality and Infinity [1961]1969; Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence [1974]1998d), Levinas develops a philosophical position that has at least these major points:1 1. Initially, we think of the human subject as solitary, as if it is closed in on itself, a Cartesian ego. 2. However, we cannot conceive of even the solitary individual without conceiving of that individual as enmeshed in the material world.2 Everyday, worldly existence, the experience of nourishment and knowledge, is ex-perience, the encounter with something that transcends the subject, specifically, the material world. In everyday pleasures — eating a chocolate, sniffing a rose — one is concerned with something other than oneself. One forgets oneself in such experiences, so they take one beyond the solitude of the mere self. The solipsism of a Cartesian ego is impossible. Because it is a matter of self-forgetfulness, concern for something other than oneself, Levinas calls everyday existence “the first morality” (1987a, 64). 3. In this everyday world, understanding identifies the being of a thing and its value. On this understanding, “the reality of a thing is indeed constituted by its finality. As the end of an intention, a thing is a goal, a limit, an ultimate” (1978, 38).3 It is a very small step — 102

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indeed, no step at all — from “x is what it is as the object of my intention” to “x is what it is as what it is for me.” Indeed, all that is required is the identification of myself with my intentions. Thus, the first morality, though not Cartesian solipsism, remains a concern for self. 4. An adequate account of human existence must get beyond concern for self or it remains a kind of solipsism: the isolated individual enmeshed in his or her world. An account of human existence that does not get beyond concern for self begins with what it must explain, the individual human subject, and it explains everything else only as it relates to that subject. Though the objects of everyday life transcend the human subject, because they remain objects (in other words, that at which the individual is directed — the word object is shorthand for “object of an intention”), they are insufficient as the basis for an account of human existence. Since an object is, by definition, an object for a perceiving subject, I remain at the center of the horizon of everyday transcendence; nourishment is my nourishment, pleasure is my pleasure, knowledge belongs to me. Thus, only what is other than mere materiality and beyond the horizon of everyday transcendence could be the “ground” for a nonsolipsistic account of human being.4 5. The personal Other is beyond the ego or subject. It cannot be conceived merely as an object and remain a personal Other. Thus, the relation to the personal Other — which Levinas’s phenomenological analysis argues is an asymmetric relation of obligation — makes a nonsolipsistic account of human being possible. Because such a relation is a relation to what is genuinely transcendent, it is the “second morality” or “ethics”.5 It follows that any adequate, in other words, non-question-begging, account of human being must begin in ethics rather than in ontology.6

T HE P OSSIBILITIES FOR P SYCHOLOGY The consequences of Levinas’s arguments are far-reaching. For example, because Levinas takes the subject essentially as response to obligation, his thinking allows us to give a non-Hobbesian account of the origin of law and human rights. On Levinas’s account, these begin in original obligation rather than original alienation. As a result, one can think about government and community without reducing it to,

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on the one hand, a means of staving off war, or, on the other, a way to overcome the essential alienation that always threatens to break through and disrupt our lives together. Using Levinas for a similar approach to psychology seems possible. One should be able to ground it in original obligation rather than in the mere historicity that characterizes social psychology, on the one hand, or the alienated individualism of individual psychology, on the other. Levinas’s work ought to provide a way between the horns of that dilemma. One advantage of a Levinasian ground for psychology would be that, unlike most of the alternatives to the dominant, empiricistic approach of American psychology that have been offered, a psychology with a Levinasian ground should make it possible for us to have a regular and “objective,” in other words, rational, understanding of interpersonal relations. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Levinas provides an explanation of the universality and necessity of reason. For him, reason is a response to my obligation to the Other. Consider these two quotations: The face [Levinas’s word for the nonobjectifiable “something” that one encounters in an experience with another person] opens the primordial discourse in which the first word is obligation, which no “interiority” permits avoiding — discourse that obliges one to enter into discourse, the commencement of discourse that rationalism prays for, a “force” that convinces even “the people who do not wish to listen” [a reference to Plato’s Republic, 327b] and thus founds the true universality of reason. (1969, 201; translation revised)7

And: An order common to the interlocutors is established by the positive act of the one giving the world, his possession, to the other, or by the positive act of the one justifying himself in his freedom before the other, that is, by apology. Apology does not blindly affirm the self, but already appeals to the Other. It is the primordial phenomenon of reason, in its insurmountable bipolarity. (1969, 252)

Levinas begins with an account of human being that goes beyond human existence in the material world, but he does not disregard the importance of reason in doing so. In fact, by moving beyond the

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material world, he explains why reason is essential; he gives it a ground. Thus, his insistence on the ethical character of reason implies that general accounts of human behavior — social sciences — are possible and, as we will see, necessary. In psychology, this combination of attention to the genuinely human element of human existence and recourse to reason is unusual and perhaps unique. It is one of the most promising aspects of Levinas’s work. In principle, it makes possible a rational account of human psychology without that account merely aping the physical sciences and without reducing human psychology to something nonhuman. Simultaneously, Levinas’s account of human being makes it possible to investigate meaningfully the material and the physiological aspects of psychology. And, it makes these two possible without one contradicting the other or either contradicting the character of its analysis of human beings as human. As a small contribution to a rethinking of psychology based on Levinas’s work, let me consider what it might mean to rethink the unconscious from that perspective.8

C ONSCIOUSNESS , I NTENTION , AND THE U NCONSCIOUS According to Levinas, we must be careful not to confuse psychological behavior with conscious behavior, as we implicitly do when we assume that behavior rests on cognition (1969, 29). It is tempting to “spiritualize” human behavior, dividing consciousness from the rest of human being by making it the foundation for all human behavior, separating the “spirit,” the “mental,” the “conscious,” etc., from the body (committing intellectual “murder,”to put it only a bit melodramatically). Such murder not only characterizes some obvious forms of psychological theory, but as a mere reversal of that spiritualization (its “materialization,” if you will), this division of body and consciousness also characterizes those theories that reduce human behavior to physical states and conditions of some kind. Either response to the problem, dualism (even if disguised) or simple materialism, is an unfortunate reduction, different sides of the same coin. Levinas’s point is

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not reductionist. It is, rather, that we cannot explain human behavior merely through cognition, whether we do that, as the tradition once did, by postulating the primacy of a separate, nonphysical entity, or whether, as is common today, we do it by thinking that cognition is identical to an electrochemical process. Levinas is firmly in the camp of those who refuse to talk about psychology apart from embodiment; however, because he is opposed to those who, for whatever reasons, identify human being with consciousness or ground it only in consciousness he is also opposed to those who would reduce human being to brain states, states that are at least coextensive with consciousness.9 Consider a more full explication of the claim that we must not confuse psychological behavior and conscious behavior. At least implicitly, psychological theories often take human behavior to be explained by intention, by the directed character of consciousness.10 However, Levinas argues that in making such an assumption they affirm “that the world is the field of a consciousness” (1978, 38). Given that implicit assumption and the fact that consciousness is intentional, it follows that we understand everything in the world that is to be understood, relata as well as relations, only by reference to consciousness, as centered in consciousness even if not identical to it (39). On such an understanding, the structure of consciousness — intentionality — characterizes all psychological/behavioral relations to the world. Of course, more is going on in human behavior than explicitly intentional acts of consciousness. No one naively suggests that everything psychological is conscious. However, having assumed that the world is a field of consciousness, we also assume that everything psychological has the structure of consciousness, namely intentionality. As a result, we postulate, besides explicit consciousness, “thoughtlike” events. We assume that the nonconscious aspects of behavior have the same structure as its conscious aspects. Though perhaps we do not use the word “unconscious,” often preferring words like “motive,” we postulate the nonconscious or unconscious as an element of psychology, and we unreflectively assume that it is structured

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in something like the way that consciousness is structured — specifically, by intentionality. In American psychology, it is standard practice to dismiss the notion of the unconscious, particularly as postulated in Sigmund Freud’s work, because it issues in a variety of contradictions and paradoxes well summed up in the phrase, “unthought thought.”11 Yet, though we do not usually speak of drives, motives, and so on as unconscious, and though talk about drives and such has been subject to less frequent criticism, they are no less a matter of the unconscious and no less mysterious. Both the traditional interpretation of Freud and more modern talk of motivation attribute the structure of consciousness to the unconscious, though there is no reason to do so.12 Our ascription of an intentional structure to the unconscious and the resulting labeling of that unconscious as drive is an assumption rather than a fact. As an assumption, it requires questioning, and that is a place where Levinas is helpful, for he gives us both a criticism of the assumption and an alternative to it. Presumably psychology must study human behavior as a whole and not only its conscious aspects. It follows that psychology cannot be merely the study of consciousness; a fully developed psychology must study what is unconscious, but it must do so without assuming that the unconscious and consciousness have the same structure. To see, broadly, some implications of this claim, consider a particular intention, the phenomenon of desire: Passing through the kitchen on my way to the study, I see a bowl of apples and I desire to eat one.13 Notice two things about my desire. The first is a point about its intention: I do not desire to eat an apple so I can do something else, such as continue my bodily existence. What I desire is straightforward: I want to eat the apple; perhaps we can go as far as to say that I desire the pleasure of eating the apple, but there are many things we must be careful not to say. For example, eating the apple is correlated with a set of sensations in my mouth, nose, and belly. It is also correlated with the fact that I continue to live. Nevertheless, the pleasure of eating the apple is not identical to that set of sensations or that fact. I desire to eat the apple, but I could not accurately substitute a description of the

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physical aspects of the event under discussion in a description of what I desire. To reduce my desire for the apple to a set of physical facts, to a desire to satisfy my hunger or to live is to change the meaning of my desire. Saying “I want to eat that apple” is different from saying “I wish to have a sensation of apple-taste in my mouth, the texture of apple on my tongue, the fragrance of apple in my nose, and a feeling of fullness in my stomach.” Neither is it the same as saying, “I want to continue to live by eating this.” When speaking of intentional behaviors, one cannot necessarily substitute expressions that identify the same object of desire and retain the truth-value of the original claim. Consider: the phrases “that apple” and “the piece of fruit that I bought for my daughter’s lunch.” These may describe the same thing. Nevertheless, they don’t mean the same. “I want to eat that apple” could be true at the same time that “I want to eat the piece of fruit that I bought for my daughter’s lunch” is false. Sentences using the two descriptions do not always mean the same. Similarly, it would be possible for a person, perhaps someone at the end of his life to say, without contradiction, “I want to eat that apple” and “I do not want to continue to live.” Thus Levinas’s claim that, in ordinary circumstances, I do not desire to eat so that I will continue to live (even if I wish to eat and to continue to live). Of course, one can accurately and objectively redescribe the event of eating the apple with another list of events. For example, one can accurately describe the biological consequences of eating the apple in terms of ends or goals, such as continued life.14 However, making such a redescription changes the identity of the object of my desire; it describes something other than my initial intention. A desire to eat the apple is different from a desire to fill my belly or a desire to continue to live, even if each describes the same set of events accurately. No one will deny that eating contributes to the continuation of my life.15 Nevertheless, thankfully, only in unusual circumstances would I eat an apple in order to live. Levinas says: “The care for existing, . . . is absent from intention. In desiring I am not concerned with being but am absorbed with the desirable, . . .” (1978, 37). I cannot reduce the

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objects of my desires to tools for other projects: “Not everything that is given in the world is a tool. Food is supplies for logistics officers; houses and shelters are a ‘base.’ For a soldier [however] his bread, jacket and bed are not ‘material;’ they do not exist ‘for . . .,’ but are ends” (43). The second point about desire follows from the first: when we try to understand my desire for the apple, we have no reason to suppose that another thought-like (in other words, intentional) event stands “behind” that desire (itself intentional). And it does not matter whether we make the thought-like event temporally or logically anterior: “No ulterior references indicating a relationship of the desirable with the adventure of existence, with bare existence, take form behind the desirable qua desirable. . . . Desire has no further intentions behind it, which would be like thoughts; it is a good will; all the rest belongs to the level of biology” (1978, 37). Of course, the fact that I find nothing behind my desire but biology does not imply that my desire is reducible to biology. I must eat if I am to live, so one cause of my desire to eat the apple is biological. However, that is not to say that I eat the apple in order to live; my desires are not reducible to their causes (see Moore 1983, 35). One might conclude that I eat to live from the fact that I must eat if I am to live or from the fact that one of my body’s survival mechanisms is a biological event called “hunger.” But to do so would be merely to reverse the logical mistake made by those who assume that the unconscious is structured like consciousness. In the end, to make that conclusion is to deny that any psychological behavior is intentional. It denies this by reducing all intentions to biological causes and ends, confusing causation, end, and intention and, by that, deleting consciousness from the world.16 If we do not make the reductionist mistake, we can still give accurate, scientific descriptions of desires, such as my desire to eat an apple. Our first step is to do so in terms of their intentionality, which is very much a matter of discussing the orientation of these acts to pleasure.17 A variety of studies of the relation of the subject to the desired object of pleasure are possible, and psychology could legitimately and profitably conduct such studies, generalizing from them to groups of

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individuals and perhaps to human beings as a whole. Yet such studies would be incomplete, for — as studies of intentional behavior — they do not yet study the nonintentional, in other words, unconscious, aspects of the behavior. A fully developed psychology requires that we study the unconscious and consciousness. One good way to characterize the unconscious without immediately imputing the structure of consciousness to it is to speak of what is implicate in consciousness. An advantage of speaking of the implicate is that one can speak of the unconscious without suggesting that it is an entity “added on” to consciousness (which is itself an entity), or that consciousness is an entity that grows out of another entity, the unconscious. Such talk, whether Freudian, cognitive, or otherwise implies the existence of a variety of entities, some of which produce or oppose or condition the other(s). I believe that this attempt to deal with human psychology in terms of a variety of entities causes many of the problems that psychological theories have describing the “relations” between those supposed entities, in this case between the unconscious and consciousness. To speak of relations between entities is to assume that one must explain how these entities, originally separated, have come together, or how one has produced another that is now separate, or how both result from some prior, third entity. Psychologies run into problems when they try to give such explanations. In contrast, implication requires no such assumptions (partly because it does not assume that it deals with entities) and, so, no such explanations. As an analogy (but only an analogy), consider logical implication. The logical proposition “if p, then q” implies the logical proposition “if not q, then not p” and, in principle, an infinite number of other propositions.18 One can say that these propositions are implicate in “if p, then q.” Obviously, though a wide a variety of logical propositions are implicate in “if p, then q,” not everything is. For example, the proposition “p and not q” is not.19 Formal logic is a method for evaluating what propositions are implicate in other propositions or sets of propositions and which are not. When I do formal logic, I study logical implication (the implicate relations between various propositions).

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Since there is a method for obtaining logical knowledge, I study logic scientifically. Nevertheless, I do not assume that anything like entities called “if p, then q” exist. I discuss the relations between the two propositions without assuming that they are entities. I do not even suppose that their constituent parts refer to entities. In fact, that assumption is not only unnecessary, it is absurd. By analogy, I can scientifically, in other words formally, study what is implicate in my desire for an apple without assuming that the things I discuss are themselves entities. The supposition is not usually necessary, not even as a working hypothesis, and sometimes it may be absurd. Of course, unlike the study of logic, a study of desire will not be only formal, for in studying it, we study also entities — embodied persons, objects of desire, etc. — and, as persons, humans are necessarily embedded in contexts of significance (“worlds” in Heidegger’s terms) without which we can make no sense of human behavior and which are not reducible to formal properties. Nevertheless, we need not assume that everything implicate in the study of an entity or of relations between entities is itself an entity.

O BLIGATION AND R EASON Step five of my initial sketch of Levinas’s thinking shows that in his later work (Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being) he argues that we cannot understand human existence without doing so based on fundamental relation to others, which he calls ethics. Giving psychology such a basis would involve studying the ways in which the subject is obligated to others and the ways in which those obligations have worked themselves out in rational, general structures, structures of individual behavior as well as social structures. Such a basis would be as true for the unconscious as it is for consciousness. In fact, I think that Levinas’s work requires us to argue that obligation is the fundamental structure of both the unconscious and consciousness. Understanding what Levinas means by obligation is, however, important. Some contemporary discussions of Levinas go awry by misunderstanding that term.

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It is tempting to reduce Levinas’s work either to a philosophy that makes our consciousness of ethical and moral obligations primary or to a philosophy of feeling, a feeling for moral and ethical obligations. In other words, some take Levinas to propose a philosophy of moral sentiment. That Levinas uses words like obligation to refer to the relation to what is other than the subject, that he speaks of the other’s hunger and need, that he places ethics prior to ontology, such things as these may lead us to think that he is speaking of our feelings of obligation to others, their feelings of need, and our consciousness of those feelings. An explanation of human psychology with such a basis is easily controverted. That is, however, not a problem because, in spite of what one sometimes hears from those who talk about Levinas, such a view is not Levinas’s. For example, he says that the altruism he is describing “is not a tendency, is not a natural benevolence, as in the moral philosophies of feeling” (1998d, 197). We can use the word feeling to describe our experience of obligation. As we will see, there are reasons to do so. But we must be careful, for most interpretations of feeling give it an intentional structure and Levinas unquestionably wants to avoid doing that. Levinas is quite clear that our relation to the other is not fundamentally a matter of intentionality and so not a matter of consciousness, whether conceptual or emotional. In the introduction to Totality and Infinity, he says, “the essential of ethics is in its transcendent intention” (1969, 29). Such a remark may seem to justify the common understanding of Levinas. However, the modifying word, transcendent, shows that he is not speaking of intentionality in the usual sense. He adds, “not every transcendent intention has the noesisnoema structure” (29). For simplicity’s sake, we can understand the noesis-noema structure to be a relation of subject and object, an “intention” in the usual, philosophical sense of the word. Thus, it is odd to call something without the noesis-noema structure an intention at all. It appears that Levinas speaks of an intention without the noesis-noema structure to indicate the possibility of a relation that is not an intentional relation in the usual sense. The point is that our relation to another person is not a relation between a subject and an

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object of any sort; it is not a way in which we are directed at something or direct ourselves toward something. Obligation is a relation, but not one that begins with us; it is not intentional. For Levinas, the ethical relation is not to be understood as something that I do. It is not, for example, a matter of generosity. Instead, the other breaks in on and, thereby, breaks up my otherwise solitary intentions, including any intention to do good. “The struggle [namely the ethical struggle] remains human, and passivity [a subject’s ‘exposure’ to the other] does not simulate essence through a recapture of the self by the ego, in a will for sacrifice or generosity. The exposure to another is disinterestedness [which means, for Levinas, ‘disengaged from all participation,’ i.e., no longer ‘in and among things’ (1969, 109)], proximity, obsession by the neighbor, an obsession despite oneself, that is, a pain. . . . The subjectivity of the subject is precisely this non-recapture, an increasing of the debt beyond the Sollen [the ‘should’]” (1998d, 55). When I intend another person, that person overflows my intention, marking that intention inadequate and, by that, disrupting it as an intention.20 The experience of this disruption is also the experience of a demand that, per impossible, I make my intentions adequate to the phenomenon that overflows them — that I explain myself, that I give reasons. According to Levinas, the disruption of my intention by the other (indistinguishable from the insatiable demand of the other, both of which, in the terms of this essay, are unconscious matters) is the origin of language and reason. He says, “Every recourse to words presupposes the comprehension of the primary signification, but this comprehension, before being interpreted as a ‘consciousness of,’ is society and obligation. Signification is the Infinite [i.e., the other that overflows my finite intention], but infinity does not present itself to a transcendental thought, nor even to meaningful activity, but presents itself in the Other” (1969, 206–07). The experience of the demand of the other is not, first, a consciousness of, a mental or emotional comprehension in any usual sense of the word. Instead, it is the experience of the social. The other obliges me in the same way that it demands reason. In fact, it is perhaps not too much to say that, for Levinas,

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obligation and reason mean the same. They are two sides of the same phenomenon: obligation is what the other creates in me by making me feel (where feel means “experience,” “understand, but not necessarily comprehend”) the inadequacy of my intention; reason is that with which I respond, that with which I cannot stop responding. The distinction between understanding and comprehension may seem illicit. The point is that one can neither give an adequate account of what overflows one’s intention nor that it does. There can be no concept of what exceeds one’s concepts. However, it does not follow that one does not know, in some sense, that something overflows one’s intention. Because it is a knowledge that something exceeds the conceptual, in principle such understanding can have no specific conceptual content. It is in this sense that the word feeling can be used to describe the event, but this kind of feeling is not a matter of emotion or consciousness. (One must remember that Levinas identifies it with social existence.) We can use the word feeling to describe this understanding because of the connection of the word to sensation, because feeling, as something that happens to one is, precisely, not a consequence of an intention — which must be the origin of any concept. Instead, feeling, in this sense, is the disruption of intention and, so, strictly speaking, inconceivable: I can know that something exceeds and interrupts my intention without being able to specify what does. The identification of reason and obligation may also strike some as a mistaken reading of Levinas: reason is one of many ways in which one can respond to the excessive character of one’s relation to the other. What we usually conceive as ethics, namely a concern for justice and rules for behavior — what Levinas calls “objective morality” (1969, 245) — stems from this apologetic function and the fact that there is more than one other who interrupts my existence. The multiplicity of others requires that I adjudicate my responses to them. It requires, for example, law and objective morality. The narrower, more formal understanding of reason takes it to be a similar response to the multiplicity of demands.

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I think, however, that a stronger reading of Levinas is more accurate, one that broadens the understanding of reason: since the basic understanding of the “I” is to be found in apology (the explanation and justification of one’s happiness before the other who interrupts that solitary happiness by demanding an explanation), one can understand all forms of response to the other as forms of reason, forms of explanation and justification. Thus, reason and obligation are the same.21 I believe that this strong identification of reason and obligation is true to Levinas, but even if it is not, for Levinas, reason is the consequence of the original ethical relation, in other words, of obligation. Obligation is the felt understanding of the essential inadequacy of our intention when we take another person as the object of our understanding (where, to repeat, what is felt is something nonconceptually understood rather than an emotion; it may or may not have an emotional correlate). It is tempting to read Levinas and make a standard philosophical move as a way of understanding him. One might say that the proper response to original obligation is not to take the other as an object of an intention. One might say, “Remember that the other person is no object.” But that recommendation fails. For, it finds the solution to the problem of the other in the subject, specifically in the subject’s memory and behavior. Thus, it brings the other back into the intentional horizon of the subject (even if as the nonclosure of that horizon).22 That the other is not a simple object is unquestionable, but that truism is not Levinas’s point. Levinas’s work is not an ethics in the usual sense; it does not itself recommend or discourage particular ways of behaving. If we are to be related to the other consciously — which is necessary for human beings — then, as subjects, we will necessarily intend others as objects; we will necessarily relate ourselves to the other as an object of an intention. That is part and parcel of what it means to be related to another, so it does no good to recommend against taking the other as an object; such a recommendation is, implicitly, a recommendation that we have no relation to the other at all.

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Instead of making the almost folk-wisdom point that the other person is not a mere object, Levinas is accounting for that point. Our experience of a person is the experience of an “object” that does two things: First, a person overflows any possible understanding we might have of it as an object and, so, is a disruption of our understanding rather than one of understanding’s objects. Second, the other demands that we continue to accommodate ourselves to it, that we continue, unsuccessfully, to intend it, that we continue “to give reasons.”23

C ONCLUSION Levinas’s understanding of obligation and reason opens interesting possibilities for psychology. For example, it suggests that there is a new way to consider the social dimension of human psychology — as part of the unconscious, in other words, as implicate in psychological behavior, rather than as an entity or state of affairs either prior to or consequent on individual conscious behavior. Note again Levinas’s identification of society and obligation in the last citation from Totality and Infinity. Given his understanding of these terms, fundamental society cannot be an object of an individual’s thought. Instead, it is the ground for the possibility of thought — that which calls thought forth. Fundamental society is implicate in thought as ground and, therefore, part of the unconscious. In addition, unlike other “humanistic” approaches to psychology (using the word humanistic broadly and with considerable hesitancy, given that humanism reinscribes everything in the horizon of the subject), understanding the unconscious as the implicate leaves room for physiological questions about psychology. Because persons have/ are bodies, bodies are implicate in all human behavior, even if human behavior is not reducible to human physiology. As implicate, physiological questions need not be understood reductionistically, and they need not contradict other, nonphysiological discussions of psychology. Levinas’s work also suggests that we may want to reconsider some of Freud’s claims and theses and the work of his more recent

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interpreters and revisers, such as Jacques Lacan. Revisiting the work of such thinkers in terms of the unconscious/implicate rather than as discussions of the characteristics of certain peculiar and unseen entities may cause us to see their work differently and, perhaps, helpfully. For example, understanding the Lacanian discussion of symbolic orders as a discussion of “society and obligation” (Levinas 1969, 206– 07), may offer insights into psychology from sources that, otherwise, often seem unintelligible.24 Finally, understanding the unconscious as implicate allows us to consider other phenomena as part of human psychology, phenomena such as sex, color, nationality, one’s name and culture, one’s history, phenomena that cannot be either reduced to physiology or separated from it. The other’s demand, her “hunger,” is not separable from such things as her color and her sex. As Rudi Visker says, “Colour, instead of simply being a visible, is at the same time an invisible, but not in the sense of Levinas but in that of Merleau-Ponty — the invisible for Merleau-Ponty being that of the other which I cannot see and he cannot see either” (1995, 33). On Visker’s view, in my terms, color is a manifestation of the unconscious. Though such things as color, age, and sex are part of any minimal account of what it means to be human (Haar 1993), they are notoriously difficult to deal with when made part of the field of consciousness as intentional entities. Exactly how one is to consider physiology, sex and sexuality, color, nationality, the name, history and culture, the social — these things remain questions, questions for further discussion, questions for research. However, by giving us a way of rethinking them as unconscious and the unconscious as the implicate, Levinas has opened the possibility for a new, genuinely scientific understanding of psychology and a new rapprochement between areas of psychology that, hitherto, we have often assumed to be mutually exclusive.

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SIX

Simplicity, Humility, Patience George Kunz A NOMALIES IN P SYCHOLOGY Twenty years ago I searched the psychological literature for studies on “humility,” without much luck. Humility was not even listed in the Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms (Kinkade 1977). At the same time, I listened carefully and found humility often spoken about by ordinary people as an endearing and enduring psychological trait, for example, when a big name college coach said on TV of his big name star, “He’s a very humble guy.” I noted in a talk I gave back then, “We see humility in others; we speak kindly of them as humble; but psychologists may not be able to fit it into their theoretical and especially their empirical structures.” More recently, in the 1994 edition of psychology’s Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms (Walker) I found no reference to “simplicity,” “humility,” nor “patience.” But I did find a few abstracts in PsycLit. “Simplicity” described perceptual organization but not a psychological style. “Humility” was recommended for overcompensators. “Patience” was not defined, but encouraged when working with hyperactive children, etc. These three words, “simplicity,” “humility,” and “patience” appear frequently in religious and other inspirational works. Psychologists, however, seem to have neglected a vocabulary useful in describing significant human experiences. In the rapidly expanding self-help/self-esteem genre, which emphasizes the centering of the self in the heart of the self, simplicity, humility, and patience are not valued. Perhaps they are seen as qualities of codependency, and therefore pathological. Greenberg (1994) carefully conducted a hermeneutic analysis of both the theory and 118

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popularity of the self-help/self- esteem/recovery from codependency literature and found a self-perpetuating style of independence, isolation, loneliness, nihilism, and need for reassurance over isolation. This modern turn to the independent self, resisting any “codependency,” is indicative of the “cancerous individualism” so thoroughly described by Bellah et al. (1985). The disinterest of psychologists in simplicity, humility, and patience comes partly from this cultural mindscape where these notions are understood as either outmoded, socially constructed religious/spiritual obsessions and compulsions, and therefore psychologically unhealthy, or as sheer hypocrisy. Perhaps psychology has contributed to our contemporary cynicism, a question to which I will return later. This article is not, however, a social critique of modern “me-ism” evolving into postmodern nihilism. Rather, it points out a gap in the paradigm of contemporary psychology that makes it unable to accommodate simplicity, humility, and patience as concern for others even though they are readily recognized in the course of common experience. Some psychologists explicitly describe the driving paradigm in our science as “egoism:” the self centered in the self, satisfying the self. “The dominant ethos in the social sciences, including psychology, denies the existence of altruism and embraces the assumption of universal egoism. . . . The hedonistic view of human nature has been the fundamental principle underlying approaches as disparate as Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory (e.g., the pleasure principle) and B. F. Skinner’s behavioristic perspective (e.g., the law of effect).” (Schroeder et al. 1995, 19, 83). In their book, The Psychology of Helping and Altruism, Schroeder et al. cite the many studies on altruism by Daniel Batson and his associates. However, they also note that after a decade of research there is no conclusive proof that behavior is motivated by altruism. I suggest that psychologists cannot find altruism because they do not know how to look for it. Indeed, the compilation by Schroeder, et al. of the research on prosocial behavior, helping, and altruism includes nothing on simplicity, humility, and patience. These three qualities of altruism are obvious to layfolks but hidden from psychologists.

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My intent is not only to claim that these decentered styles of the self are anomalies within contemporary psychology, but explicitly to argue that the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas offers a description of the human that both challenges psychology’s paradigm, and commands us to design a new paradigm that can accommodate these anomalies. His radical altruism of ethical responsibility describes the self called out of its egocentrism by the needs of the Other and finding its most authentic existence in serving the Other. This could provide a fundamental principle to underlie psychological theory and practice: the ego by nature is ego-centered, but the self is most human when it transcends its nature by obeying the call to respond, with disinterested self-interest, to the needs of others. Toward this end, I will first give a brief description of simplicity, humility, and patience, inspired by Levinas, then a few of his fundamental distinctions, argue for a new psychological paradigm, and finally describe more fully the qualities of simplicity, humility, and patience. Here I define “simplicity” as the disposition of consciousness to know by being responsibly opened by the Other to be taught about reality. Simplicity is being uncomplicated, undeceitful, transparent, open. With its consciousness opened by the needs and inherent dignity of others, the self acknowledges that, because of their very existence and their absolute otherness, others who confront the self have inherent rights over it, and are not to be judged by stereotypical categories; and because of these insights, the self should not lie or try to persuade others with self-serving justifications. In my self-reflection, simplicity is a kind of skepticism of my own tendency toward narrow egocentrism; and this skepticism comes from the Other’s call to me to get out of my narrowness. My selfishness is called into question by the needs and worth of others. Initiated from outside, from the Other, and inspired in me, simplicity comes from being distracted away from my self by the compelling goodness and otherness of others. It is the opposite of my tendency toward arrogant self-righteousness, and selfconcealment in foolish naiveté. Simplicity is the fundamental ground for learning: commanded to accept that I do not know when I too readily think I do, I attend to others from whom I learn, and I am

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grateful to those who awaken my consciousness, so that I may come to know reality. Humility (derived from the Latin humus, meaning ground or earth) is modestly doing lowly labor. Here I define humility as the disposition of one to act responsibly for the sake of the Other. Called by the needs of others, the self responds by doing any labor in the service of those needs, postponing personal success and especially trying never to use others for self-advantage. In my self-reflection, humility is the self-substitution of obedience inspired in me by others and a willingness to labor to fill their needs because they have a priority over me. It is the opposite of my tendency toward both control by manipulation and the cowardice of riskless avoidance. Humility is the fundamental behavioral ground for accomplishment; shaken from my tendency to selfishness, I use my abilities and energies without self-interest. I am grateful to those who can use my work and thereby change it from capricious and random behavior to meaningful labor, because only then may I get something worthwhile done. Patience (derived from the Latin patiens meaning suffering) is uncomplaining endurance of distress. Patience is the disposition to suffer as responsible sacrifice. Accepting without choice or complaint, the self suffers the freedom of others, feels compassion for their pain, and especially tries to never hurt others because of selfishness. Patience is self-sacrifice inspired in me by others to suffer for their sake. Patience comes from undergoing unchosen and inescapable distress while doing what is needed to alleviate the suffering of others. It is the opposite of the tendency toward both addictive attention to self-indulgence and psychic numbing. Robert Lifton described this psychic numbing as the inability to feel and to leave gaps between knowledge and feeling when faced with distressful suffering (1976, 78). Patient suffering for others gives meaning to my otherwise meaningless suffering. While it is not difficult for lay people to make the distinction between being simple and being simplistic and foolish, between being humble and falsely deprecating oneself to look magnanimous, between being patient and allowing oneself to be abused out of cowardice or

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self advantage, the paradigm of professional psychology that centers the self in the center of the self can neither theoretically make these distinctions, nor construct methods to collect data concerning them. Psychology as a natural science (Giorgi 1970) can not construct precise operational definitions of simple, humble, and patient behaviors. Psychology as a human science, phenomenology, would have trouble collecting qualitative descriptions from the subjects about their own simplicity, humility and patience. The self-denying nature of these qualities make them difficult and perhaps impossible to disclose unambiguously in or through self-conscious reflection. Although we find some consistency within individuals and across situations, perhaps simplicity, humility, and patience are not easily described because they are not traits of the personality as traits are generally understood: “characteristic patterns of behavior or conscious motives, assessable by self-report inventories and peer reports” (Myers 1996, 387). They are neither habits of activity measurable by behaviorists, nor styles of intentional activity describable by phenomenologists. Levinas’s philosophy shows them to be anomalies to psychology because they are styles of “radical passivity.” Simplicity comes not from my self-initiated activity to develop a habit of openness, but from having my conscious understanding challenged by another. Humility comes not from my decision to help others out of my own generosity, but by being called out of myself by others to serve them. Patience comes not from my choosing pain, but from suffering in this service. Furthermore, although they are radically passive, simplicity, humility, and patience are not oppressive. They liberate the self from the burden of its own egocentrism. Levinas describes the passivity of the subject with the paradoxical statement, “Subjectivity . . . comes to pass as a passivity more passive than all passivity” (1998d, 14). The earth is passive in receiving the falling tree, the child in suffering the abuse of a parent, the poor hurt by the injustice of the rich. However, the passivity of human subjectivity that Levinas describes is more passive than these. This passivity comes in being assigned responsibility, defining me as the-one-forthe-other prior to my knowledge of the needs of the other, prior to

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any of my own projects, prior to any choice to be either generous or selfish in responding to those needs. Levinas makes this clear by stating, “The responsibility for the Other can not have begun in my commitment, in my decision. The unlimited responsibility in which I find myself comes from the hither side of my freedom” (1998d, 10). This fundamental characteristic of assigned ethical responsibility, as neither a property of human nature nor a choice of freedom, challenges psychology to understand these dispositions not as habits of behavior or traits of intentionality or personality styles. They are inspired in the self as foundations for modes of human existence. The passivity Levinas writes about is certainly not what we ordinarily think of as the personality trait of submissiveness found in the battered mate, the sycophant employee, the apathetic citizen. Because I am passively commanded to be responsible, I am called to actively resist the abuse of others, to demand justice for the oppressed, to hold others responsible to do no violence to others or to me. Thus, Levinas’s unrestrained descriptions of the primordial social relationship as ethical responsibility assigned to the self independent of choice by the self can provide a new paradigm for psychology. To illustrate this, I will briefly examine some central phenomenological distinctions made by Levinas, outline a paradigm for psychology that can value and accommodate the three dispositions of simplicity, humility, and patience, and finally offer a fuller description of each.

T HE E THICAL P HENOMENOLOGY OF L EVINAS Levinas makes distinctions between totality and infinity, between need and desire, and between freedom as “doing what I want” and freedom “invested in me” by the other to be responsible for the other’s needs. These and other distinctions found in his work can provide the basis for describing behavior and affect as either egoistic or altruistic experiences. The analysis of these distinctions which follows draws most heavily on Totality and Infinity (1969), and Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1998d).

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T OTALITY AND I NFINITY Levinas distinguishes infinity from totality, two opposing ideas that arise in relating to “other than the self.” Totality is the experience (judgment and action) that the other is “nothing more than . . .,” e.g., nothing more than my car, nothing more than my dog, nothing more than my friend. Infinity is the experience (revealed to me through direct perception) that the Other is “always more than . . .,” e.g., always more than my wife, always more than my neighbor, always more than a homeless man on the street. Totality is the way the totalizer confirms that he or she knows all about the other by superimposing some useful set of categories. Infinity, on the other hand, is a gift from the Other that reveals that person as always beyond totality, always exceeding any convenient category. Totality is conclusive and exclusive; it closes knowing in order to protect already secured knowledge and keeps out any otherness that may offer challenges. Infinity is a shock that shakes open consciousness by the infinite otherness shown by the face of the Other. The face, as the immediate presence of the other person, is unassumable; it cannot be incorporated into my previous knowledge. Yet the face is unavoidable, it is an appeal to be acknowledged, to be respected, to be honored as inherently worthy by the very fact of being human. When I “totalize” the other person or thing, I am experiencing him as nothing more than a category for my clear understanding and efficient use. For example, “This thing is nothing more than a pencil for my writing;” or, “Amelia is nothing more than my student to be taught and graded.” The pencil does not resist this reduction to a useful thing by my totalizing. Amelia is not so easily thus reduced. I try to reduce her for my convenience, but, by this totalizing, I only reduce my own understanding. I cannot reduce Amelia. She is always more than my understanding. Material things may be objects for my comprehension, control, and consumption, but not Amelia, not Max, not anyone. When I “infinitize” the other person, I experience him or her as “always more than . . .” whatever category I might find useful for my purposes. The Amelia that faces me in class is always more than just

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my student. The face of the Other makes the fundamental, unvocalized statement that he or she is not a thing to be totalized by me. Indeed, I cannot even say that “I infinitize,” as if I were able to initiate the act of “infinitizing”. The idea of infinity is not the product of my constituting consciousness thinking this thought. The idea of infinity is thrust upon me by the radical otherness of the Other, by the face of the Other that resists and subverts my attempts at totalizing. Natural science has typically engaged the world by totalizing it. The job of natural science has been to organize events and qualities into categories, to reduce things to totalities, so as to facilitate knowledge and progress. Science seeks to describe the natural order of things. Psychology has long sought to imitate the more established natural sciences by trying in its turn to describe the natural order of human things. But psychology cannot succeed in this endeavor because the human psyche resists totalization. The psyche of the Other shocks the totalizing psychologist by its infinite otherness and breaks the convenient categories and labels we psychologists might devise. Although psychology has been aware that its tendency to be reductionistic is a problem, it has not had an adequate philosophy to challenge the positivism inherited from nineteenth century philosophy of science.

N EED AND D ESIRE Levinas makes the important distinction between need and desire. Wanting material things for myself is the experience of need. Desire, however, wants the good for the Other — not a good from the Other for the needs of the self, but goods for her or his needs. Needs are satiable. Needs come from a lack, and when the goods get consumed, the self is filled. Needs find things good for the self ’s satisfaction. Desire, on the other hand, is insatiable but not because desire is an unfulfillable need. Desire is unfulfillable because it deepens the self as the self more clearly knows the goodness of the Other. Desire finds other’s good in themselves, not reducible to a good for the self. However, from the behaviorism of Watson and Skinner to the humanism of Maslow and Rogers psychology has tended to think only in terms of needs. While in our own experience need and desire are

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distinguishable, psychology assumes that needs are the preeminent motivation of the psyche, and tries to explain this distinction by describing levels of needs. Levinas does not base this distinction between desire and need on naturalistic philosophy by claiming we have two basic natural drives. He is careful to show that to desire is to rise above nature. My nature tends to reduce the Other to a commodity for my needs. Desire for the good of the Other with no self-interest in using the Other to fill my needs is the call to go beyond nature, to get out of “the natural attitude,” as the phenomenologists would say. Because of my natural tendency to be self-centered, I can, and too frequently do, pervert my needs into insatiable drives (wanting things) that develop into addictions. I can likewise pervert my desire for the good of other persons, reducing them solely to a good for a need of the self. Thus, my selfcentered disposition is to reduce other persons as well as things to fill my needs. My other-centered disposition is to work for the needs of the self, but to want goodness for others. Desire is to then labor to fill their needs.

F REEDOM AS O RIGINATING IN S ELF AND F REEDOM AS I NVESTED BY O THERS Perhaps Levinas’s most important potential contribution to psychology is his articulation of the notion of “freedom.” He would say that a self-centered disposition defines my individuality, my uniqueness, in a particular and problematic way. This disposition finds expression in such declarations as: “I am the source and center of my freedom. I can be capricious if I want. I can choose to be nasty or nice. After all, it’s my freedom.” This disposition claims its own freedom to be its most precious possession; but often finds its precious freedom susceptible to obsessive arrogance, compulsive manipulation, and addictive decadence. An other-centered disposition to the call to be responsible defines my individuality, my uniqueness, differently: Here I am, the one who is called and ethically commanded to respond to the neediness of others. I am limited in the use of my effort and ability because my

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freedom is invested in me by others; I cannot shirk my responsibility. My freedom is not taken away when I am called to be responsible; rather my freedom is deepened and expanded. Psychology has defined the psyche as either determined by environment or free in choosing its needs. Levinas’s descriptions of the radical passivity and the responsibility of the investment of freedom provide an extraordinary challenge to psychology. He describes human passivity as a radical openness to the world, to the Other. Human existence is not opened from the inside by directing sense receptors, interpreting the data of perceptions, or nobly asserting its being-there, as the work of Heidegger and most of Western philosophy and psychology might suggest. At the level of knowing, consciousness is not, first of all, conscious reflective intention to act or feel, “consciousness of . . .” in the Husserlian sense. Consciousness is primarily conscience: finding my responsibility already assigned to me by being husband to my wife, father to my children, coworker, citizen, neighbor, human, and called to be humane. My consciousness is struck, broken open, commanded to open eyes and ears and use cognition to figure out how I can respond to the needs of the Other. Levinas says, “The subjective. . . . is a surplus of passivity which is no longer consciousness of . . ., identifying this [thing] as that [category], ascribing a meaning. The neighbor strikes me before striking me, as though I had heard before he spoke” (1998d, 88). Cognition is inspired from the outside, from the Other calling the subject to attend, in the sense of obey (ob- toward + audire to hear). Levinas says we are more vulnerable to the other person than when responding like a reflex to a stimulus: “Obedience precedes any hearing of the command” (1998d, 148). At the level of acting, behavior is not originally an act of intentionality emitted upon the environment, after intellectual consciousness has made prior interior interpretations about received information, and voluntary consciousness has made decisions about appropriate behavior. Rather it is a response of responsibility elicited by otherness and always unsure of itself. Action is always groping, searching in response to an unclear invitation or command. It is always finding some

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meaning, but finding that meaning asks for even more effort, always pursuing an elusive finality. When bodily movements are directed toward filling a need of the self, it is only a complicated reflex, a spasm or twitch; it is not behavior. Behavior is an originary groping, responding in obedience to the Other’s neediness, never sure whether I have heard her needs rightly, never sure whether my labor can fulfill his needs, never sure my action will not be more harmful than helpful. My behavior is in response to the otherness of the Other. The more I work to fulfill my responsibility, the more I find yet to be done. Levinas says, “. . . in the measure that responsibilities are taken on they multiply. . . . The debt increases in the measures that it is paid” (1998d, 12). At the level of feeling, affect is not originally the experiential side of hormonal secretions or behavioral gestures or sense receptors pleasurably stimulated, as reductionistic psychology too frequently understands it. Affect is the exposedness of the human. It is the feelings and wants laid open and ready to receive confrontation or support from outside, from the Other. Affect is originally suffering. “The subjective does not only undergo, it suffers” (1998d, 88). In Totality and Infinity (1969), when Levinas distinguished desire from need, he described the satisfaction of need, enjoyment, as the experience of pure independence from others. Enjoyment of satisfied needs, nourishment, “. . . delineates independence itself, the independence of enjoyment and its happiness, which is the original pattern of all independence” (110). It is not knowing but enjoyment that is “the very egoism of life” (1969, 112). One of Levinas’s greatest contributions to psychology is his description of the enjoyment of sensibility. In Otherwise than Being, Levinas extends his notions of passivity and responsibility. He argues that, although needs and the enjoyment of needs, the satisfaction of sensibility, have an independence and a priority over desire in the life of the ego, this independence, based on egoistic enjoyment, makes the self exposed to the command of the Other. Levinas defines “sensibility” as the exposedness to the outside, the raw nerves turned toward the world. But this sensibility, this exposure, this openness of the nerves, vulnerable to being stimulated to enjoy, or to being struck

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to suffer pain, is the very exposure to the command of the Other to serve its needs. “Enjoyment in its ability to be complacent in itself, exempt from dialectical tensions, is the condition of the for-the-other involved in sensibility, and in its vulnerability as an exposure to the Other” (1998d, 74). Desire for the Other takes priority over the self’s nourishment of its needs and its enjoyment because the need of the Other commands the self to give the objects of the needs of the self to the Other. “The immediacy of the sensible is the immediacy of enjoyment and its frustration. It is the gift painfully torn up, and in the tearing up, immediately spoiling this very enjoyment. It is not a gift of the heart, but of the bread from one’s mouth, of one’s own mouthful of bread” (74). The message of Levinas is that, although we are passive to the Other, we are not called to be inactive. We are not called to retreat into our bunkers of self-indulgence and self-protection to lick our wounds opened by the Other’s actions against our passivity. We are called to be responsibly free, to act in ways that serve others. Being a servant is not by nature being abused. Allowing others to abuse us is no service to them. Expressing pain due to their violence and injustice is service to others. Others invest freedom in us to be used for their good. We are called to be responsible. Our consciousness is not called to be irresponsibly evasive, our behavior to be irresponsibly submissive, our affect to be irresponsibly pathetic. This command to wakefulness, obedience, and compassion does not keep the self from fulfillment. The Other’s needs are the occasion for me to be most human. “The other’s physical needs are my spiritual needs” (Jewish proverb).

E THICS AS P ERCEPTUAL D ISTINGUISHED FROM E THICS D ERIVED FROM R EASON Psychology as a science has a legitimate claim to be disinterested in morality, to be amoral. In offering the philosophy of Levinas as a ground for psychology, it is important to clarify that he is not engaging in merely another brand of “moralizing.” He is a phenomenologist describing the human. Or rather, he is a “beyond-phenomenologist,” pointing to what is beyond the phenomena, to what is infinitely

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beyond our perception. He is descriptive, not prescriptive. He tells us what is pointed to by what we perceive: the radical otherness of the Other drawing the psyche out of its ego-centered isolation, and the Other receding beyond the psyche’s grasp. Most ethical theories claim good behavior is the result of right reason derived from primary moral principles either inscribed in us as a member of the species or prescribed by those in charge of our socialization. Levinas claims that the origin of ethics comes from the call of the face of the other, from her here-and-now presence. It is not my good will; it is the essential goodness of the other that commands my responsibility. This real person, presenting herself to me, revealing herself as face facing me, makes the unspoken demand, “Do not do violence to me. Serve my real needs.” These meanings in the face of the Other, this ethical negative command, “Do not violate,” and positive call, “Do serve,” are conditions of reason, rather than the results of reason, either my own or of some moral dictator. Having been given the call, now I must reason about how, where, when, I can respond. Ethics is primarily perceptual. The first principle is not an abstract principle; it is the face perceived. Alphonso Lingis, in the introduction to Otherwise Than Being writes, “Responsibility is a fact. . . . [It] is an imperative order. But . . . the locus where this imperative is articulated is the other who faces — the face of the Other” (1998d, xiii). The perception of the infinite dignity of others comes before any of my sophisticated judgments about who is deserving and who is not, before my calculating comparisons of competing calls. The experience of the face of the other provides the foundation for ethics, and, by extension, supports the rational conclusion that human persons have worth simply by being human. Such a conclusion preempts considerations of worth based on what they have accomplished, or what good they can provide for the needs of others. The face of the other speaks by its very presence as good and as always beyond my understanding: “Do not judge me! Do not manipulate me! Do not indulge yourself at my expense!” The ethics described by Levinas is not reducible to a set of moral

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principles competing with other such sets of principles prescribed by family, church, school, government, culture. He sets the stage for this difference in the opening line of Totality and Infinity, “Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality” (1969, 21). Citizens of our age are very sensitive to the rhetorical persuasions of moralists. The first principle of Levinas’s ethical philosophy is the Other. The dignity of the Other immediately perceived is not an abstract principle; it is a fact. The face of the Other directly reveals herself or himself to me as vulnerable and as worthiness. This revelation is the origin of ethics. The face is perceived, or better, is revealed to the perception of the self. From the face of the Other the self receives its proper freedom, the call to use its freedom for the good of the Other. The philosophical scandal is not that we cannot prove that our freedom is invested in us in the form of responsibility for others. The scandal is that we allow ourselves to be persuaded by psychologies, sociologies, economic and political theories, even some theologies, which describe human freedom as self-made and self-directed, as purely self-interested. We are called to obey others from beyond our nature, beyond our tendency to self-interest. Responsibility is not a law of nature; it is an ethical command. Psychology cannot be simply the study of the nature of human experience and behavior. It must be a moral science, but one founded on an ethics that recognizes the goodness of the Other and holds that the self is responsible to honor and serve that goodness. Levinas’s most challenging philosophical concept, the one perhaps most difficult to live, and therefore most difficult for psychology to describe, is the paradox that the Other is simultaneously infinitely close and infinitely far away. The Other is always nearby calling me to serve, and always beyond my ability to adequately serve. I am passively given responsibility to and for others, and confronted with the impossibility of fulfilling this responsibility because of the infinite otherness of the Other. Psychology might be well served by struggling with this paradox by trying to describe the experiences of the paradoxes of the weakness of power and of the power of weakness. On the one hand, our

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powerful intelligence, skill, and satisfaction can sabotage our knowing, acting, and feeling. On the other hand, our simplicity, humility, and patience can provide the ground for interpersonal happiness.

E GOLOGY AND P SUKHOLOGY “The psyche in the soul is the other in me. . . . The animation, the very pneuma of the psyche, alterity in identity, is the identity of a body exposed to the other, becoming ‘for the other,’ the possibility of giving” (Levinas 1998d, 69). The Homeric understanding of the soul or psyche was the self dependent on others and held responsible for sustaining and breathing life into others. Our Western notion of the psyche has evolved, or devolved, over the 3000 years since the time of Homer. Today society defines the ideal psyche as an independent self, cautiously peering out from its self-enclosed and self-reliant ego, seeking and grasping consumables, and watching other independent individuals. The psyche is understood as the identity of the self in itself responsible only for its self, and for others only for the sake of the self. Levinas reawakens us to the reality of the psyche as the self in others, always responsible by and for others, and always unable to adequately fulfill its responsibility. I have argued that Levinas’s radical distinctions between totality and infinity, need and desire, and self-freedom and invested freedom are legitimate grounds for psychology. With these distinctions, psychologists could further distinguish cognition, behavior, and affect based on self- interested self-service, on the one hand, and those same human events that serve the needs of others with disinterested interest and responsible responses on the other. Following Levinas’s careful phenomenological analysis, I suggest to my own students in the classroom two approaches for psychology, the approach of egology, and the approach of psukhology. I deliberately alter the spelling of the word to psukhology to bring their attention to the Homeric Greek word cuxh (psukhe) which, according to the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary,

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originally meant breath. The choice for spelling the word psukhology with the letters u (from the Greek u: upsilon) rather than y, and kh (from x: chi) rather than a ch (with a little Germanic influence) is intended to remind them that the word psukhe not only meant breath from our lungs, but also life, our soul or spirit breathed or “inspired” into us by others. The Greeks understood the dependence each of us has on others for our biological and especially our psychological, spiritual lives. None of them claimed, like we do, to be self-made men. Such a claim is egocentric and a distortion of reality. We owe most of who we are to those parents, relatives, teachers, peers, models who psychologically and sociologically have breathed and continue to breath into us the person we are. The fundamental characteristic of being human is not only to be in-spired by others, but also to be responsible to and for others. The philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, with its central insight of responsibility and substitution, where the Other is in the self, and the self is in the Other, inspires us to understand psychology more broadly than the narrow philosophical presupposition that only the self is in the self, and the self is only in the self. Levinas’s philosophy of responsibility for others, “breathed” into us, calls for a new paradigm for psychology, one that attends to the psyche as the psukhe as well as an ego. This distinction of the nature of being human inspires the distinction between egology and psukhology. I take egology to be that approach to psychology founded on the presupposition that the self is the center of the self. Egology uses methods that qualitatively and quantitatively describe the self ’s manipulation of its environment to satisfy its needs. Egology’s content is the descriptions of cognitive, behavioral, and affective styles of the self perceiving, thinking, learning, motivating, emoting, developing over its life, deviating from social norms, and returning by social control or therapy to the well socialized behavior of self-reliance — to individualism. A psukhology, on the other hand, would take seriously the Levinasian description of the self called out of its ego-centered style to be centered in the Other. His descriptions of the fundamental ontological

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characteristics of human existence as otherness (irreducible to any knowledge, use, and consumption by the self ), passivity (receiving the power of freedom to know, act, and feel), and responsibility (the self commanded to know, act, and feel) can provide a basis for this different approach, method, and content in psychology. Whatever effort I make to urge my students to conceive a psukhology is not intended to oust egology from psychology by means of a classical Kuhnian revolution. Psychology needs to study the styles of the psyche acting as if it were an independent ego. That is the nature of the psyche. However, since psychology has been almost exclusively an egology, disregarding attention to the call from others to rise above our nature, to transcend ourselves to be responsible for others, emphasis should be given to psukhology in the service of balance. In fact, since psukhology is founded on the phenomenological priority of responsibility over egoism so forcefully articulated by Levinas, psukhology should have priority over egology. Psukhology would be the study of how others inspire, animate, and breathe into the self its styles of consciousness, behavior, affectivity, freedom, responsibility, and individual and social identity, and how the self responds to this inspiration by using its consciousness, behavior, and affect responsibly.

S IMPLICITY , H UMILITY , P ATIENCE Using psychology’s traditional distinctions between acts of knowing (perception and cognition), behavior, and feeling (affect), I describe simplicity as the ground for knowing, humility as the ground for acting, and patience as the ground for feeling. Simplicity comes to the psyche with the revelation that the otherness of others puts them beyond the understanding of the self, that their rights as others puts them beyond judgments, that their inherent goodness as others is desirable. As a family member, a fellow worker, a citizen of a group, I may know much about them; I may judge them as helpful or hurtful. But independent of all this knowledge is the recognition that as humans they have dignity and rights beyond my

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understanding and influence. When I am pulled out of myself by the compelling otherness of others, when respect for others pushes self concern out of my consciousness, especially any self-motivated desire to categorize others and use them for my own purposes, or when I am moved to gratitude for others’ confronting my narrow understanding, liberating me from self-obsession, these are the experiential manifestations of simplicity. Simplicity gives me the gifts of self-skepticism and gratitude for the openness to reality uncontaminated by my egocentrism. Simplicity, not ego-initiated skill, is the horizon of passivity: the background disposition to allow the Other’s infinite otherness to question my prejudgments and to be newly opened to the experience of reality. The infinity of the Other is the ultimate horizon or background against which my consciousness is opened to know reality. My simplicity is this passive openness to the infinite otherness of others. My simplicity corresponds to the horizon or background of the Other’s call to be — to be open to his or her reality. The confrontation by others of my “comprehensions” and “certitudes” inspires selfquestioning for the sake of those others. Simplicity is accepting this inspiration to self-question as a gift from others. This self-questioning is a benefit to me: it lets me turn to reality, to more clearly know reality as it provides the conditions for the Other and myself. Personality traits are psychological tendencies potentially knowable by the self through reflection and by others through observation. When I act with frugality, for instance, I can reflect on my own intention to spend less money. This is a trait I can improve. With authentic simplicity, however, my attention is directed toward others; I am not attentive to my own psyche. Because simplicity is by definition radically passive, and solely experienced as attention to the Other, I cannot directly observe my own simplicity. In reflection, I can point toward my simplicity by recognizing my responses to the Other’s resistance to my self-centered knowledge. Self-questioning is responsible simplicity only when it is in response to the infinite otherness of others, to their infinite dignity. Any active effort on my part

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to develop the habit of questioning myself for the motive of selfimprovement is vulnerable to self-deceit and conceit. When my selfquestioning is self-initiated rather than a response to the infinite dignity of others, then any genuine simplicity is likely hiding behind simplistic claims of naivete and innocence. The horizon of simplicity is not a habitual intention of the self; it is elicited attention to the infinite dignity and needs of others. At the level of knowledge, simplicity is a style of “knowing” that transforms “knowing” from that which conceals to that which receives the revealed. The traditional understanding of knowing has centered knowing in the knower. But that kind of knowing predisposes us to allow “certainties” to become obstacles, preventing us from being open to what is able to show itself. Levinas’s philosophy of responsibility offers an epistemology for psukhology. Rather than defining epistemology in the active voice: “the study of how we know;” it defines it in the passive voice: “the study of consciousness opened by the command of others to perceive reality as revealed, and to respond responsibly.” The intention of epistemology is to study the ways we can know the truth of reality uncontaminated by self-interest. When I know any object independent of my self-interest by having my consciousness opened to it out of concern for others, I know that object “objectively.” This is, of course, a type of “objectivity” quite distinct from the traditional sense of the term. Only the object as pure gift is a pure object. The face of the Other opens my consciousness from the outside. Consciousness is not the self-regulated, self-reflected, self-referential intentionality defined within an egology. Simplicity is the horizon for clarity, allowing consciousness, free of self-interest, to receive what is given. Simplicity is disinterested interest in knowing truth. Humility comes from the command to me from the otherness of others to not violate their freedom, and their call to serve their needs with my freedom. Viewed as particular members of a family, as fellow workers, as citizens, and so on, they may not have needs as understood from within those defining roles. As human beings, however, they are needy because of their vulnerability to my violence, to the

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violence of others, to the tenuous conditions of the world. When, inspired by the command of others’ needs, I come to the awareness of my tendency to take advantage of those others, when this awareness challenges my behavior to turn from serving the self to serving others with labor, or when I am moved to gratitude for others’ challenging me, liberating me from my selfishness, these are the experiential manifestations of humility. I can catch only a glimpse of what might be called my style of humility as the gift of self-substitution and gratefulness for being challenged to responsibility rather than selfishness. Humility, not ego-initiated skill, is the ground or horizon of passivity. My humility as the horizon of my passivity, my openness to serve, correlates with the horizon of the infinite neediness of the Other to be served. My passivity is my being disposed to serve, to obediently respond with my available skills in disinterested labor, and to be grateful for being called. Responsibility is invested in me, independent of my choice. I do not actively choose to be or not be responsible. Certainly I have my liberty. I can choose to respond to the call of others or to not respond. I can choose to respond with help or hurt. But I am radically passive to the investment of freedom as responsibility from others and for others. In authentic humility my attention is directed toward the needs of others calling me to respond; I am not obsessed with my own adequacies or inadequacies. Because humility is radically passive, and experienced as a labor for the Other, I cannot observe directly my own humility. Upon reflection, I can point toward my humility by recognizing my responses to questions pertaining to my own skills. Self-initiated humility, self-modesty, is often cowardice or laziness. Self-initiated work for others, independent of the call of the needs of others, is susceptible to becoming meddling of the sort expected of a do-gooder, done to gain praise or for some other self-serving reason. Humble persons are not taken up with their own skills. The humble person does not impose him or herself, responding only when the needs of others’ call for help. At the level of action, humility is a style of behavior that transforms work into labor, the manipulation of things into action with things for

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the sake of others. When directed exclusively to the ego’s needs, behavior is essentially handling the elemental stuff of the world to shape it for consumption, store it, exchange it for money and other consumables, and finally consume it to transform the nutriments into the self. There are many ways to consume goods to transform them into the self. In this process the ego confiscates materials, consumables, and money otherwise able to be used by others. Self-directed work is moved by a present need or a plan to store for a later need. When directed toward providing for the needs of others, behavior is essentially labor: obedient service of others. Patience comes from suffering with compassion in the service of others’ suffering. There are three ingredients of patience: the inevitability of suffering the freedom of others; the absurdity of suffering for the sake of suffering alone; and the transformation of suffering from absurdity to meaningfulness when suffering alleviates the suffering of others. When I undergo suffering that makes no sense in itself, but find meaning in the effort to alleviate the meaningless suffering of others, and when I feel gratitude for the opportunity to assume some of the burden of their suffering, if only by suffering with them, these are the experiential manifestations of patience. I can catch only a glimpse of what might be called my own patience as the gift of self-sacrifice and gratefulness to assume otherwise unassumable suffering. Levinas tells us in his essay, “Useless Suffering”, that suffering is absurd, it is “unassumability” (1988, 156) itself, “It is precisely an evil” (157). He carefully articulates the limitations of the two arguments for the usefulness of suffering: to indicate harm, like cell damage, and to deter certain behavior. He says that only within the inter-human perspective, the ethical perspective, does suffering have meaning. Levinas continues, “. . . the suffering for the useless suffering of the other person, the just suffering in me for the unjustifiable suffering of the Other, opens upon suffering the ethical perspective of the inter-human” (159). The very foundation for ethics is the investing of responsibility in me by others, independent of my choice, and my accepting this responsibility for others. Those occasions in which I suffer for the good of others are those that most clearly invest in me my responsibility.

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Patience is not a self-initiated skill. It is the horizon of my passively being invested with responsibility: my disposition to find both evil in the suffering of others and good in being able to suffer to alleviate their suffering which is in itself absurd. The suffering of others inspires compassion and self-sacrifice for the sake of those others. Patience is accepting this inspiration to self-sacrifice as a gift from others. This sacrifice is a benefit to me: it gives meaning to fundamental meaninglessness. In authentic patience, my attention is directed to the suffering of others, not to my own suffering. Because patience is radically passive, and experienced as a suffering for others, I cannot directly observe my own patience. Upon reflection I can point toward my patience by recognizing my suffering as meaningful only as responsibility to others. Any active effort to develop self-initiated patience, suffering for the sake of suffering, finding meaning in suffering itself, is likely an effort to seduce others to feel sorry for and give to the self. Selfchosen suffering is vulnerable to masochism, deriving pleasure from pain. At the level of feeling, patience transforms absurdity into significance. Since my suffering is unchosen and inescapable, it signifies me as the one who suffers. I cannot designate myself as the one who suffers. I am designated to suffer by the suffering that comes in serving the needs of others. Finding no meaning but only absurdity in the suffering of others, and finding meaning in my own suffering only when I respond by working to alleviate the suffering of others, their suffering assigns me, designates me as responsible.

C ONCLUSIONS Cynicism is at an all-time high. Polls and surveys indicate increasing distrust of the government and of those who say they are acting in behalf of others. The results of a Harris Poll released in November of 1994 showed an increase from 43 percent in 1972 to 70 percent in 1994 in the belief that those with power try to take advantage of people. Postmodern society is marked with deep and widespread

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suspicion of malignant fraud and hypocrisy. Not only are people cynical about elected officials and government workers, they also increasingly suspect those in the legal, medical, and business professions. Academic and media analysts describe the unraveling of the fabric of trust. Although there is evidence enough of the rise in deception and chicanery to warrant our disillusionment and alienation, these have always existed. Diogenes, the great cynic of Athens, chided and ridiculed not only Alexander the Great and his cronies, but also the poets, philosophers, and lawyers of the fourth B.C. for their hypocrisy. There have always been reasons to be critical and plenty of critics to criticize. We would be hard pressed to convince historians that things are worse now than in the past. But new edges of cynicism cut deeper and deeper into postmodern psyches. During the modern age, the eighteenth, nineteenth, and especially the twentieth centuries, there have been great advances in science, technology, and marketing, advances that have promised to make us more happy, not less. Science gives us “enlightenment” with new knowledge about human and physical nature. Hardware and management technology give us “efficiency” to control our environment with complex machines and social institutions. Marketing gives us “enjoyment” through massive and speedy distribution of good things to consume and make modern life comfortable. Television and the information superhighway have put us in touch with all this new knowledge. Schools train us in the technological skills to give us power in our lives. The free market system opens up multiple choices in the possession and consumption of goods. These powerful advancements in “enlightenment,” “efficiency,” and “enjoyment” have, however, paradoxically made us vulnerable to disillusionment and cynicism. Serious work has gone into analyzing the reasons for this cynicism. Peter Sloterdijk argues that perhaps the cynicism of postmodern society comes from being too arrogant with “enlightened” knowledge. He defines cynicism as “enlightened false consciousness” (1987, 5), and says the major modern forms of false consciousness are ideologies (15). Ideologies are like intellectual techniques: explanations used to

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protect the vested interests of the “enlightened” and to reduce the explanations of others to falsity. Ideological convictions about other people’s motives foster cynicism about their “hypocrisy.” Our selfrighteous judgments about other’s motives supports a deep cynicism at the level of knowledge. Analogous to Sloterdijk’s analysis of ideology, “enlightened false consciousness,” Barrett’s (1979) work on the “illusion of technique,” inspired by Heidegger’s philosophy, and Roszak’s (1969, 1973) description of the “myth of objective consciousness” are classic articulations of an understanding of cynicism at the level of action. Out of a compulsion for efficiency, action is reduced to repetitious maneuvers devoid of imagination, creativity, and especially ethical concerns. Seduced by the efficiency of techniques, regardless of their ethical consequences, the postmodern manager, organizer, bureaucrat, or therapist gets caught up in cynical manipulation. Successful technique becomes its own reward. This routinized compulsive commitment to succeed, independent of concerns about the cost to others, becomes the cynicism of action. In a way analogous to these analyses of ideology and of technique, Wachtel’s (1989) descriptions of “the poverty of affluence,” Durning’s (1992) question “how much is enough?,” and the ecological movement’s concern with consumption help me understand cynicism at the level of feeling. Our marketing systems, especially ubiquitous and invasive advertising, persuade us to “feel good about ourselves.” To do this we must indulge our wants and distract ourselves from the needs of others. Love and compassion and commitment get sacrificed for the attainment of personal satisfaction. Self-indulgence at the expense of others is cynicism at the level of affectivity. The philosophy of Levinas offers psychology an opportunity to help develop antidotes to cynicism. Simplicity, the openness to know, grounded in desire for the good of others opens consciousness to know reality as it is given for them, and deepens us as we see them as mysterious and never fully known. This awesome mystery of others makes our cynicism more difficult. Humility, willingness to help, allows us to use our efficient skills in the service of providing for the

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needs of others. In the face of the vulnerability and neediness of others, our own cynical manipulation is more difficult. Patience, suffering for the sake of others, helps us find meaning in our suffering when supporting the freedom of others. Our cynical self-indulgence is more difficult in the face of the suffering of others. Levinas’s philosophy does not encourage naive optimism about the good intentions of others, about the usefulness of our labor, about the rewards of suffering for others. Simplicity does not guarantee true enlightenment. Humility does not guarantee success. Patience does not guarantee happiness. However, the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas can help psychology find new ways of observing and describing the human condition.

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On Being for the Other Freedom as Investiture Richard N. Williams No question takes us nearer the essence of being human than the question of agency. In effect, the question of agency is the question of the essence of our humanity. As such, at least when asked with sufficient earnestness and clarity, the agency question is a genuine watershed, dividing the discipline of psychology, as well as other disciplines, into scholarly camps with recognizable conceptual boundaries and discernible intellectual, political, and practical agendas. These camps, however, have been and continue to be disproportionately populated. Committed advocates of human agency are distinctly in the minority. The intellectual climate in psychology has not been favorable to human freedom, and free will advocates have found the going rather tough. William James, speaking in 1884, observed that arguments about the issue of freedom could not be carried out on equal grounds (1956). Determinism already had become the privileged position. That it continues to be the privileged position in the contemporary discipline hardly needs documenting. The net effect of this has been twofold. First, the question of human freedom rarely comes up in textbooks or theories in psychology, since it is assumed to be a decided issue. Second, both theoretical and methodological pursuits are firmly grounded in deterministic assumptions of the sort that allow no place for human 1 freedom except perhaps as “error variance.” This state of affairs partly reflects the fact that arguments against human freedom have historically tended to be more elaborate and 143

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detailed than defenses of freedom. This in turn reflects the fact that many deterministic arguments are borrowed from the natural sciences where they have been carefully worked out and where the lawfulness of the natural world has been meticulously documented. There is no comparable body of research and theorizing that proponents of agency 2 can borrow. Furthermore, defenders of human freedom in psychology have often fallen into the trap of letting the proponents of determinism set the agenda, so that proagency positions are often little more than antideterminism positions, rather than carefully designed arguments persuasive in their own right. Merely showing the limitations and looseness of deterministic positions does not take the next step, showing the intellectual and moral strength of a proagency position. Arguments against determinism are not necessarily compelling arguments for freedom. To many, human freedom seems to be so obvious as to need no defense and certainly no justification. Within the social sciences, however, and within the wider culture as it is infused with the same perspectives this, sadly, is not the case. I have argued elsewhere that there is no more important question for psychology than the question of agency (Williams 1992). The position we take on agency will inform our understanding of the meaning of all human action, as well as our view of morality, the possibility of genuine intimacy, and virtually every other human attribute. These arguments will not be recapitulated here. However, the conclusions to which the arguments lead will be assumed in the analysis that follows. Thus, it is taken for granted that if human beings are not agents, if human acts are not free acts, then they are simply necessary and, thus, not meaningful. Meaning demands possibility (Williams 1987), 3 or, to use a term from Emmanuel Levinas, “alterity.” By the same token, morality demands alterity. If all things, including human actions, simply (or complexly) are what they must necessarily be, then it is senseless to ask whether they are good or bad. It is true that human persons, with egos and the cognitive and emotive accoutrements that go along with egos, can sustain for a time individual judgments of the meaning or the morality of acts and things, but, as it has been argued at least since the time of Epicurus (in the third century

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B.C.), it is a foolish enterprise. To sustain such passion in the face of a determined universe is not only unrealistic, but ill advised, giving rise to impotent perturbation and preventing peace and happiness. Only agents possessed of freedom — of some sort — are capable of meaningful activity and moral responsibility. Only events which are acts performed by such beings have any but contingent and thus ephemeral meaning. In spite of or perhaps because of the importance of the question of agency, it has remained stubbornly resistant to resolution, not only in psychology but in the older philosophical traditions. Our intellectual tradition affords us a great many treatises on agency, but it affords no resolution of the conceptual difficulties surrounding the intellectual question of the nature of agency, at least not one that has brought unity to the discipline of psychology and thus involved all in a common intellectual project — that of a human science. This is, in large measure, due to the fact that two irreconcilable positions have distilled: that we are free or that we are not. As the positions have distilled on both sides, there appears to be no common ground on which discussion can take place. When this occurs, especially with an issue as important as human agency, it suggests the advisability of looking for alternative grounds on which to conduct our investigations. Because Levinas’s work offers such an alternative to the perspectives that have engendered both sides of the freedom debate, and because it appears to be a sufficiently radical alternative to diffuse the more vexing conceptual problems, I believe it can provide just the alternative grounds on which agency can be understood. Before turning attention to this alternative grounding for agency, however, two points must be addressed. The first is that two discourses about agency have evolved through our intellectual tradition, the discourse of volition and the discourse of responsibility. The second point is that positions on the question of human freedom can, with minimal distortion, be arrayed along a continuum ranging from complete determinism on one end to radical freedom on the other.

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T HE T WO D ISCOURSES ABOUT A GENCY Scholars who have argued for human agency have traditionally done so along two lines. First, it is argued that humans possess the ability to direct their own actions for their own purposes. This capacity can be referred to as volition. Philosophical discourse about volition and its role in our humanity is very old; it was presented in its developed state by Aristotle (1987). At one level the notion that humans are capable of volition seems to be an overwhelming truism. Anyone who has reached for a pencil, or stifled a yawn can attest to the reality of human volition. In the spirit of Thomas Reid (1969), we might wonder whether the existence of volition is a question about which serious minds can really debate. However, when the discourse turns to the issue of remote causes for actions, questions about the origin of intentions to act, and the limitations of reason, the question of volition becomes somewhat more complicated. Most often confidence in the human faculty of volition rests on confidence in the human faculty of reason. It is held that our capacity for reason and to be moved by reason is what sets us apart from more primitive species and gives us the power of volitional action. Choice is taken to be the sine qua non of volitional action, and thus freedom is conflated with free choice. I have argued elsewhere (Williams 1992) that free choice cannot be the foundation of agency because such choice always both requires and denies grounds from which choices arise. While our choices may reflect our capacity for volition, they cannot be the essence nor the foundation of the essential agency by virtue of which we are truly and fully human (Williams 1994a). Rather, I argue that agency consists of having the world truthfully, a notion I believe to be inherent in Levinas’s own position on the question. This position does not deny volition. I would argue that we certainly have much more genuine volition than deterministic, reductive positions such as behaviorist or biological accounts would ever grant. But agency is certainly more than this. What does seem unavoidable in this discussion is that any sort of agency, including volition has at least one minimal requirement — possibility. Volitional acts are certainly only possible where possibility

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is genuine (James 1956). If the universe is such that there are no possibilities in our actions — each and all are as they must be — then 4 no agency is possible. While possibility is not a sufficient condition for agency, it seems to be a necessary one. This issue will be taken up again in light of Levinas’s work. The second line of analysis followed in discourses on agency concerns the relationship between agency and moral responsibility. The argument is fairly simple. Determinism holds that events cannot be otherwise than they are. If they cannot be otherwise, it is senseless to 5 discuss how they should be. Thus, questions of good and bad, right and wrong are not meaningful questions in a world without agency. By the same token, people can be held responsible only for actions that could have been otherwise, acts which they freely chose to perform. If there is no agency, there is no moral responsibility. If there is no moral responsibility, there can be no moral principle more sophisticated than elementary evolutionary survival, and no morality more advanced than a crass utilitarian social contract.6 Thus, at stake in the question of agency is the possibility of morality itself. These two discourses about agency certainly intersect. In fact, the faculty for rational thought and reason is most often suggested as the basis of moral responsibility. That is, we are morally responsible to the extent that we can, through the exercise of intellectual powers, perceive a moral position and choose it or not. One implication of this, however, is that limitations on reason become ipso facto limitations on moral responsibility, and wherever rationality falters, channels through which morality is drained away from human action. I have argued elsewhere (Williams 1994a, 1994b) that agency cannot exist without moral content. If agency is defined as having the world truthfully, morality finds its place at the center of agency because the question of truth is a fundamentally a moral question (see Williams 1992).7 Thus, I argue that morality, at least the possibility of genuine and meaningful morality, is a minimal condition for the existence of agency. What remains open to question is whether reason, the capacity for deliberation, is the ultimate basis of moral concern and moral action, or whether there are sources of moral responsibility outside those a rational being

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might rationally discern and freely and deliberately take on. Levinas argues, persuasively, I think, that alterity understood as otherness, rather than as mere possibility, and not rational thought is the grounding for morality — and, thus, for agency as well.

T HE N ECESSITY — F REEDOM C ONTINUUM A historical study of the question of human agency reveals remarkable, although perhaps not surprising, continuity and cohesion across the major figures and the positions taken on the question. With a few notable exceptions, such as Spinoza, Leibniz, and Hume, there has been agreement among scholars about what human freedom must be, and how it functions in human life. Most scholars agree about the important parameters to be included in any explanation of agency and why they are important. Because of this continuity, it is possible to define a continuum of positions on the question of agency. However, for reasons I will articulate, it is a continuum where the anchoring points at the extremes are well defined, but it isn’t as clear just how positions along the middle of the continuum are to be understood. At one end of this continuum, we find complete mechanical and necessary determinism where no freedom is possible. This position is occupied by hard determinists of all sorts, ranging from the early Greek materialists through Spinoza to the biological reductionists and most behaviorists of today.8 Those who deny agency simply invoke deterministic principles to account for all human action, and hold agency and the meaning it supposedly lends to our actions to be illusory. The dark at the end of the tunnel encountered in this position is the end of meaning and the impossibility of genuine morality. At the other end of the continuum we find positions of a sort that Charles Taylor (1985, 29) defines as “radical choice theory.” These positions hold that human freedom must exist as choice, and that choice is in important respects unrestrained. The most radical form of this view that has found its way into the literature of psychology may be the work of Jean-Paul Sartre (1956). For Sartre, we are condemned to freedom by the fact that we have our being as “being for itself.”

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There is no escape from the necessity at all times to choose the meaning and even the morality of our lives. However, two spectres haunt this “pan-freedom” position from around its edges. First is the spectre of solipsism. The choices that constitute my freedom are entirely mine and are not ultimately affected by the Other, nor do they ultimately affect the Other. If the Other lacks power to affect my choices at the most profound ontological level and all that the choices entail, it is immediately uncertain just what basis there might be for substantive contact or relationship with another being at all. Certainly there is no basis for relationships that can run deep enough to relieve our most primitive existential distress. The second spectre derives its power to haunt from the fact that even my own choices and my own activities leave my freedom unaffected. As Merleau-Ponty (1962) argues, this position destroys choice as well as freedom because it deprives it of its moral content and relevance. I am neither more nor less free, nor more nor less secure, after making any particular choice. In simple terms, not only does the Other have no effect on me at a fundamental level, but I have no such effect on myself. Merleau-Ponty (1962) argues further that the continuum I have suggested here — that between freedom and determinism — is, indeed, empty in the middle. While Merleau-Ponty may ultimately be correct in this claim, it has been my experience that most psychologists and perhaps even most philosophers, when forced to take a position, try to locate themselves somewhere between these two extreme positions. I contend, with Merleau-Ponty, that there is no comprehensible middle ground if our human being is understood in terms of freedom (defined as the for-itself ) on one hand, and determinism (defined as the in-itself ) on the other. Thus the positing of a middle ground in which agency exists, although common in psychology, is an incoherent position because it seeks a common ground between two ontological realms that have no common ground. A more sophisticated approach would examine the adequacy of the in-itself versus the for-itself as fundamental ontological categories, and would prescribe a more penetrating analysis of the nature of cause and determinism, as well as agency.

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Nevertheless, most theories of agency attempt to resolve these substantive issues and slip around the question of agency by positing some sort of limited freedom based on some sort of limited rationality. These theorists, in fact, the majority who have written on the topic, hold, with radical choice theorists, that freedom must exist as choice. Our capacity for choice derives from our reason, but there are constraints on reason. Obviously, the natural world resists our choices, and the facticity of that world constrains our freedom of action.9 More important, however, is the question of whether our rational functions, including our resultant intentions and motives, are similarly constrained, and if so, what it might be that constrains us. My reading of the literature on human agency leads me to the conclusion that the nature of the relationship between reason and agency has not been adequately worked out. It is still very much in question whether agency can indeed derive purely from reason. There has been no shortage of classical (e.g., British empiricist) as well as contemporary (e.g., social constructionist) criticisms of reason, all aimed at clarifying its limitations.10 If agency is founded entirely or primarily on reason, these arguments necessarily compromise agency. Furthermore, since morality is essential to agency, it is also not clear how an adequate account of morality can be based primordially and securely on reason. One is lead to the conclusion that the capacity for reason, like volition, is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for human agency. Most often lost in discussions about the limitations on reason and their effects on agency is the question of whether there is, in fact, any coherent position that might be adequately described as “partial freedom.” That is, are there any defensible and cogent positions in the middle ranges of the continuum between complete determinism on the one end and radical choice on the other? If agency really is a rational function — choice — requiring a kind of powerful and undetermined rationality, and if such rationality is shown to be impossible, then agency as choice is fatally compromised. It disappears as a whole. If rationality is subject to influences based in biology, environmental events, and cultural happenstances, then human beings are incapable of making choices of the sort required to secure agency. While we can

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live with the concept of limited rationality, accepting that our perceptions and understandings of things may be wrong, we have some confidence, thanks to the work of many careful thinkers (such as Kant), that this doesn’t matter much in our efforts to live effectively and to know what is important for us to know. We can simply claim that “partial knowledge” is incomplete and can be modified, improved, or added upon. “Partial freedom” is not so easily made sense of, however. Obviously it is endemic to the definition of freedom that choices are not determined by inevitabilities. A very special kind of rationality is necessary for us in order to be free of present circumstances that might otherwise, lacking such rationality, be taken for exigencies. If that rationality is not possible, or if rationality itself is the product of such exigencies, then this kind of freedom is absurd. It must then, disappear altogether. Fallback positions leave it very unclear whether we might claim to be sometimes free, or whether we might claim to be free in some situations although in both cases it is difficult to explain how determinisms and limitations on reason might be occasionally suspended. The ultimate fallback position is to defend freedom as randomness or, in terms more palatable to scholars, caprice. Randomness or caprice in human action fails to maintain the meaning in those actions since meaning requires purpose and context. Indeed, it has long been recognized that a solution to the problem of human freedom in terms of indeterminism is no solution at all (see Williams 1992 and 1994a for a fuller discussion of this point). Given the formidable difficulties incumbent on all such positions it is not clear why so many, particularly in the social sciences, have been content to entertain them as alternatives with so little analysis.

T HE C ENTRAL P ROBLEMS WITH C ONTEMPORARY V IEW OF A GENCY It seems undeniable that many theorists have attempted to place themselves somewhere along a continuum of positions ranging from a scientifically reputable determinism to radical choice. What is more important for purposes of the present essay is that all of the positions

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that have been formulated in order to make even a pretense of a defense of agency are entirely egocentric. That is they take agency, like reason, to be something possessed by individuals, deriving from an inherent nature. Indeed, in these positions, agency is the defining manifestation of individuality itself. Agency is the hallmark of identity. Whatever sense of community such agents might achieve will be mediated by reason or some other private faculty such as sentiment, emotion, or compassion. All mainstream theories of agency posit that we are fundamentally individuals and that genuine community is an achievement made possible largely due to our rational faculties. Furthermore, morality itself, the foundation of agency, is similarly mediated or created by the powers of reason. Thus, it appears that the two spectres that haunt “radical choice theories,” solipsism and the loss of moral relevance, haunt “nonradical choice theories” as well. This is so because both radical and nonradical choice theories are thoroughgoingly individualistic and begin their analysis and understanding of agency from within the world of agents themselves as if the foundations of agency were there. The alternative perspective on agency presented here, following the lead of Levinas suggests that while genuine agency may very well entail individuality — as a necessary condition — it does not arise from individuality. The substantive problems with theories of agency as choice revolve around the central role of reason. Reason and agency are bound together so tightly, that if one fails the other fails as well. In some sense, this seems to be correct. We certainly would not want our freedom to constitute evidence that we are unreasonable and irrational creatures. However, as I have pointed out earlier, theories of freedom as choice fail as accounts of agency (Williams 1992, 1994a) because of the constraints necessarily influential in deliberative processes, and, in light of these constraints, the difficulty of defining what might be meant by “partially free.” Charles Taylor suggests to us another reason why reason is, perhaps, not the best or most adequate foundation for agency. “For to the extent that a choice is grounded in reasons, these are simply taken as valid and not themselves chosen. If our ‘values’ are to be thought of

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as chosen, then they must repose finally on a radical choice . . .” (1985, 29). In other words, one might ask: where is the agency in conforming our choices to the demands of reason? Is not reason, by its very nature, compelling? To the extent that it is, and to the extent that we do not choose nor create reason itself, a reasoned act seems not to be a free act at all. To the extent that we do create and choose reason and its hold upon us, we navigate closer to a position of radical choice with its inherent problems: solipsism and the loss of morality and meaning.

T HE C ONTRIBUTION OF L EVINAS We seem to have come to a genuine dilemma. It appears that in order to achieve and understand agency, we need to articulate an act which does not have its origins in reason (because thus it would loose its freedom), and yet maintains its meaningfulness and its fundamentally moral nature. This, added to all the other problems in accounting for agency articulated thus far, makes it difficult to see how human agency might be understood, much less, defended. However, an understanding that can circumvent these problems opens up for us in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. The tradition we have described thus far offers us a bad bargain. We can choose between two modes of engagement, two ways of understanding the world and our standing in it. We can opt for the “in itself,” the mode of being of the natural world and the determinism and loss of meaning and morality that will inevitably follow. Or, we can choose to understand ourselves and our freedom in terms of the “for itself,” grounded in our own consciousness, consigned to freedom as radical (or semi-radical) choice. If we attempt to seek a middle ground we either succumb to the limitations on reason arising from its inability to escape contingency, and end up in the “in itself ” after all, or we become not agents, but products of powerful and compelling reason, and, if we are mere products, meaning and morality elude us again. Levinas opens an alternative path, a mode of engagement that leads to neither the “in itself,” nor the “for itself.” That way is being “for the other.”

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Understanding of our being does not begin with our being. It does not begin with an understanding of the totality of the “in itself ” into which we fit. Nor does it begin with an understanding of our “foritself ” faculties, or sentiments. Rather, it begins with the absolute alterity of the other. It is the alterity of the other (the infinity of the absolutely other than I) that provides the grounds for my being, and it is the face of the Other (the other person as a particular instantiation of alterity) that provides the occasion for my coming to be an agent. Levinas (1998d) argues that there are things I do not create, nor do they disclose themselves in or through, or even to me. They do not exist for me. These are not part of the “in itself,” because the “in itself,” in some sense, waits for me, and draws out of me interpretation and meaning. The “in itself ” insofar as I apprehend it as the “in itself,” is really for me after all. At the same time, the otherness Levinas talks about is not from the “for itself.” This otherness, and the things it comprehends, are absolutely other than I. They resist all attempts to reduce them to my own mentation, products of my own faculties. This absolute alterity is instantiated in the face of the Other. The face of the Other is at once intensely particular and infinite. It is the face of the Other before yet (infinite) others, and it is infinitely resistant to my comprehension or capture. The presence of the face of the Other brings about an “upsurge in me of a responsibility prior to commitment, that is, a responsibility for the other” (Levinas 1998d, 103). This responsibility is not a product of reason guided by some moral principle such as reciprocity or a categorical imperative. Rather, it is the prior and inescapable ethical grounds from which I might perceive a need to formulate moral principles at all. Because of the other, the alterity, I am placed in a position I did not create nor choose, of being responsible — in two senses. I am able to respond because there is an Other to whom to respond, and thus response is both possible and sensible. Further, I am required to respond because the presence of the Other constitutes a relationship which I neither created nor chose and from which I cannot escape. Since the roots of alterity are not within me, it (the other) resists

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my every action. Like a boulder in a narrow path it requires some action: I might attempt to ignore it, I might attempt to go around it, or I might attempt to move it. These or similar responses are required so long as I and the boulder are in the same world, and each response will have consequences for me, for the boulder, and for the world. I might choose to engage in flights of fancy regarding the boulder, but my journey along the trail it blocks is nonetheless impeded; such fanciful ignoring is not freedom since any subsequent act will still inevitably reflect the determining influence of the boulder and, concomitantly, its resistance to my fancy. Without there being a boulder in my path there would be no occasion for a free act on my part since hiking along the trail can be quite mindless and quite determined by the trail itself. Thus, it is impossible to demonstrate freedom or, more importantly, to be free without opportunities occasioned by alterity. The free act only occurs as I am called by something other than myself — something utterly resistant to me. Proponents of radical choice might suggest that while the boulder is real enough, what it means is entirely up to me. However, so long as some overt embodied action on my part is occasioned by the boulder’s being and being in my path, its meaning will necessarily be reflected in my very embodied action in regards to it. The nature of meaning transcends mere consciousness so long as meaning resides in embodied persons located in a world of things and others reflecting alterity.11 Levinas would no doubt resist this simple metaphor wherein otherness is vested in an inanimate boulder. When otherness has a face (is a person), the predicament inspired within me is an ethical one. Here Levinas assumes that what is most human about us is to recog12 nize as distinctly human the humanity of the Other. My place in relationship to the other is described as “hypostasis,” literally, a standing under. Metaphysical priority, as well as moral priority, belong to the other. The other occupies the preeminent position. I am “bound in a knot that cannot be undone in a responsibility for others” (Levinas 1998d, 105). This responsibility is not freely chosen through an act of consciousness (or reason). Thus, it is not freedom that recognizes and assumes responsibility by an act of choice; rather, it is the other and

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her assignation of responsibility that invests me with freedom. Freedom is an investiture. Just how this investiture makes freedom possible is the next question to which we must turn. To understand freedom as investiture it is important to first understand what Levinas’s position must be regarding choice and volition. Levinas, even granting the uniqueness of his insights, must be fit into a larger essentially rationalist position. Even critics of the classical rationalism of Descartes and Kant do not seriously question whether human minds exist and whether they are capable of generating and weighing alternatives, making choices, and directing actions. The basis for the nuanced disagreements articulated by many in the recent continental philosophical tradition is not whether such “mental” abilities are real, but about how they are to be understood, and about the necessary (but not sufficient) grounds from which they arise. Thus, Levinas, like Thomas Reid (1969), must be seen as granting that human persons have volition and that they do in fact make very real and important choices. Indeed, for both Levinas and Reid, the question of volition is one that cannot generate serious debate, partly since such genuine debate would settle the question. However, it is consistent with Levinas’s philosophy to argue that volition and choice making, while necessarily entailed in freedom, are not the sufficient grounds of freedom. Freedom does not consist in volitional choices, although our humanity requires them. For Levinas, freedom as volitional choice of the usual sort is necessarily individualistic and self-centered. It is always an act of appropriation, of making the other part of the same. As such, it is an act of “totalizing” self-assertion. Freedom must be something more profound and, in some sense, something purer. While it (freedom) could not happen at all without the capabilities that constitute volition, it is fundamentally grounded in the occasion provided by the other as I am invested at once with responsibility and freedom. Levinas provides several metaphors to describe my responsibility for the other. He describes it as “an accusation preceding the fault,” “a debt without a loan,” “an expenditure overflowing one’s resources” (1998d, 112). All this is to point out that there is in the ethical relation occasioned by the presence of the other no quid pro quo, no qui bono,

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no concern for equity. The ethical obligation into which I am drawn by the presence of the other is not irrational, but neither is it by any means the product of rationality. It is prior to all that; it is the occasion for rationality to arise. In contrast to most approaches to freedom that suggest that responsibility arises out of freedom, Levinas argues that freedom arises from responsibility. “Responsibility for the other, this way of answering without a prior commitment, is human fraternity itself, and it is prior to freedom” (116). The “absolute accusation, prior to freedom, constitutes freedom . . .” (118). The response to be made in the face of this responsibility, a free act, Levinas terms “substitution.” It is a genuine being for the other. It entails suffering with and for the other. In this freedom, the “oneself,” the “I” is constituted. For Levinas, “the word I means here I am, answering for everything and for everyone” (1998d, 114). Our attention must now turn to how Levinas’s work allows us to respond to the problems surrounding the issue of agency that have been articulated in the earlier sections of this essay. The response, however, can be given only in an abbreviated fashion. Levinas argues that freedom must always be justified. Freedom that needs no justification is irrational and tyrannical — tyranny never accedes to the call to justify itself. However, Levinas also suggests that freedom cannot justify itself in the sense of being its own justification. This, indeed, would be tyranny. Levinas asks: “Does not the presence of the Other put in question the naive legitimacy of freedom?” (1969, 303). The justification of freedom is to be found in “Goodness” (1998d, 118), the ethical response to the other (i.e., substitution), or as Levinas puts it, “to encounter the Other without allergy, that is, in justice” (1969, 303). Thus, “Morality . . . presides over the work of truth . . .” and freedom (304). I argued earlier that freedom requires moral content, an ethical content, for its existence. In the work of Levinas we find the moral grounds out of which freedom can arise and maintain (as well as justify) itself. I also argued that freedom cannot be grounded in reason, because acts governed by the dictates of reason are, in an important sense, not free. Levinas argues compellingly that acts required by

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reason are not the essence of freedom. He grounds freedom not in irrationality, but in the “nether side” of reason. Reason is a response to the investiture of obligation and freedom (cf., Smith 1986). I also argued earlier that freedom, when construed either as volition or agency requires genuine possibility, that is, room to act in a world never closed nor finished. In the work of Levinas we discover that the alterity of the other is infinite. This infinity provides room for action. By its very alterity, the otherness of the Other evades capture, leaving us always more to understand and, more importantly, to do. Possibility inheres in alterity, but alterity is more than mere possibility. Moreover, the responsibility into which we are called by the Other is infinite; it can never be fulfilled. This is partly because the face of the other represents yet others, and in fact, an infinity of others, and thus, my responsibility and my possibility for ethical action is never exhausted. It is also the case that obligation is not exhausted temporally. There is no metric by which to determine whether it is complete. As long as I am, I must respond, “Here I am.” Thus, there is always space to operate, infinite possibility, not in a sense that ignores the givenness of the world and descends into radical subjectivity, but in the sense that there is always more to do. The region of freedom is in the region of excess — the region where obligation overflows any and all response. In the infinity of responsibility, we find genuine possibility, and room for genuine freedom. I suggested above that many proponents of freedom have argued that freedom is at the heart of identity, that identity depends upon freedom. Within the tradition, however, both identity and freedom are beset by conceptual problems. Levinas clarifies for us the relationship between freedom and identity. Freedom as well as identity arise because my responsibility is inescapably mine. While I am called to substitute for the Other, no one can substitute for me. As Levinas says, “This charge is a supreme dignity of the unique. I am I in the sole measure that I am responsible, a noninterchangeable I. I can substitute myself for everyone, but no one can substitute himself for me. Such is my inalienable identity [as] subject” (1985, 101). This position in which I find myself, standing in an ethical relationship to

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others in which only I can stand, constitutes my uniqueness, and since I am called from beyond reason and self to stand there, it is a place of freedom. The freedom with which I am invested arises in the passive taking on of the obligation. It is in this passivity, this willingness to suffer, that I can perform the free act. An act born of the myriad motivations presented by conscious deliberation is not an act of freedom, but rather of assertion done in response to just such motivations. Free acts are free of motivations of any sort commonly understood as motivations. Ultimate freedom is the freedom to passively give oneself for the other, absent any reward. When rewards accrue, they are mere side effects, unintended consequences, to be regarded with skepticism and caution, lest they appeal to me, and in so doing, strip me of my freedom. The ultimate act of freedom is the act of being willing, absent any enhancement of the ego. It is in being willing (not in an act of willing) that I am free. It is in acting in my freedom that I am an agent. This agency cannot be absorbed into an aggregate of persons nor can it be abrogated. I am invested by the Other with freedom. The act of freedom is the act of sacrifice which only I can perform.

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Diachrony, Tuché, and the Ethical Subject in Levinas and Lacan Suzanne Barnard Over the past several decades, philosophically oriented psychologists have witnessed a significant rise in the influence of poststructuralist critiques of psychological theory and practice. While these critiques have been diverse in emphasis and broad-ranging in focus, they have in common a rejection of the foundationalist and universalist assumptions of Enlightenment and liberal humanist models of subjectivity and social life, as well as the implications of such models for addressing questions of meaning, truth, morality, and ethics. That such critiques have had a significant impact on the discipline is evidenced by the proliferation of published work concerned with the values, assumptions about agency and determinism, moral codes, and ethical grounds implicit in dominant approaches to psychological theory and practice over the last ten to fifteen years (cf., Burman 1990; Cushman 1993; Gantt 1999; Sampson 1990; Stigliano 1993; Williams 1994). While many psychologists have unreservedly embraced the poststructuralist “turn” in psychology, many others are wary of what they believe to be the relativist implications of poststructuralist praxis. The latter’s concerns about relativism are typically framed within the interpretation of poststructuralist ethics summarized by political philosopher Slavoj Zizek as the assumption that “the quintessential and only all-encompassing rule is to be aware that what we perceive as “truth,” our own symbolic universe, is merely one in a multitude of fictions, and thus not to impose the rules of our game on the games of others — that is, to maintain the plurality of narrative games” (1997, 160

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213). Thus, in psychology, the poststructuralist turn has left in its wake serious and ongoing debate concerning the challenges of navigating the ethical domain in a nonfoundationalist, nonuniversalist field. Unfortunately, the arguments comprising such debates often slide into a too-familiar binary between “new” and “improved” forms of foundationalism (e.g., communitarian ethics) and/or universalism (Habermasian or Rawlsian ethics) and the “anything goes, just don’t step on toes” interpretation of poststructuralist ethical theories. While I feel that much fruitful dialogue has emerged from these debates, the typical binary structure of such dialogue appears to be nearing the end of its usefulness as a framework for thinking about ethics. In particular, the foundationalist/relativist binary as it has thus far been played out in psychology has failed to fully articulate the potential of certain poststructuralist insights concerning subjectivity, as well as the relationship between subjectivity, ethics, and social life. It is in this context that the meditations on ethics and subjectivity found in the oevres of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Lacan represent an alternative to the binary poles of foundationalism and relativism that have thus far structured debate concerning the place of the ethical in psychological praxis. Both Levinas and Lacan were preoccupied with articulating a new approach to ethics, a task they believed had been eclipsed by both traditional philosophy’s emphasis on the primacy of ontology and poststructuralism’s early preoccupation with the critique of ontology.1 In addition, Levinas and Lacan were also centrally preoccupied with thinking about the philosophical and psychological subject. Thus, in contrast to the emphasis on the subject’s ultimate demise in the early work of their poststructuralist contemporaries (for example, Foucault’s emphasis on the “death” or disappearance of the subject and Derrida’s emphasis on its “deconstruction”), Lacan and Levinas both argue that a new approach to ethics requires retaining at least something of the subject. Given their mutual concern for developing a nonfoundationalist ethics along with a compatible theory of the subject, I will argue that certain points of overlap in Levinas’s and Lacan’s work provide a framework for moving beyond the foundationalist-relativist binary that threatens to stultify debate

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on ethics in psychology. I will also suggest that while there are potentially irreconcilable differences in their approaches to ethics, the significant points of convergence in their work are particularly useful for reconceptualizing the relation between the subject, the Other, and ethical praxis. More specifically, I believe that moments of rapproche2 ment in their accounts of the temporality and causality of the subject can shed light on the reciprocal relevance of Levinas’s account for psychology’s debates on ethics and of Lacan’s account for ethics as “first philosophy.” Levinas’s and Lacan’s parallel interests in ethics can be partially accounted for in terms of their shared historical and cultural context. They were contemporaries in France, and each in his own way was profoundly influenced by the significant historical events and political upheaval in twentieth century Europe, as well as its distinctive intellectual milieu. Both were personally affected by the tragedy of the World Wars and ethnic persecutions of the twentieth century, and they both witnessed the transition to the social and political idealism in France during the late 1950s and 1960s. They shared general educational backgrounds in Greek and European philosophy, and both were intellectual heirs of the “crisis” in Enlightenment thinking precipitated by Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx. There are obvious parallels in the evolution of their thought, including their respective critiques of the “egology” of Hegelian and Husserlian idealism, and the disappearance of the subject in, for example, Heidegger’s notion of Being and de Saussure’s notion of la langue. Both were critical of the lingering philosophical impulse to characterize existence and experience in terms of an “otherworld” or “metalanguage” of consciousness, and to understand ethics in terms of the ontological assumptions implicit in such characterizations. Their work is also distinguished from many of their contemporaries by its emphasis on the subject’s relation to alterity as the “place” from which an account of the ethical relation must emerge. For Levinas and Lacan, retaining such a place for the subject does not require an idealism, a rationalist ontology, or a proceduralist ethics. What it does suggest, however, is the need for a theoretical space within which alterity is not

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reabsorbed into any system of identity, or what Levinas and Lacan call an order of “the Same.” Thus, ethical theory ultimately involves analyzing the conditions of possibility for thinking a transcendence that would not be of an “other,” ideal world, nor of the order of ego, Being, or structure. Levinas’s two major works — Totality and Infinity (1969) and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1998d) — are centrally preoccupied with articulating ethics as “first philosophy.” For Levinas, it is ethics rather than ontology that should be the first task of philosophy. Construed by Levinas in terms of the self ’s infinite and immutable relation to “otherness” or alterity, ethics is more fundamental than both ontology and the formulation of particular theories of justice and morality. Lacan’s work is also explicitly concerned with articulating the relation between the subject’s relation to alterity as a fundamentally ethical one. As early as his 1959–1960, Lacan, in turn, claimed that ethical thought is “at the center” of analytic work, and presented psychoanalysis as a singular form of ethical praxis which broke radically with dominant Aristotelian, Kantian, and consequentialist forms of ethics (1992, 38). He credited Freud with developing the outlines of this new ethical praxis — a praxis that links ethics with desire — in response to the persistence of social violence and tragedy in our supposedly “enlightened” modern and progressivist era. Lacan moves beyond this Freudian development in his own work, first through a more thorough exposition of the relationship between the subject, ethics, and desire, and, in his later work, through developing what he called an “ethics of the real,” or an ethics that maintains fidelity to a fundamental gap or fissure in the ontological structure of the world.

T HE T IME AND C AUSE OF THE S UBJECT IN L EVINAS AND L ACAN While the ethical questions asked by Levinas and Lacan were (and are) not new to philosophy, both claimed that such questions could not be answered within ontological frames of reference. Instead, Levinas and Lacan argued that answers to questions such as “What does it

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mean to be a subject?” “What is the basis of sociality?” “What does it mean to be responsible to another, to ourselves?” must be tied to the traumatic question that the Other represents for us as subjects. Within their general conceptions of subjectivity, they provide a new articulation of the “cause” and “time” of the subject and, more broadly, of the structure of the ethical relation. The question of the subject’s status is central in Lacan and Levinas because it is connected to the ethical problem of responsibility — or, of our knowing how to respond to what happens to us. In traditional philosophical ethics, this problem has most often been addressed through meditations on the “Supreme Good” (e.g., Aristotle), on the nature of duty (e.g., Kant), or on the assessment of utility and the “common good” (e.g., Bentham). These meditations have tended either toward some form of philosophical idealism or toward an adherence to systems of normative ideals; as a result, traditional theories of justice and morality have been derived from either idealist or normative ethical ontologies. While they differ profoundly in their characterizations of human intersubjectivity in both its “actual” and “ideal” forms, most traditional approaches have assumed the ethical subject to be one for whom “virtue,” “duty,” or “utility” are prescribed in advance, and, hence, to be one who responds ethically from a freely chosen and transcendent position. In contrast, Lacan and Levinas are most interested in the question of how we might conceive of an ethics that would be operative prior to the formulation of any notion of the virtue, of duty, or of the general good; in other words, an ethics that would come “before” the positing of any prescriptive rule of conduct (Rajchman 1991). In so doing, they attempt to characterize a relation to ourselves and others that emerges from the subject’s encounter with the other as Other — in other words, in the subject’s encounter with something which is unassimilable to consciousness, something which cannot be known or predicted in advance, and something which exceeds the subject’s capacity to render it in meaningful or “experiential” terms. As such, subjectivity in Levinas and Lacan diverges radically from the models of subjectivity assumed in traditional ethics, particularly as it is within the space of the subject’s

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traumatic encounter with the Other that the possibility of ethics has its roots. Both Levinas’s and Lacan’s projects can hence be understood as a response to the incompatibility between philosophical ethics’ traditional valuing of consciousness, transcendent knowledge, and autonomy, on the one hand, and, on the other, an ethics derived from the immutability of the subject’s encounter with the Other. In the same vein, they are critical of the way in which the theoretical tools of ontology have functioned to fill in the gaps or moments of negativity in subjectivity itself through a privileging of ego, presence, Spirit, or Being. For example, in describing the closed and self-referential character of subjectivity qua consciousness or Being in Western philosophy, Levinas claims that: It is as though subjective life in the form of consciousness consisted in being itself losing itself and finding itself again so as to possess itself by showing itself, proposing itself as a theme, exposing itself in truth. . . . The detour of ideality leads to coinciding with oneself . . . which remains the guide and guarantee of the whole spiritual adventure of being. But this is why this adventure is no adventure. It is never dangerous; it is self-possession, sovereignty. . . . Anything unknown that can occur to it is in advance disclosed, open, manifest, is cast in the mould of the known, and cannot be a complete surprise. . . . For the philosophical tradition of the West, all spirituality lies in consciousness, thematic exposition of being, knowing. (1998d, 99)

Levinas suggests instead that the subject must be articulated — not in terms of consciousness or its knowledge — but in terms of its relationship to the Other; this relationship cannot be captured within consciousness and hence cannot be “known” or represented (at least, not in any traditional sense of these terms). For Lacan, as well, the subject cannot be captured within the language of consciousness, or of the ego. He argues that the Freudian “discovery” of the unconscious precipitated a Copernican-style revolution in Western philosophy that dethroned consciousness from the central position it had held in philosophy since Descartes. Lacan viewed his own work as an alternative to other neo-Freudian approaches to

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psychoanalysis, most of which he felt had betrayed this insight of Freud’s by resituating the ego at the center of the psychological subject. With his own approach to the unconscious, Lacan was (among other things) attempting to develop a new understanding of our sociality and what it means to inhabit a world with others. His approach was guided by his sense that the defining moments of the subject — both in relation to herself and to others — were not events of consciousness, events knowable and, hence, masterable by the ego — but occurred, as it were, in the uncanny or unheimlich space in which the subject encounters the opacity and inscrutability of the other’s desire. Hence, both Levinas and Lacan claim that it is only through a refusal to recognize the significance of such negativity or “gaps” in being that philosophical ethics has been able to ground itself in ontology. They offer an extraontological account of the “time” and the “cause” of the subject that articulates an ethics prior to any ontological ordering of the subject as consciousness, Being, or ego. Levinas describes the exceptionality of such a subject in terms of its anarchical relation to the cause and time of consciousness and intentionality. Lacan describes the subject’s exceptionality in terms of its emergence in relation to tuché or an essentially missed encounter with what Lacan calls “the real.” Levinas’s central preoccupation in Otherwise than Being (1998d) is the position and meaning of the subject, the subject as “the self who meets the Other” (Peperzak 1993, 212). In contrast to the subject of ontology, or the ego, Levinas claims that the self who meets the Other must be articulated in extraontological terms. More particularly, he locates the “cause” of this subject in its encounter with the radical alterity of the Other, and its temporality in the anarchic space of the interruption of ontological synchrony by diachrony. For Levinas, the Other as cause of the subject is not any particular other, one who exists in my world as perceived and (at least potentially) known. Rather, Levinas suggests that the Other, as concretized in his description of the nudity, vulnerability, and mute insistence of the face of the Other, is irreducibly heteronomous. In the encounter with the Other, the subject is confronted with alterity as such. Adriaan Peperzak describes

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this encounter with the Other as an “appearance [which] breaks, pierces, [and] destroys the horizon of my egocentric monism. . . . The other’s face (i.e., any Other’s facing me) or the other’s speech (i.e., any Other’s speaking to me) interrupts and disturbs the order of my, ego’s, world; it makes a hole in it by disarraying my arrangements without ever permitting me to restore the previous order” (1993, 20). Hence, the project of articulating the subject who “meets” the Other involves invoking the subject’s relation to the Other in extraontological and anarchical terms. For Levinas, this invocation — along with its rejection of the primacy of consciousness, the ego, intentionality, and lived experience — requires a notion of the subject as “exceptional,” in other words, as “ex-isting” in a relation that simultaneously exceeds representation, intentionality, reciprocity, and temporality. Levinas thus describes the subject literally as a non-lieu, a no-place: “The Self lives on this side without taking a place among ontologically comprehended beings. As an exception, it is a certain nowhere. The exception is a non-lieu” (1998d, 17–18). For Levinas, then, the only possibility for transcending ontological thinking would be through indicating the path or “trace” of the anarchic non-lieu of the subject (Peperzak 1993, 213). Levinas suggests that the “an-archic is” of the subject is elided in the relation between time and consciousness articulated within the ontological frameworks of both Husserl and Heidegger (for example), as well as in positivist assumptions concerning the essential homogeneity and repeatability of moments of time. He is particularly critical of the way in which the existential analysis of inner time makes of the past, present, and future a unity of ecstases — one which situates the present as a point of intersection of remote, immediate, and futural possibilities. He suggests that within such an analysis, the temporal structure of consciousness is rendered as the subject’s taking the temporal dispersion of consciousness — and all “its” events — back into itself by means of memory and interpretation. In other words, the existential subject (or “Being”) as intentionality dominates time, as it is the agency that gathers together the dispersion of consciousness across time. Thus the subject, while apparently rendered passive through its gaps in self-

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presence, ultimately reigns transcendent as thinking becomes remembrance, and thought becomes re-collection (Peperzak 1993). For Levinas, however, the subject’s time cannot be retrieved through the process of memory or its contents. In other words, the time of the subject is not an ontological synchrony, but is, rather, a diachrony. Levinas links the notion of anachronistic, diachronous time to the irretrievable moment(s) of the subject’s encounter with the Other. While he recognizes that our experience with others often proceeds within the frame of ontological time, he also claims that ontological time is a priori conditioned by a certain resistance in the other to reduction to ego-centered experience. Within the frame of ontological time — through our egocentric ways of habitually perceiving, engaging with, and responding to others as instances of “people like us” — the ego attempts to appropriate the other by means of language, experience, and material practice. Diachrony, on the other hand, represents a violent rending of ontological time through the ego’s encounter with the irreducible strangeness of the other — a strangeness which disrupts all taken-for-granted means of being-with-others. In this encounter, the utter nakedness of the face and the silent appeal of the voice of the other violates consciousness and its tendency toward expansiveness and overwhelms the ego’s capacity for assimilation. This resistance to assimilation is not founded on the other’s will, as is the case when one “freedom” encounters another “freedom” which it seeks to limit. Rather, this resistance is in place before any possibility of choice and before psychological considerations of intentionality or consciousness; the mere fact of another’s ex-istence is a “surplus” that cannot be reduced to becoming a part or moment of my world. The Other “cannot be captured or grasped and is therefore . . . incomprehensible” (Peperzak 1993, 21). Thus, in contrast to the “presence” of the ego to itself and others as instances of the Same, the time of the subject emerges anarchically in the encounter with the Other — a moment which invokes the subject as always already having been chosen, occupied, and claimed by alterity as such. Thus, within a Levinasian framework, the subject as such has no past — or rather, the subject’s past is always “more past” than he

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or she can know. Hence, we can only speak of an “immemorial past,” a past that can never be recalled within the space of consciousness or memory. The time of the ego (ontological synchrony) and the time of the subject (diachrony) are heteronomous. Time is not, then, only a teleological realization of the subject’s “possibilities” — possibilities which develop into history as a movement back and forth from the present — but is the anachronistic diachrony produced as the impossibility of incorporating the overwhelming event of the Other into synchronic time. The radical alterity of such events blocks their retrieval into an intelligible totality, or into a personal or collective history. Against the history of synchronic time, then, Levinas juxtaposes the “secret” and “invisible” history of the subject’s encounter with the Other (Levinas 1987a). Within this framework, it is impossible to conceive of the subject as having an “origin” or beginning in any traditional, ontological sense of the words. To the extent that we can conceive of an origin or cause of the subject, it must be located in the Other’s claim as a sort of death — or a repetitive, perpetual dying — that interrupts and irreparably disorders our projects and our presence to ourselves. As “caused” by the Other as a death-bearing stranger, the subject comes into being as a preoriginal acquiescence or “passivity” in relation to the nonsignifyingness of the face of the Other. In other words, we must understand the subject as “originating” from a sort of death — a death that constitutes not the telos of our living nor something we live towards as the limit of our horizon, but as a traumatic death or dying which marks our birth as subjects. As Hélène Cixous suggests, “To begin (writing, living) we must have death . . . [w]e must have death, but young, present, ferocious, fresh death, the death of the day, today’s death. The one that comes right up to us so suddenly we don’t have time to avoid it, I mean to avoid feeling its breath touching us” (1993, 7). Thus, what is significant for Levinas’s account of the ethical subject is that the subject emerges only as the impossibility of possibility that the death effected by the encounter with the Other represents. As such, the ethical subject in Levinas can be understood as an openness to the repetitive, passive movement of dying itself.3

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As Levinas asserts, then, within the diachronous non-lieu of the subject’s encounter with the Other, the subject is constituted as a “passivity beneath all passivity” (1998d, 91). Constituted as a radical passivity, the subject ex-ists in what Levinas refers to as a “duration,” a secret and unassimilable time in which something outside of consciousness comes to pass. Thus, in the event of the subject’s passivity in the face of the Other, we find a temporal excess or duration, a “something coming to pass” outside of time and consciousness. More importantly, perhaps, it is also in this event that the possibility for ethics arises. Levinas suggests, then, that if ethics is to attend to both the singularity of the subject and the alterity of the Other, it must articulate the relevance of what comes to pass in the event of the Other. In Lacan, we find a description of a temporality and causality of the subject that resonates provocatively with Levinas’s account. Perhaps the first and most obvious resonance is to be found in Lacan’s claim that his articulation of the subject is a development of Freud’s revolutionary critique of the centrality of the ego in psychic and social life. He argued that Freud’s “discovery” of the subject of the unconscious removed the ego from its central position in western philosophy, and that the proponents of ego psychology had actually betrayed Freud’s critique by reinscribing the ego in the center of the subject. Thus, in contrast to the ego, “the gap of the unconscious may be said to be preontological; its emergence has the all too often forgotten characteristic of failing to lend itself to ontology” (1981, 29–30). Lacan also claims that the observant analyst or analysand will realize, apropos of the subject of the unconscious, that what “truly belongs to the order of the unconscious is . . . neither being, nor non-being, but the unrealized” (30). More specifically, however, Lacan’s account of the subject resonates with Levinas’s through the manner in which Lacan differentiates the temporality characteristic of the subject of the unconscious from that of the ego. For Lacan, the temporality of the subject is a “strange temporality” which exceeds or is “other” to the time of the ego. While Freud had described the unconscious in terms of its timelessness and absence of negation, Lacan suggests that unconscious contents

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appear timeless because they are of a radically different temporal order than conscious thoughts. For example, in his Seminar XI — the seminar which marks his increasing preoccupation with the relationship between the subject, the drive, and the Other as “real” — Lacan states that “the unconscious is [ontically] elusive — but we are beginning to circumscribe it in a structure, a temporal structure which, it can be said, has never yet been articulated as such” (1981, 32). He goes on to describe the temporal structure of the unconscious as distinguished by its rhythmic, pulsative, and repetitive character: “I have constantly stressed . . . the pulsative function . . . of the unconscious, the need to disappear that seems to be in some sense inherent in it — everything that, for a moment, appears in this slit seems to be destined, by a sort of preemption, to close up again upon itself . . . to vanish, to disappear. At the same time, I have formulated the hope that through this may be renewed the trenchant, decisive crystallization . . . that we shall call the conjectural science of the subject” (1981, 43). The subject of the unconscious, then, must be understood as “conjecture” in the sense that it “preempts” itself — in other words, its appearance is exclusively conditioned by its repetitive disappearance, and depends on its propensity to “close up [again] on itself.” Thus, the unconscious can be characterized in terms of a temporal structure of pulsation as a repetitive opening and closing, and in terms of a form of knowing that “slides away” from or escapes the interpretive knowledge of the ego. While the temporality of the subject can be traced in more detail 4 through several central concepts in Lacan’s later work, it is in his emphasis on the relationship between the “irretrievable” time of the encounter with the real, the time of repetition, and the Aristotelian notion of Tuché that we find the most useful parallels to Levinas’s notions of alterity and diachrony. In attempting to account for the subject of the unconscious in extraontological terms, Lacan turned to Aristotle’s analysis of causality. Lacan was most interested in the distinction between the two types of chance described by Aristotle: automaton, which designates chance events in the world at large, and tuché, which refers to chance as it can be understood to impact upon agents presumed capable of ethical and

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moral action. Lacan links automaton with the symbolic order, or “network of signifiers,” and as such, relates it to the effects of language in the subject. In other words, he understands automaton to refer to phenomena that appear to be arbitrary, but are ultimately determined by the insistence of the signifier in the trajectory of the subject’s desire. In contrast to automaton, tuché as causality is a wholly arbitrary, incalculable, and purely heteronomous form of chance. As such, it is beyond both consciousness and the unconscious effects of language in the structuring of desire. Lacan refers to it as a cause because, through its unpredictable interruption and disordering of the world of consciousness, it brings something else — something other to consciousness — into being. This something other is the subject of the unconscious, and its being is not of the order of existence or presence, but, as Lacan would say, of ex-istence. Thus, Lacan suggests that tuché can be employed to understand the anarchic “origin” of the subject in the encounter with Other — an encounter with alterity which cannot be predicted or thematized. His adoption of tuché as the subject’s cause underscores the incompatibility between the philosophical ideal of the ego as presence and self-sufficiency and the sovereign role of contingency, chance or fortune in the decisive moments of our lives. Lacan aligns tuché with his notion of the real, which he also links to that which remains radically other to meaning, knowledge, and the symbolic order. For Lacan, the real is the “impossible,” that which is impossible to imagine, to achieve or attain, or to render significant via language. Because it lacks any possible mediation, the real is “something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail” (1988, 164). Lacan argues that we meet the real in tuché in a chance encounter with alterity of the Other, with the fundamental opacity of the Other’s desire. Such chance encounters — perpetually missed encounters in terms of the ego’s utter incapacity to assimilate them — produce both the “kernel of the real” constitutive of the subject itself and, subsequently, the turning points in which the subject’s relation to self and others is thrown into question. As unpredictable and unassimilable disruptions of identity and experience, these encounters can also be understood as trauma. Lacan suggests that psychoanalysis

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takes its meaning from investigating these traumatic points in the subject’s “reality” — points which at which the enigmatic question posed by the Other transforms the subject’s manner of being.

T HE S UBJECT AND T RAUMA In Freudian terms, trauma is defined as the intrusion of an unexpected and emotionally or physically overwhelming event into a person’s life, by his or her inability to adequately respond to it, and by its immediate and longstanding psychological effects. The significance of such events is not fully grasped while they are happening and, even though the events are involuntarily “replayed” in nightmares, flashbacks, and other forms of repetition, their specific significance for the subject usually remains unclear. Lacan locates trauma at the point where the real as tuché intrudes into and disrupts the ego’s identity and experience of the known in such a way as to render any adequation or restoration of equilibrium impossible. In his seminar “Tuché and Automaton,” Lacan remarks on the irony involved in Freud’s work on trauma, an irony conditioned by the fact that traumatic neurosis itself represented a theoretical trauma around which Freudian theory was transformed: “Is it not remarkable that, at the origin of psychoanalysis, the real should have presented itself as that which is unassimilable in it — in the form of trauma” (1978, 55). Thus, for Lacan, it is no accident that the function of tuché, of the encounter with the real, first presented itself in psychoanalysis in the form of trauma. Since traumatic neurosis (first seen by Freud in his work with veterans of war) could not be accounted for in terms of the pleasure principle, Freud was ultimately forced to consider other motivations for repetitive phenomena. Lacan suggests, then, that the shift in Freud’s thinking from the ascendancy of the pleasure principle to recognition of the role of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1989a) must be understood as a response to the theoretical trauma represented by war neuroses. In response to this trauma in psychoanalytic theory, Freud first theorized that trauma was simply an “interruption” of consciousness by an unexpected and overwhelming

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event. However, by the end of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he had arrived at the conclusion that trauma is that which explains the very origin of consciousness itself. Central to the more general understanding of trauma as “preoriginal” to consciousness is Lacan’s account of the relation between trauma and repetition. Lacan describes the function of the real in repetition as “that which always comes back to the same place — to place where the subject, insofar as he thinks, the res cogitans, does not meet it” (1981, 49). This is the place — the nontemporal space between perception and consciousness — that Freud (borrowing from Gustav Fechner) described as the “other scene” of the unconscious as 5 manifest in dreams. Or, in Lacan’s words, “This is the locus where the affair of the subject of the unconscious is played out. . . . [It is] presented to us . . . as an immense display, a special spectre, situated between perception and consciousness. You know that these two elements will later [in Freud’s work] . . . form the perceptionconsciousness system . . . but one should not then forget the interval that separates them, in which the place of the Other is situated, in which the subject is constituted” (1978, 44, italics mine). Lacan suggests that the uncanny or unheimlich character of this “other scene” can be understood in terms of the essentially “missed” encounter with the Other that takes place in this interval between perception and consciousness and which, upon waking, is only experienced as a gap or rupture in consciousness or, alternatively, as anxiety as the affective residuum of an encounter with the real. To understand this missed “real-ity” in terms of its impact on the subject’s development would require investigating the “radical points” of encounter with the real. Lacan suggests that these points “enable us to conceive reality as unterlegt, untertrage, which, with the superb ambiguity of the French language, appear to be translated by the same word — souffrance. 6 Reality is in abeyance there, awaiting attention” (55– 56). This space of encounter with the real thus represents a certain reality which is “missed” or “pending,” one in which meaning or sense remains in suspense, suffering for lack of attention. Thus, the radical points at which the real as tuché breaches consciousness and the functioning of

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the ego are points at which an uncanny reality is produced — one which cannot be assimilated into consciousness — but one within which the subject is constituted, within which the subject is claimed by the Other, and one for which the subject suffers. Levinas, for his part, captures both the uncanny space of trauma and its repetitive dimension through emphasizing the persecutory and obsessional structure of the subject’s relation to the Other. For Levinas, the subject is also constituted in and through the trauma represented by the rupture of the ego by the call or claim of the Other. The encounter with the Other occurs, as suggested above, prior to any willing or consciousness on the part of the ego, and thus can be understood as a being taken hostage by and persecuted by the Other. In an early version of “Substitution,” one of his central essays on the self’s relation to the Other, and the conceptual core of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, Levinas describes the Other’s claim to the subject as a persecution which cannot be remediated by the ego, cannot be reabsorbed into the language of meaning and consciousness. “The persecution reduces the ego to itself, to the absolute accusative in which there is imputed to the ego a fault it has not committed or willed, and which confounds it in its freedom. . . . Persecution is a trauma, violence par excellence without warning nor a priori, without possible apology, without logos” (1998d, 183, n. 27). In a later version of “Substitution,” Levinas emphasizes the originating force of trauma in relation to the subject, insofar as the subject as such emerges only as hostage to the a priori and infinite claim of the Other. “[Trauma] . . . prevents its own representation, a deafening trauma, cutting the thread of consciousness which should have welcomed it in its present, the passivity of being persecuted. . . . Persecution is not something added to the subjectivity of the subject and his vulnerability; it is the very movement of recurrence. . . . A subject is a hostage” (1998d, 111–12). Thus, the subject is constituted as “a hostage,” one “obsessed” with responsibilities which did not arise in decisions taken by a subject “contemplating freely,” consequently accused in its innocence, subjectivity in itself is being thrown back on itself ” (1998d, 101). The anarchic, traumatic encounter with this

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“other” that cuts the thread of consciousness is actually that which “grounds” consciousness itself. In other words, Levinas considers consciousness to be the effect of affect, that which trauma produces in the place of knowledge. The subject is the effect of the affect that trauma produces. For both Levinas and Lacan, then, the subject’s relation to trauma marks a basic ethical dilemma at the heart of consciousness itself. While consciousness is founded on a “preoriginal” encounter with alterity — an encounter with an otherness that through an insistent “calling” or unilateral claim constitutes the subject as the possibility of a response — consciousness itself functions to appropriate this otherness through discourse and labor into something known, something predictable, an experience or meaning which can be captured in a narrative of identity. Thus, while the possibility for consciousness is a secondary effect of the pre- or extraontological moment of the subject’s emergence in relation to the Other as trauma, consciousness can only function through a veiling or covering over of this radical relation to the real.

E THICS OF THE O THER , E THICS OF THE R EAL In foundationalist and universalist ethics, ethical thought and action are grounded in consciousness, and in the intentional cultivation and application of principles of virtue, duty, or the common good. In contrast to an understanding of ethics as mediated by a substantive Good, by a set of formal, rationalist procedures for making ethical determinations, or through a tolerance for the plurality of language games, Levinas and Lacan articulate an alternative position whereby ethics is grounded in reference to a traumatic encounter with the Other which resists assimilation into consciousness and, hence, resists any form of symbolization or codification. As what Levinas referred to as a “traumatology,” ethics must hence be grounded in a notion of a responsibility for the Other which exists prior to the formulation of any rule of conduct. If, as Levinas and Lacan argue, consciousness itself is a secondary effect of a diachronic, traumatic, and

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unsymbolizable encounter with the Other as real, then ethics must begin with an account both of the sort of subject produced in this encounter, and this subject’s relation to consciousness. Both, then, are preoccupied with the ethics that might emerge from understanding the subject in the temporal and causal terms outlined above, particularly as the “disposition toward alterity” in the subject as “trauma,” and in terms of the ethical moment implied in attempts to articulate the limits of language and thought that trauma represents. Levinas and Lacan argue that ethics must be understood as an injunction that cannot be grounded in ontology, and that the subject’s relation to radical alterity is a fundamentally ethical one. Thus, the possibility of ethics arises in the rending of consciousness by an a priori encounter with a traumatic Real which resists symbolization — a violence experienced in the traumatic encounter with the abyss of the Other’s desire. As both Lacan and Levinas emphasize, the encounter with the Other as real represents a claim — or the burden of a response —on the subject that preexists consciousness or any involvement in the world of the part of the subject itself. Levinas describes this preoriginal assignation of the subject through invoking the dilemma of Job in the Old Testament: We have been accustomed to reason in the name of the freedom of the ego — as though I had witnessed the creation of the world, and as though I could only have been in charge of a world that would have issued out of my free will. . . . That is what Scripture reproaches Job for. He would have known how to explain his miseries if they could have devolved from his faults. . . . [I]n a meaningful world one cannot be held to answer when one has not done anything. Job then must have forgotten his faults! But the subjectivity of a subject come late into a world which has not issued from his projects does not consist in projecting, or in treating this world as one’s project. The ‘lateness’ is not insignificant. The limits it imposes on the freedom of subjectivity are not reducible to pure privation. (1989b, 111). 7

Thus, as Lacan also makes clear with his analysis of tuché, the point to be gotten here is that the events that profoundly affect our lives always occur too early, or the understanding of their effects comes too late, for us to be able to “choose” them. Levinas and Lacan suggest

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that we are, rather, chosen or elected by such events. Thus, the subject, in its traumatic “origin” as hostage to the mute, persecuting insistence of the Other, emerges as a passivity and a duration. As a passivity that endures with the Other, as obsessed by the Other, Levinas says that the subject becomes the possibility of response: For the condition for, or the unconditionality of, the self does not begin in the auto-affection of a sovereign ego that would be, after the event, ‘compassionate’ for another. Quite the contrary: the uniqueness of the responsible ego is possible only in being obsessed by another, in the trauma suffered prior to any auto-identification, in an unrepresentable before. The one affected by the other is an anarchic trauma, or an inspiration of the one by the other. . . . Responsibility is what first enables one to catch sight of and conceive of value. (1989b, 113)

Thus to be responsible for the Other emerges from a simultaneous persecution and inspiration by the Other. Being hostage to the Other represents also the possibility of being in-spired by the Other, given breath as a singular subject within the frame of a radical responsibility for an other. It is, therefore, my irreducibility and unreplaceability as subject for the Other that redeems the finiteness of my freedom. It is in this sense — the subject constituted as the possibility of the finite, yet radical freedom of a response-ability to the Other — that Lacan refers to the “subjectivizations” of the event of trauma that mark points at which the subject may restructure herself. These points at which the subject is affected by the Other as real allow for a recurrence of the subject that is not mediated through identification. Rather, the subject is mediated through an openness and response to the Other as within me — or, to the claim of the Other in what is possible for me. It is only through such an openness and responsivity that subjectivization can occur. Lacan suggests that the ethical problematic framed by the real as trauma was ultimately what Freud was attempting to articulate in his famous dictum “Wo es war, soll ich werden.” Rather than suggesting that “the ego must dislodge the id,” Lacan claims that Freud was describing the effects of tuché on the development of the subject, namely that the subject first emerges from the

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encounter with alterity represented by trauma, and that who the subject is and what she will become can only be understood as the response to trauma. In other words, Lacan argues that es is NOT the id but is tuché, and ich is NOT the ego but is the “I,” the subject who speaks. Here, the subject who speaks is not the ego (what Lacan occasionally calls the subject of the enoncé, or statement), but is the subject of enunciation, the subject who speaks beyond what can be captured in an interpretation or narrative. Thus, Lacan retranslates Freud’s “Wo es war, soll ich werden” in the following way: “[t]he subject is there to rediscover where it was . . . the real. . . . Where it was, the Ich — the subject, not psychology — the subject, must come into existence” (1981, 45). As such, the aim of psychoanalysis would be to bring the subject to the point where he or she assumes the cause as tuché. In other words, analysis involves subjectifying and taking responsibility for the Other’s opaque desire, or the foreign cause that brought the subject into being; this involves a “repositioning of the ego as subject in the a [cause] that I was for the Other’s desire” (Lacan 1965; for more on this point, see also Fink 1995). Subjectifying the cause or “awakening” to the “something coming to pass” of trauma (and the death of the ego it represents), is not a simple transformation of perception, consciousness, or knowledge but of a response to a call that can only be heard in the encounter with the Other. Levinas’s notion of substitution is also helpful here for understanding what it might mean for the subject to come into existence in the mode of response to the Other. In the section on substitution in the chapter of the same name in Otherwise than Being, Levinas distinguishes between his notion of the subject and the ontological notion of self or ego. More specifically, he attempts to distinguish “persecuted subjectivity” from “eternal being, whose possibles are also powers, always takes up what it undergoes, and whatever be its submission, always arises anew as the principle of what happens to it” (1998d, 113). He argues that, contrary to the kind of “quest” for selfhood, self-coinciding, or Being that characterizes the ontological subject, the anarchic subject born of trauma is a substitution, a passivity for and response to the Other that does not take the form of an

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assumption. This is so because, as Levinas states, “The self as a creature is conceived in a passivity . . . [that is] prior to the virtual coinciding of a term with itself ” and because the subject is “brought out of nothingness” by a call that it only hears or knows in the delayed mode of its response (113–14). Thus, substitution for an other cannot be understood on the model of the self “returning” from the night of trauma to the light of a new knowledge of the Other, knowledge where there had been absence or lack. Substitution is not a matter of knowing the Other, but of standing in for the Other or, as Lacan suggests, a “coming to be” in the place of the Other. Hence, ethics involves a recurrence to oneself [that] cannot stop at oneself, but goes to the hither side of oneself; in the recurrence to oneself there is a going to the hither side of oneself. “A” does not, as in identity, return to “A,” but retreats to the hither side of its point of departure. Is not the signification of responsibility for another, which cannot be assumed by any freedom, stated in this trope? Substitution of the one for the other, as the basis of ethics, would thus represent the imperative of a subject “on the hither side of rest,” the subject of trauma as the “impossibility to come back from all things and concern oneself with only oneself ” (Levinas 1998d, 114). The point of ethics would then be to reconstitute the “truth” that trauma introduces in the subject’s history — a truth that attests not to a knowledge or discourse adequate to the Other’s desire, but to a mode of existence determined by a responsibility to the Other in spite of the impossible structure of an adequate response. Or, as Levinas suggests, the “something” that comes to pass in the subject’s duration and passivity in the face of the Other can only be articulated in an act that does not return the self to the ego, but one through which the subject becomes the passive movement of dying that substitution represents. Understood in this way, truth must be understood as always coming after the fact of trauma, and involving a responsibility for the other with which we are never done. To emerge from or subjectify trauma is thus to bear an imperative to “survive” — to speak beyond trauma in order to tell what it means not to know (see Caruth 1996). Thus, with respect to truth, “the Real qua trauma is not the ultimate

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‘unspeakable’ truth which the subject can approach only asymptomatically, but that which makes every articulate symbolic truth forever ‘not-all,’ failed, a bone stuck in the throat of the speaking being which makes it impossible to tell everything,” once and for all (Zizek 1997, 216). Rather, the real qua trauma requires the subject’s substitution for the other as the only form of testimony and witness to what it means not to know, or to forever know “not-all.”

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NINE

Levinas and Mainstream Psychology A Conversation about Common Concerns Robert John Sheffler Manning & Michael Chase M ETALOGUE : W HY D O T HINGS H AVE O UTLINES ? Daughter: Father: D: F: D: F:

Daddy, why do things have outlines? Do they? I don’t know. What sort of things do you mean? I mean when I draw things, why do they have outlines? Well, what about other sorts of things — a flock of sheep? or a conversation? Do they have outlines? Don’t be silly. I can’t draw a conversation. I mean things. Yes — I was trying to find out just what you meant. Do you mean “Why do we give things outlines when we draw them?” or do you mean that the things have outlines whether we draw them or not? (Gregory Bateson, Steps To An Ecology of Mind)

Maurice Blanchot once wrote of Emmanuel Levinas, his lifelong friend: “I am sure that Levinas does not mind philosophizing in ways that might seem somewhat unfashionable” (Blanchot 1986, 44). And until recently Levinas’s philosophy must have seemed unfashionable indeed. Sartre’s atheistic existentialism was fashionable in its season, and not only in Paris. And those other two great French thinkers of the generation after Sartre — Michel Foucault, with his teachings about the co-implication of knowledge and power, and Jacques Derrida, with his highly literary deconstruction of western metaphysics — are both 182

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intellectuals whose ideas have become chic in this age that desires to see itself as more than and beyond modernity, as postmodern. But Levinas, with his language about ethics, responsibility and obligation and his frequent references to God , religion, and the sacred? As Blanchot knew, being fashionable was something Levinas criticized rather than sought. And yet by the 1980s, his works were being translated rapidly into many languages and a steady stream of philosophy students and scholars, like myself (the first author), was making its way to his Parisian apartment to discuss his work. By the end of that decade, scholars from many disciplines and not just philosophers were attempting to make themselves familiar with the often quite difficult work of this most unlikely of fashionable Parisian philosophers, Levinas the philosopher of the ethical relation with the Other. This present volume on Levinas and psychology is one of the exciting byproducts of this growth of interest in Levinas’s ideas. In this essay, we will attempt to put Levinas in conversation with the discipline of psychology and some of its central concerns today. Thus, the greater part of this present paper is given over to an imaginary conversation between Levinas and a representative of mainstream psychology. Before we do this, however, we give a brief overview of where Levinas was coming from philosophically, what his main ideas and concerns were, and of how they changed throughout Levinas’s long academic career. In the late 1920s Levinas was a philosophy student in Strassbourg and in 1928 and 1929 went to Freiburg to study under Husserl. There his most significant encounter was with the works of Heidegger, and especially with Being and Time (1962), which Levinas always regarded as one of the supreme works of philosophy, despite his severe criticisms of Heidegger’s philosophy. Levinas’s early work is almost entirely preoccupied with the work of Husserl and Heidegger, and indeed it was as a translator and commentator of Husserl and Heidegger that Levinas first broke in upon the academic scene in France. Levinas’s early and continued preoccupation with Husserl and Heidegger demonstrates that his own philosophy is very much with the school of phenomenology, and Levinas always regarded his own

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work as phenomenological philosophy. Levinas’s earliest publications also make clear that his own phenomenological philosophy will follow Heidegger in rejecting the constraints of Husserl’s pure, scientific phenomenology. Just as Heidegger rejected Husserl’s notion that phenomenology restrict itself to a close description of things as they appear to consciousness and then used Husserl’s phenomenology as a method to describe lived human experience, or Dasein in Heidegger’s vocabulary, so too Levinas will develop a phenomenology in which lived human experience will be at the core rather than put in brackets, as Husserl insisted. And Levinas makes it very clear from his earliest philosophical writings that the aspect of human experience which interests him most and which he most thinks needs explicating is intersubjectivity, the relation between the self and the other person. Already, in Existence and Existents, written largely during the war, Levinas expressed his disagreement with Heidegger by arguing that “. . . in Heidegger sociality is completely found in the solitary subject. The analysis of Dasein, in its authentic form, is carried out in terms of solitude” (1978, 95). Similarly, in his series of lectures entitled Time and the Other, Levinas wrote that the relation with the other person “. . . is a relation with a Mystery. The other’s entire being is constituted by its exteriority, or rather its alterity” (1987a, 75–76). Although it is apparent from the beginning that Levinas’s phenomenology will be concerned with intersubjectivity, his insistence on the radically ethical nature of the self-other relation becomes clear only with the publication of his first major work, Totality and Infinity (1969). Here Levinas gives his famous account of the ethical significance of intersubjectivity through his provocative metaphor of the “face” of the other. It would, indeed, be difficult to overestimate the significance of the face of the other for the Levinas of Totality and Infinity. The face expresses to the self its radical alterity, bringing to the self so much more than it itself possesses or can possess, more than it has conceived of or can conceive of. Thus, the face of the other brings to birth for the first time in the self the idea of infinity. Not only this, but the infinite alterity that is the face of the other reveals to the

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self that its own attempts to understand, to conceive what is other to it have always involved a reduction of that otherness to more of the same, have always involved an attempt to bring that otherness back into its own terms. Thus, the radical alterity of the other person shows the self for the first time that its own manner of orienting itself in the world involves a certain violence, that its knowing and conceiving is really a grasping and a containing, that knowledge involves “. . . the suppression of the other by the grasp, by the hold, or by the vision that grasps before the grasp” (1969, 302). Thus, the face of the other person freezes the free movement of the subject by revealing to it its own violent capacities and by calling it into question for the first time. The face of the Other acts upon the self in a forceful, though nonviolent way, calling it, compelling it to a nonviolent, ethical relation. As Levinas says, “the face summons me” to ethical responsibility for it, to protect it and guard it. The face expresses the command: “Don’t kill me” (1969, 203). If Levinas’s extraordinary account of intersubjectivity has made him the philosopher of ethics for our time, nevertheless he should not be confused or merged with that other great philosopher of ethics of another time, Immanuel Kant. For Kant, human reason in its maturity is quite capable of positing for itself ethical principles and of acting in accord with those principles. It is absolutely imperative for Kant that the self be free to posit its own ethical principles and free to act in conformity to them. For Kant, ethics must involve a fully autonomous subject or it isn’t ethics. As he would put it, I must give my order to myself for my activity to be considered ethical. Something I do under compulsion or because someone told me to do it might be obedience but isn’t ethics. For Kant, ethics must involve autonomy, a free subject freely giving itself ethical principles and freely deciding to live by them. Levinas, on the other hand, from his very first publication, his essay on Hitlerism (1934), insists that there is something in human existence to be prized much more highly than freedom and autonomy. Indeed, the way Levinas depicts the relation between the self and the Other is the end of autonomy. For the Levinas of Totality and Infinity,

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the face of the Other calls into question my freedom, reveals it as a violence, and commands me to responsibility. And though there are some significant differences between this Levinas and the later Levinas of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1998d) his emphasis on the way in which the Other commands the subject to ethical responsibility actually grows much stronger and more insistent. In Otherwise than Being and in several essays leading up to it, he insists that the other negates the freedom and autonomy of the subject so completely that he often describes the subject as the “hostage” of the other. In the essay “No Identity,” for example, he refers to the subject as “a hostage for everyone” and says that man “. . . is made of responsibilities” (1987b, 149–50). Such hyperbolic language would probably have irritated Kant, who might have suspected that Levinas’s depiction of the unavoidable ethical foundation of intersubjectivity was derived not from human reason but from religious tradition and experience. And he would have been correct. The reader of Levinas should recognize that Levinas is perhaps the most thoroughly religious of contemporary philosophers. Levinas is not only Jewish, but he is thoroughly immersed in Biblical and Talmudic wisdom. Beginning with Husserl and Freud, a great many of the great intellectuals of twentieth century Europe have had Jewish backgrounds, but Levinas as an eastern European, Lithuanian Jew was immersed in Hebrew and in the study of the Bible and the Talmud from his earliest youth. After the war, Levinas, under the direction of one of the great Talmudic masters of this century, devoted much of his time and life to the serious study of the Talmud and became himself a Talmudic scholar. In addition to his philosophical works, he is also the author of several volumes of commentary on the Talmud. Of course the relation between these bodies of writing is complex. Levinas says several times that he never advances a biblical or Talmudic text to prove his philosophical positions, but he never shrinks from saying that the Bible and the Talmud over and over again testify to the reality of the essentially ethical nature of human intersubjectivity. To Levinas there is something sacred about the essentially ethical nature of human intersubjectivity and when ethical responsi-

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bility arises within the human to human encounter, that is an event in sacred history. So one has to confront the fact that Levinas is a religious person, but one must also guard against one’s own assumptions about what it means to be a religious person, about what this must mean for Levinas and for his work. We must let Levinas be a religious person in the way that Levinas is, and for those of us unfamiliar with the Talmud and rabbinic Judaism, his way of being religious will be very other to us. Another thing to keep in mind when reading Levinas and in trying to come to terms with his unusual claims about the ethical foundation of intersubjectivity is that Levinas is himself intimately familiar with those many times and situations where the interaction between subject and other is anything but ethical and nonviolent. Levinas’s language may seem very idealistic at times, but few thinkers had ever confronted so immediately the reality of man’s inhumanity to man. While nearly all of the European intellectuals of this century were marked in some fashion by the calamities of the 1930s and 1940s, few suffered as did Levinas. He spent almost the entire war years at hard labor in a Nazi prisoner of war camp in France. During this time, in eastern Europe the Nazis were murdering not only Levinas’s parents and relatives but nearly everyone Levinas knew as a boy. All those who would come to terms with this great philosopher of the ethical foundation of intersubjectivity would do well to remember the dedication at the beginning of Levinas’s major work Otherwise than Being (1998d): “To the memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists, and of the millions on millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man, the same antisemitism.” For our imaginary conversation between Levinas and mainstream psychology, we have assumed that Levinas did some homework in order to prepare himself for the conversation. He familiarized himself with textbooks on the history and systems of psychology and on social psychology. He leafed through recent issues of the APA Monitor, inquired after titles of books recently published or soon to be published in psychology, and even checked out the American Psychological

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Association (APA) and American Psychological Society (APS) websites. Obviously, then, for the purposes of our conversation we creating a Levinas who did not actually exist, and yet we have been careful to create a Levinas who responds in the ways we think Levinas would respond. In doing this, we recognize that there will inevitably be some lack of detail, and some important insights will be leveled-off a bit to respond more directly to the discourse of psychology. Many nuances that make Levinas’s work as powerful as it is will not be as apparent they might be in another forum. However, this “playful” dialogue will, we believe, bring Levinas to psychology in certain concrete ways. We have tried to “keep the feet of both to the fire” as they struggle together with the difficulties of authentic encounter.

A C ONVERSATION B ETWEEN M AINSTREAM P SYCHOLOGY AND THE P HILOSOPHER , E MMANUEL L EVINAS Psychology:

Levinas:

Psychology:

Levinas:

I am not sure what will come of this discussion — it doesn’t seem like we have any points of contact or mutual interest. Your work seems to be mostly about metaphysics, moral philosophy, and ethics, topics which psychology doesn’t address. That seems like a long way from our work in the science of human behavior. I am also not sure what will come of our discussion. However, I am quite certain that what I have attempted to describe in the language of philosophy — the ethical demand of the Other — psychology has also encountered and has attempted in multiple ways to respond. But psychology doesn’t deal with moral, ethical, and metaphysical issues. It doesn’t hold a religious way of looking at things. Psychology is about science. But what else lives in this discipline in addition to its pretensions and desires to be scientific? Psychology must not take a too narrow view of its own life out of aversion toward the words morality and ethics. I think it will become clear that a great deal of the life of

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psychology derives from the underlying reality to which the terms ethics and morality inadequately gesture. Ok, but it seems like you are still working over there in the realm of metaphysical philosophy, even religion, while modern Psychology is clearly working from a scientific perspective. Philosophy and religion differ from psychology in both content and methodology. Any attempt to bring them together would probably distort one or the other, or both. The relation for me between religion and philosophy is a complex one, and of course I do not think of myself as a theologian, but rather as a philosopher. My concerns are that of a philosopher. My work is that of a philosopher. I do find that the Bible, the Talmud, Shakespeare and many other works also testify to the ethical reality of the encounter with the Other which my philosophical work has described. And I feel grateful that my reading now also includes psychological works such as those I undertook for our conversation today. I believe that the obligation to the Other lives within much psychological research, but that perhaps the ethical concern that prompts and lives within the research most often goes unacknowledged and unthought. This would, I think, hardly make psychology unique as a scholarly and academic discipline within the universities! Much psychological research and study is very concerned with the ethical and moral. You must mean humanistic psychology? Their interests are hardly representative of mainstream psychology. But they are part of the contemporary scene. One of the things that I know from your texts is that psychology is very diverse, and humanistic psychology is part of the whole. But I will not use humanistic psychology sources in today’s conversation. The texts that I have examined for our conversation are very much in what

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Psychology:

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you would call the mainstream. They will be texts that are familiar to nearly all psychologists. And what do I find in those texts? I believe that these texts testify to the reality of the human obligation to the face of the Other. It seems quite clear that psychology as a discipline and psychologists as persons are held hostage by the ethical obligation to the face of the Other. I’m really looking forward to your analysis of our texts on this matter, but I want to hit one issue head on. We need to deal with it up front because it is a tremendous roadblock for us psychologists who are attempting to understand and work with your ideas. Is this business about the ethical demand of the face of the other innate? Are you saying that humans are innately ethical? Yes or no? Quite to the contrary, it is only because there is the other man that I can be called, commanded to be ethical. I am not concerned at all, or perhaps better to say no more than any modern, rational person, with what is innate in humans and what can be attributed to culture or civilization. Beyond culture and civilization and before them, there is the encounter with the face of the other man, in which ethics and the possibility of peace and justice arises. That helps some, I guess. You didn’t give us the yes or no that I was hoping for but that is ok. Psychology is not prepared for a behavior that is not the result of nature, nurture, or an interaction of nature or nurture. Your alternative to nature, nurture, or interaction as an explanation doesn’t fit our way of approaching the origins of a behavior. Maybe we can just move on to your reading of our texts now. At the beginning of our conversation you protested that you didn’t see how psychology had anything to do with ethics. On that many of psychology’s detractors would

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agree. Their reading of the APA Monitor would yield a judgment that psychology is all about acquiring prestige and using power through professionalization and political action. After all, both of your professional organizations (the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society) are located in Washington, DC in order to facilitate contact with government officials, a proximity much closer to Foucault than to the ethical meaning I have tried to give that word (power) in my later work. Even your critics’ reading of your Science Directorate’s Psychological Science Agenda, which touts psychology’s scientific initiatives and achievements, would be seen as a propaganda sheet to justify the acquisition and expenditure of public and private funds for psychology as a special interest group. And so would you conclude that Psychology and Psychologists are unethical? Do you agree with the critics? Well, it really doesn’t matter. Although those observations may be justified to some measure and from a certain perspective, they do not negate the underlying ethical concern of the professional organization and its members. And what concern is that? The concern for the other. The concern for the other that emerges from the face. How do you see it being expressed? What is your evidence? Are you thinking of our expressed codes of ethics? Yes, they would be a part of it. It appears that you have explicit guidelines for such things as conducting psychological research, constructing and conducting psychological testing, and for the use of animals in experiments. The essential thing to think is not the specific guidelines themselves but the experience of the

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Psychology:

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Psychology:

Levinas:

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obligation to the Other from which the guidelines first arise and become an ethical necessity. But I don’t think those came from encountering “the face,” as you phrase it. I think codes of conduct probably come from culture. They are arrived at through consensus. Sometimes their development is pushed along by particular abuses, which would be denial of the face. But what makes an abuse an abuse? Is this purely a matter of consensus? Is an abuse an abuse only if there is a sufficient number of scientists to call it so? The determination of what constitutes an abuse and the development of ethical guidelines are later than what is always prior, which is the obligation to the other, before culture and any consensus it could develop. This obligation is an authority which can push along policies and guidelines. A researcher is a person who encounters a research subject just as a person encounters another person outside of a research situation. The ethical obligation is there in both situations because the research subject does not cease to be the human subject, the other subject. The ethical adventure of the researcher leads outside the subject, out to the other. OK, but I’m really not convinced that psychology is, as you say, “hostage to the face of the other.” Any other evidence? Psychology can’t hide its concern for the other, its own life as commanded and responsible for the Other. Psychology gives away its ethical orientation in so many ways. It is, as you would say, easy to spot. Could you be more specific about how psychology signals its supposed ethical concern or orientation “in so many ways”? You give it away in your narration of your history. You give it away in your presentation of yourself in the APA

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Monitor and your APA and APS websites. You give it away in your journals and you often broadcast it in your book titles. I am intrigued by your “deconstructing” our websites. Sounds like you regard them as texts, just like our journals and books. I do not think Derrida is the only person who would consider a website a text! Certainly it is a text, but this does not mean that it is the same type of text as a journal or a book. Derrida is right that we have to be very sensitive to the differences within and between various types of texts. My approach here has been to work with all of the texts available to get the most comprehensive picture of psychology possible. And what do you find in your reading of these various texts? First, I’d like to make some general comments from examining several of the history and systems textbooks that tell your story. It seems like you go to considerable lengths to separate modern psychology from what went on before the modern era. Distancing from the speculation of philosophy and theology seems especially important. Although some of the authors seem to want to show continuity of certain themes over time, the tendency is to emphasize the discontinuity between a premodern speculative, nonexperimental psychology and a modern empirical psychology studying naturalistic phenomenon with rigorous research methodologies. The point that psychology is a science is driven home repeatedly. My question is what does that do for your ability to understand the full depth and significance of human existence? It could make some things clearer and easier to see while obscuring some things and perhaps making them easier to stumble over. Theoretical diversity

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is usually emphasized though the discussion of the schools of psychology. Progress is also a common theme. Although there is some tendency to employ the “great person” method of historical analysis, other authors take more of a “great ideas” or “grand themes” approach in telling psychology’s story. Some of the authors pick up on politically correct themes and explore mistakes of the past (e.g., the racist consequences of Goddard’s advocacy of intelligence tests for immigration screening; Broca’s sexism in the use of brain weight in the assessment of mental ability, etc.). So, where is the ethical in psychology’s narrative of itself in its history and systems texts? I think that the compelling demands of the face are most clearly seen in psychology’s role in providing for mental health needs and, surprisingly, in early industrial psychology. Mental health reform was pursued because of the face of the other, the person suffering — not to make an HMO more profitable. The selection of street car operators was not pursued because a robber-baron wanted to increase efficiency, but to reduce the frequency of accidents leading to injury of street car operators. Taylor’s pig iron consultation is another example. Taylor worked for “win-win” situations and was pleased that the pig iron handler increased his income while improving productivity. Industrial psychology was concerned about the face of the street car operator and the face of the pig iron handler. This could be considered a modern version of the Biblical account of the obligation toward the widow, the poor, and the orphan. History and systems textbooks that cover the development of the mental health and industrial-organizational psychology professions up to the present usually note examples of progress that have positive consequences for the people being served. For example, the increased

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concern for diversity-sensitive diagnosis and psychotherapy would be described as progress in the mental health field. Here we have psychology held hostage to the alterity of the face. In modern industrial-organizational psychology we have practitioners recognizing the competing but interlocking needs of various organizational members (e.g., labor and management) and deliberately take a mediation stance in consultation. Thus, the Industrial/Organization psychologist is simultaneously seeing the face of two others and acting on an ethical obligation to both. I’m sure that if I moved from the general narrative texts of the history and systems of psychology to the texts dealing with the practice of psychotherapy and Industrial/ Organizational psychology I would find even more examples of psychologists responding to their obligation to the Other. While I am on the topic of those who provide services I want to talk about something that I found on the APA website: Divisions. That’s an interesting word. I expected that psychologists, like most professional groups, would cluster around interests. It seems radical and risky to speak of the grouping as divisions. Could the existence of divisions lead to conflict and separation? In fact, I see a great, but unarticulated and underappreciated unity in all those divisions; they all reflect an ethical response to the face of the other. There are several divisions devoted to serving mental health needs as we would expect. There is a division devoted to industrial-organizational psychology. There is also a division for those practitioners responding to the face of the other if the other needs health psychology assistance. Those are established professional areas in which psychologists expect to be paid for their services. But, then there are some divisions that don’t seem to have

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natural clients prepared to pay for the psychological services provided (e.g., Peace Psychology; Population and Environmental Psychology; Psychology of Women; Society for the Psychological Study of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Issues; Society for the Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues). These divisions exist because certain psychologists have seen the face of a particular other (a victim of war; a woman, a person oppressed by family size or environmental disaster; a gay man; a person of color). Then there are divisions that might be viewed as serving the status quo but which also connect people who respond to ethical concerns in those specialties (e.g. Media Psychology, American Psychology-Law Society) and apply their research to challenge the status quo in response to the Other. It is not surprising that one of the history and systems books (Leahey 2000) had sections in a chapter on contemporary psychology entitled “Giving Psychology Away” and “The Turn To Service.” Psychology’s ethical commitment is evident not only to me but also to insiders describing the contemporary scene. But why not account for involvement of psychologists with various divisions by a simpler hypothesis — interest or curiosity? Or maybe social approval? But why the interest or curiosity? No, I don’t think curiosity is powerful enough to maintain their involvement in many of their research programs, and there is little social recognition for their pursuit. I think that a better explanation is the compelling nature of the intersubjective encounter with the face of the other. Does not a psychologist’s involvement in a particular specialization or division often stem from a particular interaction with a particular other wherein a summons to responsibility was announced? Is it really money, power, or prestige that decides everything?

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I suppose we could conduct an empirical investigation to test the various hypotheses (e.g., curiosity, social approval, “the face of the other,” and so on.). And yet what would that “empirical observation” prove or disprove? If only a small minority actually testified to and articulated a sense of ethical obligation to the other, would that disprove the obligation that comes with the advent of the other man? Can what is beyond culture and beyond the time in which the self is able to recollect itself into an identity be proven through a survey or any other instrument of empiricism? I see psychology consumed by obligation. You are hostage to the face of the other and don’t know it. Your only use of the term ethic seems to be as a label for your formal ethical guidelines as a professional. But the topics that many of your divisions pursue are absolutely saturated with ethical concern. Yet you don’t seem to talk about it. You don’t even seem to notice it. I want to take up a couple of lines of psychological research — Stanley Milgram’s study of authority and the Kitty Genovese case — that especially embody ethical concern a little later. In those two cases we will be looking at how ordinary people respond to the face of the other. They highlight how one’s perspective influences one’s interpretation. Where you see aggression, I see ethical concern. So you want to wait till later to look at specific research? Yes, I would like to leave that till last and explore some other examples from some of your other texts that also point to this concern for the ethical among psychologists. I am familiar with the style of most of your research journals. I was somewhat unprepared for what I found in the APA Monitor. I’m impressed with how many of the articles cover topics laced with ethical concern. It’s

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not that the journalist is putting an ethical spin on a piece of research; rather, it is the choice of the topic itself which displays an ethical concern and even obligation to the face of the other. I do not see neutral, objective researchers in pursuit of greater understanding of human behavior for the sake of science. Rather, I see researchers who are responding to what they have seen — the face of the other. That responsibility to the other is what guides or orients them in their selection of topics; the ethical gives their work meaning and direction, which is exactly how my own writings describe the way the ethical lives and works within human life with the other man. And what is more, the psychologists’ research findings have implications for public policy that would lead to a more just society. So you think its title should be changed to the APA Monitor of Ethics And Justice? Well, the question to ask would be: would that change make the work of psychologists any more oriented and directed by the ethical sense, by responsibility to the other, than it already is? Granted, not all of the things being monitored involve ethical considerations, but many are saturated with concerns about the experience of those without a strong voice. If psychological research is about gaining understanding then it is about gaining understanding for a purpose, and very often that purpose is justice. Even articles about funding of research show an organization attempting to use its power on behalf of those who are on the margin with only a small voice. This is why I would disagree with critics who would say that professional organizations like the APA are only about power. If they were only about power, then their service and research would serve only those most able to reward them. There is a little catch phrase that pops up every now

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and then in the APA Monitor that really captures this sentiment: giving away psychology. The fact that psychology is so immersed in research and service to the less powerful is an indication that it is hostage to ethical concerns derived from intersubjective experience with the face of the other, and thus is intent on giving away psychology for the purpose of improving the lives of those who may not be able to pay for the service or the research on which the service is based. This is why at the outset I said that I thought that the reality and experience which I have tried to describe in the language of philosophy is hardly foreign to the work and ongoing life of psychology. Anything else you want to comment on? I was also interested in the titles of the books that are published by the APA. Two new releases in particular caught my eye: Protecting Human Subjects and Integrating Spirituality Into Treatment. Psychology can’t escape the demand of the ethical. Because psychology so intently studies the life of persons — including our life with others — it encounters the face of the other and its own responsibilities. And it is not just those two titles. Many of the other APA books listed at the website have their origin in that same type of ethical encounter. It seems quite clear that much of psychology is an ethical enterprise; however, the ethical commitment seems overshadowed by a clinical, scholarly objectivity and detachment. This is puzzling because an ethical enterprise like psychology demands commitment. You haven’t said much about the American Psychological Society (the APS) so far. Are they also being held hostage? From a quick surf around their website I would have to say yes. It appears that the development of a competing professional organization was years in the

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making, and that the dust is still settling. Given that the interest clusters of the APA were called divisions, it is surprising that the division didn’t occur earlier. It is interesting to note that many psychologists are members of both the APS and the APA. I would have to say that although there is a strong thrust for the APS to differentiate itself as the more scientific (vs. practitioner) organization, there is enormous overlap between the two organizations. One of the most obvious areas of overlap is ethical concern. Research topics for APS members don’t arise in a vacuum — they arise from encounters with the face of the other in the same way that they do for APA members. There are explicit statements about the APS’s desire to “give away” psychological research and to take an advocacy role through offering relevant scientific research on which to base public policy decisions. Sounds like ethical concern to me. Any other texts, or are we ready to read together the Milgram and Genovese narratives? Why did you pick these anyway? They seem to be the clearest disconfirmation of your ideas that I can think of. I would select them to discredit your ideas about the ethical demands inherent in an encounter between two people. First, you are entering as evidence for your position the classic experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram on obedience to authority. Here we have experimental subjects shocking the daylights out of confederates because they are not “learning” the word pairs as they are supposed to. And yet you say that this confirms that an ethical concern is at the heart of an intersubjective experience of the face of the Other. I do not speak of evidence, and I am not interested in proving things, in rounding out the reality of which I speak and making it conform to the outlines of science and rationality. The ethical demand in the face of the

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other is prior to any attempt to prove or disprove, to make things conform to scientific rationality, and any attempt to prove or disprove already has the ethical encounter with the other as its foundation, though the ethical demand is a foundation without foundation, and an authority without force. So what would you say about the Milgram study on authority, where ordinary humans were able to harm the other man simply because they were told to do so? I am saying that even in this study the command in the face of the other is still demonstrated and lives. But here we have 63 percent of the experimental subjects going clear to 450 volts. I wouldn’t call that being hostage to the face of the other. There are two other topics that are quite relevant to the responsibility for the other man that are covered in most of your social psychology textbooks — aggression and altruism. You seem so Darwinian in your acceptance of aggression as a norm for explaining human motivation. It also seems to me that you psychologists all too readily impute negative motivation to even good or desirable behavior like altruistic expressions. You usually explain altruistic behavior as self-serving (e.g., feel good — do good, reciprocity, kin selection) or the result of socializa-tion (e.g., norms, direct teaching, modeling, reinforcement). Your understanding of personhood seems limited to seeing humans as just another kind of highly developed animal, generally controlled by environmental variables who can invent computers, make digital movies, and engage in aggression using sophisticated technology. But, we also include empathy as one hypothesis for explaining helping behavior. Yes, but empathy as a variable seems lost amid all of the other less useful explanations. I insist that the

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experience of the face of the other is fundamental to our experience of one another and that ethical concern is thus at the basis of our life with the other man. Why is empathy so subordinated to the other explanations in your narratives? I want to get you back to the Milgram study and see how you are going to use it to support your argument that the ethical is inherent in interpersonal relations. I think it will require a real sleight-of-hand, probably involving some clever work with words (something I would expect from a philosopher). Pretty suspicious of the philosopher aren’t you? I guess that was a little strong. Proceed. Make your case. The reason that I like the Milgram study is it flushes out in a dramatic way many of the things I suspected, experienced myself, but have not developed very thoroughly in my own work. I have, of course, discussed for many years the demand of responsibility for the other and what this does to the life of the subject. But I also recognize all too well that the demand of the ethical can be denied and negated. The life of the subject commanded to responsibility for the other is in no way comparable to a German soldier given an order by a superior officer. This is why I have described the ethical command as an authority without force. The Holocaust is for me — as it is for others — the supreme example of how the ethical command can be denied and effaced. And there are ways in which the ethical command is muted and eclipsed that are evident in our daily experience. What processes take place when the fundamental authority of the ethical is not given force in the life and actions of the person? The Milgram study helps answer that because the study is not just one experiment but a series of experiments involving a number of variations among several dimensions, something you

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call independent variables. For example, a change in the distance between the “teacher” (person doing the shocking) and the “learner” (confederate apparently being shocked) resulted in a dramatic difference in the experimental subject’s behavior. The closer the proximity, the more the power of the face on the other to generate an ethical response. Conversely, the greater the distance, the greater the possibility for a breakdown of the ethical response. Psychology seems to portray humans as having an easy time engaging in aggression. I would argue just the opposite from this study. Milgram had to distance people from one another in order to have one harm the other. Think about what is necessary to mobilize aggression toward another group or nation. It is necessary to not only take away the face, or as you say deindividuate, the other, but to go one step further and demonize the other. To demonize is to give another face to the group so that the nonethical, even violent, response is not only justified but demanded. Another thing that Milgram had to do to get people to abandon the ethical was to require progressive investment. People would not start off with large voltage shocks. Milgram found that he had to get people to start walking on the “slippery slope” with mild shocks before he could get them to deliver the higher and supposedly more harmful voltages. The level of legitimacy and immediacy of the authority were also important. Authority had to be “in-your-face” in order get a person to subordinate their natural ethical concern during the experiment. When people did comply, they did so reluctantly and with considerable personal distress. It was viewed as an ordeal for those involved — so much so that the Milgram study is often presented as an example of unethical treatment of experimental subjects because of the level of distress induced.

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If this study can be said to demonstrate anything, it is that the ethical concern when encountering the face of the other holds us hostage. Far from finding a readiness for people to harm others, Milgram found it exceedingly difficult to structure such a situation. I know that early on in your career you wrote an article on Hitlerism and that you experienced the Holocaust yourself. I wonder if you see something in the Milgram experiment that helps make sense of the Holocaust and of why there is such a thing as evil and inhumanity? It is not possible to understand or make sense of the Holocaust. There may be things within the Milgram experiment that make clearer how it is possible for some humans to deny the obligation to the other, but that is not my concern. Certainly in the Holocaust the Nazis treated their pets with kindness while they abused their fellow man. I know how little humanity manifested itself in 1942. The memories are vivid. They live from the Holocaust. What was operative in Nazi culture and in all culture of hatred, in all anti-semitisms, that made it possible to deny the face of the other? Certainly there was a powerful ideology that worked to efface the face of the other. And did the violators have to walk down Milgram’s slippery slope of progressive investment in harming their neighbor? I don’t know. What I do know is that the ethical command is inscribed in the faces of the victims. I am sorry for having to ask those questions. I know that both you and Milgram are very conscious of the relevance and urgency of your work and desire that your readers examine the implications of your work for their relationships. Yes, I agree that these are the kinds of discussions that we need to have. We do share some common concerns. As I have been saying, the Milgram study helps us see

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the reality of this fundamental ethical concern and perhaps even leads us to contemplate some factors that may nullify that fundamental ethical concern. This to me is psychology using its intellectual resources to pursue its ethical orientation. This is an example of service to and responsibility for the other, an example of what I sometimes call wisdom in the service of love. I appreciate how difficult this must be for you to struggle with this type of application, but I would like to have you explore another derivative of your concepts and the Milgram study. The Holocaust has had a tremendous impact on your work. Yet, in the face of the Holocaust you contend that in every interhuman encounter the command of the ethical lives, though it may be effaced or negated. In Israel there are 800 trees lining the Avenue of the Righteous to honor those who did respond ethically to the face of the other, often placing themselves at considerable personal risk to do so. Do you see some application of your work to help us understand their motivation? They certainly saw their own responsibility in the face of the other. But I see where you are going. If one can eventually harm others by walking on a slippery slope where there is progressive investment (small steps) in complying with authority, maybe one can cross over the ridge to the other side and walk on a slippery slope of progressive investment that leads to taking really large risks on behalf of the face of the other? This is a question for the social scientist, for methodical analysis and measurement, for reason and ratio. Think of it: six million Jews and millions of others measured against only 800 trees. This is evil beyond measure, beyond reason and ratio. Where should we go next? What I tried to do with your Milgram texts is show

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that there is an alternate framework for looking at certain kinds of interpersonal encounters and that one can see the concern for the ethical as easily or more easily than the propensity for persons to harm other persons. Psychology may be too captive to Darwinian notions of competitive survival motivation to see alternative possibilities. I’m ready to demonstrate how the concern for the ethical shows itself in the Kitty Genovese case and the cluster of classic studies carried out by Latane, Darley, and others on bystander intervention. Our scale is back down to a more manageable level here. What was newsworthy about the Genovese rapemurder was that it took place over a long span of time in the hearing of over 30 witnesses. It is disturbing to think those hearing the person resisting an attacker did not respond. What could it mean? Could it mean that bystanders were callous? Could it mean they were fearful and wanted to preserve their own lives? What made the ethical imperative inoperative in this situation? You have raised several important questions. I hope you will be able to answer them. In the Milgram study we see how difficult it is to get people to harm one another. In the bystander intervention studies spawned by the Genovese case we see how difficult it is to get people not to help one another, to drown out that human response to the appeal of the Other for help. It is clear that the ethical command of responsibility for the other lives across a wide range of situations. Please proceed. It is not that the ethical demand contained in the intersubjective experience of the face of the Other can not be negated, but that it is difficult to negate it. One of the most powerful forces on our response to the Other is the others that are also present. Those hearing

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the Genovese screams were in the presence of others who also heard the screams. If we are the lone person encountering the person in need, we will help. If we are with others, we assess the situation by how others are responding and that governs our behavior. So it is not that the responsibility for the other is not there, but that I decide what I should do by what the others who are also responsible are doing to respond to the Other. It is as if we are solving a joint problem and using others’ behavior to determine our response. In addition to size of the bystander group and the behavior of the bystander group, there is the relative clarity of the nature of the need and the capacity to help. Psychologists demonstrated that distance from the Other weakens the ethical obligation while closeness strengthens it. Clarity of need increases the ethical response while ambiguity diminishes it. That is helpful. It seemed from your writing that the ethical concern is always there influencing the encounter. Now I can see that you recognize that this fundamental ethical response can be diminished or negated by a variety of situations. Yes, I think that the common reaction to my work is to bring up the argument about whether humans are basically good or evil. That is not a question that I am addressing. I am not saying that humans are basically good. I am not saying that humans are basically bad or evil. What I am saying is that the ethical command lives in the interhuman encounter. Now there may be conditions that diminish the authority of that ethical command, but that ethical command of responsibility for the other still announces its authority. I think that it is hard for some to grasp this because their view of human existence involves a notion of people as highly developed animals engaged in an effort to survive

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through competition. And we all too often think of humans as individual persons without thinking of the significance of the fact that in the life of the subject there is not only the subject but the life of the other man. It is because there is not just the subject but the other man that there is command, appeal, responsibility, ethics, and the possibility of peace, nonviolence, and justice. Well, you have reflected back a different face for psychology. I can see that peace, nonviolence, and justice are certainly the concerns of a great many psychologists, although not usually explicitly articulated. As I have said, psychology has many ways of responding to the ethical demand in the face of the other. I would even say that when psychology’s sensitivity to its responsibilities to its various others leads it to broaden itself, leads it to follow its own ethical orientation into peace studies or studies of hatred or prejudice or of oppressed peoples, this is not just an event within the power structure of professional organizations. This is an event within the larger history of man’s responsibility for the other man, and this history is sacred history itself. Sacred history? You would consider developments within the APA and APS and within the discipline of psychology as within sacred history? Certainly they may be so. If they further human obligation, if they follow the anarchical ethical sense and direction within man’s encounter with the other man, they may certainly be considered events within sacred history itself. I can see that we do share many common interests and many common concerns. I certainly hope that our conversation can continue.

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A Levinasian Psychology? Perhaps . . .1 David R. Harrington A L EVINASIAN P SYCHOLOGY As one who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Emmanuel Levinas and psychology, I have found the recent study of Levinas by psychologists to be enormously rewarding. But this happiness is not unequivocal. I fear that Levinas will become another plug-in module in lectures and textbooks. A clinical manual will have a chapter entitled “Contemporary Jewish Thought,” and after two pages on Martin Buber and how one can turn an “I-it” relationship into an “I-Thou” relationship, we will come to a page and one-half on Emmanuel Levinas. Topics will include “ethically-oriented appreciation of the Other” and “how to attune oneself to the Other as teacher.” Standards will be offered in journal articles based on whether one’s clinical language does violence or not “according to the work of Emmanuel Levinas.” When we see these developments, it will be a time of considerable irony. Levinas’s work is to great degree a commentary on the need to pause as we encapsulate, judge, and systematize. Levinas lauds patient and public discourse in which time is spent examining texts, persons and events, in which one invests oneself in studying meaning without rushing to judgement. Levinas’s work, while valuing systematized thought for what he understood as its moral function, is antisystematic; for Levinas, system and systematizing must be judged from outside the system and the systematizing, from the infite and other-directed Outside known as ethics. One may thus think of Levinas’s thought as 209

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the antitrust force of philosophy, a subversive assault upon monopolistic understanding. Levinas states that ethics requires us to make judgments and that such judgments need a system in which hierarchical criteria reign; it is just that such judgements are important — are only important — because of persons, who lie outside of the systems by which we come to judgement. For Levinas, the human part of human beings cannot be brought into philosophical (or psychological) understanding in any way that approaches adequation. However, it is required that we attempt this impossible task because we are compelled to make practical and moral judgements — judgements regarding multiple others, infinities — based in our finite abilities to assess and understand. It would be ironic to have such a trustbuster bound in dogmatic circumscribed bundles of text. Yet it is also clear to me that Levinas does have a great deal to offer psychology. Levinas’s philosophy prioritizes the human as other and the human as subject. Therefore, one is tempted to assume that one may then build a study of the human, a psychology, upon such a foundation. But can it become the basis for a systematic psychology, a humanistic psychology, a developmental psychology, or any other psychology? What can we garner from his philosophy and the irritation that his philosophy provokes within us? This work attempts to approach an answer, albeit an equivocal answer, by discussing Levinas’s approach to time, the other person, and subjectivity. Lived time, for Levinas, is a quasi-linguistic process whereby subjectivity is called into the present by another person, the Other, who hovers in a future. The very process of temporality is grounded in a nonvolitional ethical responsibility taken by the self in response to the demand of the Other. After reviewing this temporal basis, it is suggested that a singular psychological system, a particular series of techniques, or a map of a person (or people in general) could not be consistent with a Levinasian psychology. On the other hand, Levinas’s philosophy provides a site from which we may judge psychology, and he even gives some shaky criteria by which it may be judged. Further, his philosophy suggests that a language of hesitancy and humility should

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be developed to surround psychological pronouncements. Additionally, Levinas’s philosophy suggests we value certain human characteristics which have previously been adjudged as worthless or pathological.

B EING AS T EXT — B EING AS N OW Levinas’s earlier philosophical texts progressed from commentaries on Husserl and Heidegger to pointed critiques of the attempt by Western philosophy to encompass all through understanding. His movement into poststructural semiology — which permeates Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1998d) — allowed him to address the groundlessness and potential nihilism of deconstruction’s il n’y pas de hors-text (there is nothing outside of the text). For Levinas, while it may make a certain sense to say that there may not be anything outside of the text, there was something outside of the text, and when the text is spoken it is spoken to one who will hear it. “Being,” that term which is so often used without reflection, refers to the assemblage of interconnected meanings which is the present, now. Being is that which is, that which is or can be assembled in the now. Being is text, consisting of words, distinctions and articulations which arise out of one’s relation with the world. The coming to presence of these articulations is referred to by Levinas as “essence,” the process of being. Whether one examines the articulating — the coming into presence — or the already articulated — signifiers of perceptions, ideas, speech, or affect — one finds that they are signifiers, connected to other signifiers and contexts, which, if they are not already present, may be gathered into the purview of the now, of being. Such then is Levinas’s conception of being. Being is the systematized present, a text in which some meanings are already present and some meanings are in process of becoming clear. Although generally not explained so blatantly by others, Levinas is not original in this conception. What is original is his discussion of what lies outside that linguistic system, “otherwise than being or beyond essence.” The archetypal heroes of Greek and Judaic traditions, Ulysses and Moses, may be used as metaphors for the two conceptions of time

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referred to by Levinas. Ulysses left his home for a long journey, but returned to Ithaca, where through much travail, he was readmitted to the former network of relations and to the ancient marriage bed he shared with Penelope. Moses, on the other hand, was called forth into a future, to a land which he did not know and from a land to which he would never return. He never consummates a union with his future, the Promised Land. Both past and future remain outside of his grasp, outside of his power, outside of maintenant, the French word for now (holding within the hand). He cannot achieve union, consummation, or even understanding of the temporal condition, but still is compelled to move toward a future he cannot share. Levinas contests traditional notions of time as grasped and graspable — the “Greek” notion of time — whether represented through the typical spatialized timeline of personal or world history or through the phenomenological retention within the present of a past and anticipations of a future. Levinas’s time is a time where persons elude presentation, escape being brought into the grasp of the now. It is a remarkable synthesis of superstructuralism, phenomenology, and Judaic notions of a world created in a past by forces beyond one’s control and which extends into a future which is unknown yet compelling.

Future: The Pursuit of the Other Levinas discusses the face as evidence that the other person eludes the system which would bring all within comprehension. When we look at another’s face, what is it that we see? If we look at the color of eyes, the blemishes on cheeks, the well-formed nose, it is not the other we see. “[W]hat happens when we look at a real face? Intriguingly, we seem to gaze through it. It half-vanishes, like the pages of a book, so we view soul more than contour” (McNeill 1998, 5–6). We follow the face’s animation rather than the details. Even when the features of the face are at rest, our gaze never rests upon its object. We are motivated to place the objects of our perceptions into an interlocking system where all things are present within a synchronic now. Yet the face escapes our efforts. It runs away at the periphery of presentation and

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representation. It is important to realize that what is being described is experiential. Though we rarely reflect upon it, this common experience betrays an ethical element. The very resistance of the face to encompassment is a command which must be obeyed. I cannot swallow you into my system, and you, in the escape from the attempt, have told me not to do so. The face, if not phenomenological, is thus an ethical datum. It is not that the face prevents murder or humiliation; it is that such acts fail to bring the other into the systematic present which is being. The face freezes my powers of appropriation (if they are indeed mine) and appears as an exposure, a demand. Levinas’s conception of eros is perhaps the clearest way to understand this perception of the other. The caress is unlike palpation. In palpation, something, a what, is sought, surrounded, ascertained as this or that. In a caress, the search is on, but the object of the search is ever escaping. There is, of course, ambiguity in the caress. It does indeed find flesh and response, but when the caress stops its search, it is no longer a caress. We can say that the object of the caress is not an object. In the same way, the gaze which caresses the face of the other is a search. To be sure, it fixates here and there, on lips and eyebrow. But these are aberrations in personal perception. The other’s animation is not an object; if there is an object to the gaze it is the animator who is not able to be objectified, who objects to the attempt. In the face of the other person we find refusal to enter the system, to be brought to presence. We also find infinity — in-finity deriving from “without end.” There is an infinite source of the new. There is also infinite demand, a demand to devote all of me to the service of the other. No matter how much I do or speak or follow, I will never reach the end of you. Levinas professes that the other eludes us into the future, and because the other eludes us, the lived future is an unattainable future.

Before: Who I Was Most languages are composed of nouns (the names of distinct objects or substantives) and their modifiers, including verbs (which indicate action, existence, or occurrence) (cf., Greenberg 1966). If we

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were to infer, from the structure of any such language, the kind of experience that a speaker of it has, we would assume a world containing relatively clearly bounded areas or entities — and transformations which occur to these entities. Yet if our temporal experience was characterized by the incessant movement of sensations and impressions — William James’s stream of consciousness — or, similarly, if our experience of time was of a constant flow from past to present to future, would we not expect to find a language which more or less reflected or conveyed such a flux? Certainly we can conceive of an analogical language which would reflect a world characterized by Jamesian flux or homogenous flow; such a language would detail the subtle and seemingly constant fluctuations in spectra of color, pain, weight, luminance, and so forth. It would have tonal, syllabic, and phonetic features which would vary analogically with what the terms represented. However, most languages do not represent a world of uninterrupted flow. Instead, most languages depict via nouns a world fixed in idealities and quiddities, as it also documents via verbs the transformative moments between those states. It could be that instead of language failing to adequately represent such experience, that the description of experience as simple flux is flawed. Our language may already be analogical, may already reflect our temporal experience. Levinas states: “To speak of time in terms of flowing is to speak of time in terms of time and not in terms of temporal events” (1998d, 34). Indeed, language is part and parcel of our temporal experience. And that experience, rather than one of perpetual flux and flow, is of punctuated instants, the coming into the present of articulated terms. Language, according to Levinas, arises in sensibility. He believes that one is, at first, a “sensible” and “vulnerable” subject, sensible in the sense of feeling and perceiving — and vulnerable in the sense that sensibility is absolutely passive and open to imposition. Further, upon sensing, one is transformed immediately from a sensible subject to a signifying subject. This is an ethical turn, even if not willed. Sensing becomes articulation, identification of the sensed. Levinas identifies,

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in this momentary transformation from sensing to articulation of the sensed, a movement in which subjectivity, me, moves from receiving experience to “speaking” that experience. But, the subject is as a vulnerable surface onto which sensations are thrown. In the instant in which I passively receive a taste, an emotion, or a pain, I find that I am moved to articulate it as a word, a distinction, a thought. But the articulation is not simply a word that comes forth from my mouth; it is also something I become. I am not an all-seeing subject overlooking the passage of time. I am swept up in the movement of the instant. I become a sign. I move from the taste of the honey to the articulation of its sweetness, from the breaching of my skin to the moan of pain. This moment of articulation, which demarcates the instant, is a linguistic move for, or “as-if ” for, the Other. It is, for Levinas, a basis which grounds temporality itself in ethics. It is a movement from what Levinas terms the “saying” to what he terms the “said.” Levinas’s distinction between language as “saying” and language as “said” should not be confused with other commentators’ bipartite differentiations (“langue and parole,” “signifier and signified,” “competency and production,” “code and message,” and so on). It is true that there is a similarity between Levinas’s “said” and Saussure’s langue; Saussure’s term refers to language as a synchronic system, and Levinas’s term refers to language which has entered into such a system. The said is process or completion of articulation (Levinas 1998d, 45) and has entered into the systematized synchrony that is the present: Levinas is indebted to the structuralists for its conception. But Levinas’s saying is a term for a temporal distinction which has no comparable concept in the technical lexicons of linguists and psycholinguists. Saying, the movement preceding the said, is a movement toward the other person, a process of initiating articulation for another. And, as stated above, the saying arises from a bed of sensibility — the site (or time, since site implies spatiality) of subjectivity. Sensibility is subject-to, exposedness, “having been offered without any holding back” (Levinas 1998d, 75), complete passivity. Levinas alludes to the surface of the skin to illustrate the openness of sensibility, but sensibility is open to enteroception, sound, light, and other

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assaults. Indeed, the picture painted by Levinas is of an extended surface without an interior or reverse side which would provide escape. Sensibility is like a Mobius strip, where all sides are exposed as surface. Sensibility is acted upon rather than acting. Sensibility is openness to the other. But a reversal occurs. When one senses — cold steel, light feathers, headache, sunlight — one both senses and signifies. The ambiguity of embodied sensibility is that it is a “duality of the sensing and the sensed” (Levinas 1998d, 72). Sensibility experiences what is imposed upon it and then immediately, in staccato fashion, turns outward with its signification. Sensibility is at the crux of the unfolding of the instant, the disturbance that is the temporal correlation of the saying and said. Such a dephasing is a dehiscence, since the for-oneself of sensibility is turned inside-out and via signification becomes for-the-other. Even in enjoyment, the for-oneself of what Levinas deems conatus (selfpreservation — Spinoza referred to it as amour propre, self-love) is undone in the movement from saying to said. Rather than rest in a rhapsodic and atemporal oneness, the moment of sensation is overtaken with an outward turn of articulation. From the first sub-jection into the saying, the turning into sign, from the sensing to the sensed, sensibility moves into knowledge and consciousness. The dehiscence propels the upsurge of the instant; one moves from a time alone into the synchronic time of the world. At the acme of the élan, the “top of the moment,” subjectivity is a participant in the synchronous system of the said, consciousness. Levinas refers to this as a time of “theoretical receptivity from a distance” (1998d, 75), since sense has been re-presented. Yet it reverts in the next instant to the passivity of sensibility; it moves back to the unique me. Our communicative language may, through its nouns and verbs, be in accord with the experienced world, since our temporality is linguistic in character. But the language has a difficult time extricating from itself the one who, through responsibility, is the saying. The scope of subjectivity — sensibility, saying — exceeds the power of words. Something happens in time which, though fully human and constitutive of

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the lived world, escapes presentation. And that something is someone, a someone who answers, before all choice with “Here I am.” The subject, born in a moment before articulation — before now — enters into a synchronic present via linguistic articulations. We are only able to talk about that subjective time using terms of being, the sychronic system of the now. Thus, the sensible and responsive (responsible) subject which is on the other side of the moment remains as inadequately articulated. We use the terms of the systematic present, being, to describe this lived-past, what Levinas refers to as “otherwise than being,” but the terms we use are inadequate to explicate this early ethical time, a time which is the basis of justice and morality.

Being as Justice I have described the other person as future, subjectivity as past, and both as unable to be adequated, brought into being. But what of this now, this present, this time in which we are so invested. Levinas describes being as a time for “us.” Rather than a world consisting of a dyad, me and one other, the world consists of me and many others. So the infinite demand placed upon me by one, even if it could be adequately met, is actually in competition with the infinite demands placed upon me by another and another and so on. Being is a time when finite scales weigh infinite demands, when hierarchies are maintained in order to achieve justice. It is in a moral system, a culture, that I learn that I am one among others rather than one supporting the weight of all others — even though Levinas maintains that the experience or quasi-experience is that of weightbearer for all. I have not spent much time discussing being, because it is not the focus of most of Levinas’s work. Indeed, it is within being that ethical systems, morality, politics, and psychology become commentaries. And properly so. But it is from without being, beyond or otherwise, that its impetus lies.

A Site From Which to Judge Psychology: From Beyond Being to Ought Readers of Levinas have frequently asked questions regarding whether his texts are prescriptive (or proscriptive) in nature rather

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than descriptive. Does Levinas describe an “is” or preach an “ought”? If he does prescribe, how does his is relate to his ought? These questions involve the relationship between the philosopher’s ontology and his ethics. Such pragmatic readers ask whether we can derive praxis, practical conduct, from Levinas’s philosophy. Although the extent to which Levinas provides the details of such conduct is limited, and although his philosophy may be interpreted primarily as one which gives a transcendental foundation for any and all moral/legal systems, one of Levinas’s four goals in writing Otherwise than Being was “to derive praxis and knowledge in the world from this nonassumable susceptibility” (1998d, xlii). Levinas describes subjectivity’s anarchical foundation as altruistic and responsible (without denying the incredible violence that humans perpetuate upon each other). Subjectivity’s move from receptivity to articulation, which I described above as constitutive of time itself, is self-sacrificing and is a movement for-the-other. It is ethical, prior to ontology, “beyond being,” and beyond the “is.” It is this articulation of signs into being, the present, which is the basis of justice. The beyond being, which might be described as both “ought” and “must,” gives birth to the ontological, the “is.” The question regarding praxis asks whether an “ought” may now be derived. The question implies a further question: how is it possible to transcend one’s place in history, to wrest oneself (or be wrested) from fundamental historicity so that culturo-historical context is not the sole determinant of behavior? First, it is important to state Levinas’s belief that choice is available to humans, although the degree to which Levinas believes in choice is questionable. Levinas does not leave everything other than the élan to the forces of history. Humans have volition, and choices can be made which are oriented via their consonance with the Good. Levinas addresses one kind of choice near the end of Otherwise than Being: For the little humanity that adorns the earth, a relaxation of essence to the second degree is needed, in the just war waged against war to tremble or shudder at every instant because of this very justice. This weakness is needed. This relaxation of virility without cowardice is needed

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for the little cruelty our hands repudiate. That is the meaning that should be suggested by the formulas repeated in this book concerning the passivity more passive still than any passivity, the fission of the ego unto me, its consummation for the other such that from the ashes of this consummation no act could be reborn. (1998d, 185)

What are we to make of Levinas’s “relaxation of essence to the second degree?” Essence is Levinas’s technical term for coming-into-being. Essence is the “verbness” of being, the articulating of the distinctions of the world. This process is unwilled, an Ur-language which is fundamentally passive. This level of living in the language of the world, a time of passivity, we could call “first degree” essence. The “weakness,” “relaxation of virility,” and “relaxation of essence to the second degree” involve the will. The other who precipitates response is unclassifiable in any fundamental sense of the term. Surely he or she is of a particular gender, race, class, or body type, but the humanness which we actually seek in the face of the other always escapes the classificatory predation of consciousness. It is consistent with Levinas’s groundwork that this “relaxation of essence to the second degree” would involve the conscious attempt to avoid the classification of others into categories. We are being entreated by Levinas to relax the mode by which we compartmentalize others. Does Levinas have a particular audience in mind for his admonitions? The context of his discussion leads us to believe that he does: Levinas’s Otherwise than Being is a difficult book. Not many people have or will read it to the end. Those who have finished or will finish this masterpiece are without doubt intellectuals. And in the closing paragraphs of the book, after repeating his thesis that subjectivity is called upon to immolate itself out of responsibility, and after pointing to all of the world and saying that every person is virtually “chosen” to be responsible for all others, Levinas names the group whom he addresses, “intellectuals” (1998d, 184). Levinas has waited until the end of a major investment of time and effort by the reader to spring his trap and admonish the reader of his text. It is the intellectuals, he accuses, who as elites, forget that every person on the earth undergoes the definitively human sacrifice which

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is speech. And it is intellectuals whose linguistic skills perform violence upon those persons. Those of us who read the pages of Levinas stand accused of compartmentalizing people. Levinas warns that although subjectivity escapes being put into thing-like categories, when I encounter an other I still do damage through my own categories and subsequent actions regarding those categories. Violence still occurs. And that violence occurs during and after a form of cognitive judgement. I articulate categories for the others. I describe them as worthy, inferior, insane, or retarded. These judgements hold real consequences, especially when made by the elites about those who are not members of the elite. This then is the gist of Levinas’s admonition: to withhold judgement against persons, to revere them, and to honor the necessity for sober and shared deliberation when persons’ lives are at stake. This is the movement from description to prescription, from beyond what is to “ought.” Levinas calls us to be consistent with what motivates our temporality. The basis of consciousness, the basis of lived time itself, is the ethical response to the call of the Other. Out of this response comes a movement into a present which allows the dispassionate weighing of multiple demands. This present, being, is a time for justice. We should therefore be just. Although we are compelled by the Good to respond, we are not compelled to be just; but to be just is commensurate with what bespeaks the world. We are being asked to step away from our fundamental historicity and to appreciate the other human. We certainly cannot escape historicity. We are in the world and not at some eternal fulcrum point which allows transcendence over all points of time. Yet Levinas shows us a way, if not to escape historicity, to at least transcend it for a time. We do not escape the inertia of being, but by focusing upon the coming into meaning, the face of the other, and the elusiveness of alterity, we can admit to the finitude of our conceptions, the limitations of the said. We do not escape the persistence of the present, but listen for the trace of an irretrievable past. It is here that the systems of psychology can learn from Levinas. It is not that the systems that psychology develops are necessarily wrong

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or untrue, but that they are limited by their inability to capture what will always escape capture. Systems cannot contain subjectivity or alterity. The truly human escapes the said. The lesson of Levinas in regard to the creation of systems that circumscribe the human is to pause and consider their inadequacy. Simply recognizing that a system fails to be all-encompassing enables dialogue which transcends the system. When one remembers the hegemony claimed by behaviorism, the rigidity with which some neuropsychologists cling to neurological reductionism, the unwillingness of some of the “radical psychologists” of yesteryear to consider an organic component to schizophrenia, or any of numerous similar examples, one is confronted with situations which, through lack of “relaxation” of essence to the second degree, can perpetuate harm. I am not condemning system-making. Psychological data is nonsensical unless given sense by the system or context of which it is a part. The ought or should urged by Levinas is to consciously allow people to evade our conceptual taxonomies. The various systems of psychology will continue to accrue data, continue to make sense or be superseded by systems that do make sense, but no system will capture the personhood of the people being appraised. Systems may claim to do so and in that claim is danger because, though people will escape such attempts at capture, they may not retain their dignity or their lives.

To Value What Has Been Judged As Worthless: Oneness, Schism, and Psychology There are myriad reasons why people feel alienated, and although it is not my intention to cover the subject comprehensively, Levinas has a significant contribution to make. Levinas has explicated what might be considered a transcendental interpretation of alienation. In other words, the alienation that he describes, a self-alienation that is the foundation of consciousness and sociality, is the condition of the possibility of the myriad ways in which one can experience alienation. It is Levinas’s contention that alienation from oneself is the fundamental condition of the human qua self and that self-alienation is intrinsically related to subjectivity’s ethical basis. Levinas’s self-

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alienation (the Latin alienatio signifies separation or aversion, and alius means other) refers to the movement from self-satisfied atemporality to the disquieting fact of another’s proximity. Self is alienated from subjectivity due to the advent of the other. The nature of self-alienation should be of great interest to psychology; not only is it indicative of what is constitutive of me, subjectivity, but it is also not aberrant, not pathological. Irreparable harm has been perpetuated upon people by some practitioners and theoreticians of psychology through their belief that the manifestations of this alienation are symptomatic of a disease state. With little reflection, swept up by the Zeitgeist of recent times, they stress a fulfillment model of psychology, a notion that their role is to help people achieve a sense of oneness. My current discussion is cursory, and I recognize that I have sketched only one side of a multifaceted phenomenon. Self-alienation resulting in suicidal behavior, depression, social inadequacy, and other tragedies should concern psychologists and psychology. However, such concern needs to value the transcendental condition in which the particular alienation is based. For instance, the simplistic notion that guilt and worry are pathologies is a stance with which I vigorously disagree. These orientations are some of the manifestations of that otherdirected self-alienation which Levinas describes and which is a hallmark of the human. What is disturbing about the disparagement of these affective states — though they are not simply affective — is that these states are disparaged chiefly because they do not truly serve the ego, are not means to an end. That is to say, they all involve suffering without recompense. One wonders what ideology would reduce all ideal life to strategies of personal profit. Unfeigned guilt, worry, and grief are ways of giving unto an absent other without ever recuperating that time spent. If, for instance, a mother worries about her child late from school, what benefit accrues from the worry? Worry is not the superstition that obsession has magical powers. A mother’s worry will not prevent dire consequences or guarantee safe deliverance. Worry, as even those who view it as symptom correctly assess, prevents one from entering into the temporality of

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self-satisfaction. One remains ruptured, preoccupied with the absent other, and the savor of sheltered enjoyment is disrupted. One remains conscious for the other. And the precondition for this self-alienation is the vulnerability of a sensibility already carrying the weight of another. Worry, the sacrifice par excellence of oneself, arises out of the ethical stratum in which one is subjected to the responsibility for another. Guilt also has its genesis in responsibility for another. The past remains as an obscuring of the pleasures of the now. It is the unwelcome guest. Yet guilt involves one’s behavior toward another. Guilt is not self-referential in any simple way. If one is guilty of inadequate attainment of goals, it is either as one is assessed by another or as-if one is assessed by another. Without entering into the psychodynamic notion of the internalized parent who judges, we may still understand that the guilty one becomes a judge of him or herself as object. The basis for guilt is the responsibility for the other that is carried without choice by subjectivity. It is carried into the present as a disruption of the pleasure of the now as a giving of oneself to an absent other. Rather than a symptom of neurosis (although certain guilts could certainly be paralyzing, excessive, and needing clinical intervention), guilt is a manifestation of the sanctity of a subject who carries responsibility for others in the world. Grief, as well, does not serve the self. Reason would tell the bereaved that their grief will in no way bring back their loved ones. But grief is not based within reason. It is a manifestation of the for-theother that is the self-alienation described by Levinas. The emptiness felt by the bereaved is not self-serving. It is gratis, self-given to the other who is absent. In these states of existence — guilt, worry, and grief — we see evidence of the righteousness (hesed, agape) of human sensibility. The human is subjected to the other, and responsibility for the other remains in the other’s absence. Responsibility remains and disrupts the home. It is no wonder that psychology and especially the psy-chotherapist become involved with the worried, the guilty, and bereaved — yet it is a shallow understanding which classifies the hall-

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marks of the human as deviations from a mythic and self-sufficient ideal oneness. We may think of Levinas as a trustbuster. With deconstructive adeptness, Levinas challenges the hegemony of Western philosophy, theoretical reason, and of those superstructures built upon them. In this postmodern era, however, we have become used to such attacks. Deconstructive readings have demolished hierarchies, resurrected buried assumptions in order to pillory them, and brought forth the inherent ontotheological presuppositions upon which rhetoric is based. Tight arguments have become sieves. But Levinas leaves intact — or rather shows that thought cannot help but leave intact — the impetus for his work, the phenomenological sanctity of human existence. He also leaves intact the systems he questions. They are, after all, based in justice. He exposes their an-archical basis and their purpose — to serve. As such, we in the philosophically derived social science of psychology may find in Levinas, not technique or system, not a new map of mind or behavior, but a purpose for psychology, a reason for the pursuit. By continually and recursively returning to the language by which we conceptualize, we can challenge the ultimacy of our promulgations, diagnoses, and theories. We are challenged to question our language and acknowledge that the saying and hearing of language reside outside our conceptualizations. Levinas can also help us to realize that many mundane human qualities may be significant indicators of the ethical basis of being human.

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Notes Notes to Chapter 1/Williams & Gantt 1. While the term “modernism,” or “modernist,” may mean any number of different things to any number of people (for example, literary theorists, artists, and architects), in the discipline of philosophy it has a fairly restricted meaning that can be established with some degree of precision and agreement. Modernism has come to designate that movement in intellectual thought, given early expression in the work of René Descartes in the seventeenth century and continuing into the logical positivism of the twentieth century, which has emphasized the centrality of the epistemological problem. This tradition has stressed the necessity of a subject/observer in the formulation of appropriate and valid knowledge representations about the world. It also posits the existence of a reality independent of this subject/observer, which reality is orderly and lawful. For a more detailed treatment of this issue, particularly in regards to philosophical modernism’s relationship with postmodernism, we suggest Bernstein (1983) and Solomon (1988). Likewise, Faulconer and Williams (1990) provide a thoughtful discussion of the central points of contention between traditional modernist psychologies and various postmodern responses. Finally, Downing (2000) offers an well-organized and accessible treatment of these issues in the context of the practical needs of the practicing psychotherapist. 2. M. Brewster Smith (1994) and Kenneth J. Gergen (1994b) recently published works representative of the breadth of opinion, and the intellectual commitments this topic can arouse. The collection of essays in Walter Anderson’s 1995 book, The Truth about the Truth, illustrates the same type of intellectual discourse. 3. Of course, it must be noted here that we are speaking of the discipline of psychology, as conceived of in its predominant schools of thought and their various modes of inquiry. We are not addressing any particular psychologists. However, it is a fairly safe assumption that many in the discipline do, in fact, tend to subscribe to the very perspectives we are outlining, and that precisely to the extent that they address human activity in and through the perspective afforded by the mainstream of the discipline, they will have difficulty addressing human behavior as moral action. 4. Many postmoderns would recoil at this conclusion because they take themselves to be champions of individual and cultural diversity. However, diversity in

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the absence of a basis for making sound moral evaluations of cultures or persons is fun, but largely irrelevant. On such terms, one can appreciate diversity (difference), but one cannot really take it seriously, at least not on the grounds that persons and cultures themselves ask to be taken seriously. See Williams (1997) for a fuller explication of this argument. 5. See the selected bibliography at the end of this volume for some of the primary and secondary sources that we have found helpful in our study of this important thinker. 6. The other four are: Plato’s Phaedrus, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, and Bergson’s Time and Free Will (see Levinas 1985, 37–38). 7. Many who have examined the history of both existentialism and phenomenology frequently point to this text as one of the more crucial in establishing the necessary climate of interest for the profoundly German thought of Husserl and Heidegger to take hold in France (e.g., Spiegelberg 1994). In fact, as Simone de Beauvoir reports, it was immediately after encountering this text that Jean-Paul Sartre decided to leave Paris and travel to Freiburg in order to study this new phenomenological philosophy (as cited in Cohen 1994, 118). 8. Shortly after the war a son, Michael, was born in Paris. 9. In a captivating 1984 interview with Richard Kearney, Levinas states that “Phenomenology represents the second, but undoubtedly most important, philosophical influence on my thinking. Indeed, from the point of view of philosophical method and discipline, I remain to this day a phenomenologist” (14). 10. For Plato’s discussion of the Idea of the Good beyond Being, see Republic, 517b through 518d, in addition to the quotations made by Levinas himself (in Totality and Infinity, 102–03). 11. In distinguishing the terms “Other” and “other,” we follow the convention established in the translation of Totality and Infinity. The term “Other” represents the French, “l’autrui,” or the personal other, the other person. In contrast, “other” represents “l’autre,” or otherness in general. 12. The reference is to a passage in Pascal’s Pensees that Levinas is fond of quoting, which appears as one of the epigraphs prefacing Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence: “‘That is my place in the sun.’ That is how the usurpation of the whole world began” (1998d). 13. It must be kept in mind that this recognition is not cognitively complex or socially mediated. It comes when such things are put out of play, and experience is emancipated. It is the kind of recognition toward which all phenomenologists have strived and to which all human beings are heir, by virtue of their humanity.

Notes to Chapter 2/Cohen 1. On Nietzsche’s decadence see Heller’s revealing comparison of Nietzsche and Rilke (1989, 87–126), Nordau (1993, 415–72), and Cohen (1994, 67–89). 2. It is interesting to note that Henri Bergson, whose philosophy of intu-

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ition in many ways anticipated Husserl’s phenomenology, often used what he called “psychology” — without “psychologism” — as the method for his own fundamental researches. 3. A comment by Leo Strauss seems appropriate here: “It is safer to try to understand the low in the light of the high than the high in the light of the low. In doing the latter one necessarily distorts the high, whereas in doing the former one does not deprive the low of the freedom to reveal itself fully as what it is” (1962, 345). 4. Let me recommend, also, Cohen (1994, 195–219). 5. See, Levinas (1976, 157, 234, 266, 267, and 376; 1974, 75). 6. Even if we grant the priority of the second critique over the first, Kant still thinks of practical reason in terms of theoretical reason. The greatness of Levinas’s philosophy is to have truly thought reason based in ethics. In the history of philosophy, perhaps only the Platonic dialogue has done the same. 7. Regarding the issue of essence, see my introduction to Levinas’s Ethics and Infinity (1985, 1–15). 8. For the connections linking Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence and Totality and Infinity, see my preface to the first paperback edition of the former, published by Duquesne University Press in 1998. 9. Time and the Other (1987a) is, of course, the name of one of Levinas’s two earliest philosophical books, given as lectures in Paris in 1946–47. 10. Jean-Paul Sartre, in Being and Nothingness (1956), where the self is a pure for-itself, conceives of sociality on the model of war. If the self is only foritself than it can brook no radical alterity. In this he is following his master Hegel, who made substance itself into a subject for-itself, yielding a reality that was initself and for-itself at once, absorbing the transcendence of all individuals into its “spirit.” 11. Derrida, like Hegel, is a philosopher of immanence. For an ethical critique of Derrida, see Cohen (1994, 305–21). 12. After the destruction of the second Temple in Jerusalem, the Jewish sages declared that prayers would henceforth substitute for the sacrifices formerly performed in the Temple. 13. An interesting “story”— agadah — from the Babylonian Talmud, Moed Katan 28a, illustrates this point regarding the relation between giving and giving of the self: “[The angel of death] could not gain access to Rabbi Chiya. One day the [angel] adopted the guise of a pauper, knocked on his door and asked, ‘Give me bread.’ He gave him. [The angel] said, If you take pity upon a pauper, why do you not take pity on the [angel of death]? He proved [who he was] by showing him a rod of fire. [Rabbi Chiya] then yielded his life to him.” The commentary of Rabbi Chaim Shmulevitz explains: “This story is incomprehensible. What parallel did the angel of death find between the giving of a morsel of bread to a pauper and the giving up of one’s life? The answer is that the angel of death was well aware of Rabbi Chiya’s profundity of heart. He knew that when Rabbi Chiya gave even a crust of bread to the beggar, he did not only give it with heart; rather it was

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his very heart that he gave. Therefore, the angel of death was able to ask him ‘to have pity on him’ and surrender his life on the basis of the kindness expressed in the act of charity” (Weiss 1998, 132). 14. See Nietzsche on the transformation of the animal to the human animal, animals now “reduced to their ‘consciousness,’ their weakest and most fallible organ” (1967b, 84). 15. In Totality and Infinity (1969, 271), speaking of the erotic and the parental relations — the relation of lover to beloved and parent to child — Levinas will use the term “transubstantiation” to express this internalization of another’s sensibility within one’s own, “resolved” as he puts it, in the parent-child relation. This trans-substantial sensibility, in its moral dimension — suffering for the suffering of another — is why Levinas speaks of the “maternal body,” and why I have entitled this essay “Maternal Psyche.”

Notes to Chapter 3/Gantt 1. A previous version of this chapter, entitled “Truth, Freedom, and Responsibility in the Dialogues of Psychotherapy,” appeared in the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 14 (2): 146–58. This chapter represents a extensive reworking and expansion of that prior work. I would also like to gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Edward C. Finney and Christine H. Farber, whose insightful comments and thoughtful suggestions during the preparation of this manuscript significantly improved its quality. 2. Some might object to the inclusion of these disparate positions under a single rubric, “postmodern” because these positions reflect so many substantive and nuanced differences that they resist capture and inclusion in a single “movement.” Nevertheless, although I am acquainted with and understand these important differences, I am convinced that there is sufficient commonality in their philosophical intent, their approach, and their intellectual infrastructure, manifest in their very similar response to, and indeed their rejection of, the fundamental tenets of traditional modernism (i.e., rationalism, positivism, empiricism, scientism, etc.) to justify my reference to them as “postmodern” for the purposes of this essay. See Williams and Gantt (this volume) for a more complete treatment of this issue. 3. Ironically, the notion that universal human values can and will emerge from the experiencing organism — that human beings are by nature good and that feelings are fundamentally trustworthy — is itself, on the analysis, a value system that has been, and still is, “imposed by some group.” 4. The cavalier nature of this “or what not” belies a potentially troublesome attitude not uncommon in the existentialist literature, for it implies a flexibility viz a viz goals of life that borders on the arbitrary. Arbitrariness at the level of ends affords no defense against arbitrariness at the level of means, suggesting that one can reduce values and goals to mere means to ends. The result, as Charles Guignon

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has pointed out, seems to be that “values come to be regarded as adventitious, presumably dispensable in favor of other means (perhaps brutality or destructiveness) if those would do the job better” (1993, 221). 5. Psychoanalytic theory, in revealing the dual nature of thought and action can engender a far-reaching skepticism on the part of patients, both in regards to their own actions, and others’ in which every thought, statement or action is potentially open to hyperreflective scrutiny disallowing the given event any forthright surface validity. The Freudian cure is ultimately achieved as patients assumes the role of self-analyst through exchanging their own neurotically inadequate and repressive reality for what are essentially the paranoic realities of the psychoanalytic interpretive system. As MacIntyre has said, action can no longer “be taken at its face value: it requires interpretation and often that dialogue of interpretation in which I try to interpret your interpretation of my interpretation of your. . . .” (1992, 900, ellipsis in the original). 6. The term “Utopia,” which has been adopted as the name of an particular literary genre, was originally coined in 1516 by Sir Thomas More as the title of a book in which he described a mythical island of “perfectly happy” people who were organized in an ideal society. The word, which More constructed from the Greek, literally means “Noplace,” or “a place that is not.” In a short essay entitled Place and Utopia, Levinas (1990a) draws attention to the manner in which his own thought (particularly his religious thought on Judaism, but also his philosophical thought) diverges from the mythical netherworlds of utopic reason by grounding ethical action in the “Place” of the here and the now — the face-toface. 7. The concepts of the same (tauton) and the other (to heteron) figure as the “supreme genera” in Plato’s Sophist (254b–256e) along with Existence, Motion, and Rest. Levinas argues that, as Plato has shown, the “same” and the “other” are “combined” with the other supreme genera while remaining, in themselves “without combination.” They are ultimate and fundamental categories and, as such, provide the proper and necessary grounds for establishing first philosophy. 8. Throughout the remaining portions of this chapter, in dealing with the contrasting terms Other and other, I will be following the translation conventions of Levinas’s first major work Totality and Infinity (1969) — conventions which were unfortunately not always continued in later works. In Totality and Infinity, the term “Other” represents the French, “l’autrui,” or the personal other, the other person. In contrast, “other” represents “l’autre,” or otherness in general. Levinas is at great pains, however, to show that the other always already presupposes the Other: “The other qua other is the Other (L’Autre en tant qu’autre est Autrui)” (1969, 71). 9. As Adriaan Peperzak has explained in his excellent introductory treatment of Levinas’s thought: “‘Here I am’ does not, then, signify that I am the most important being of the world but, on the contrary, that I am at your disposal. The French ‘me voici’ expresses it even better by putting the ‘I’ in the oblique form” (1993, 25). The phrase “here I am” is itself a common one found throughout the

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Old Testament, where it is first employed by Abraham in response to the call of God, requiring that he offer Isaac his son as a sacrifice on Mount Moriah (Gen. 22:1; for other examples, see also Gen. 27:1, 31:11; Exo. 3:4; 1 Sam. 3:4; Isa. 6:8 — all references are from the KJV). 10. Levinas employs this term polemically in both a hyperbolic and literal sense. Hyperbolically in order to ensure our attention to the seriousness of the matter at hand (i.e. our infinite ethical responsibility), and literally to suggest the actual consequence of reducing otherness to sameness — an act wherein the livelihood of the Other, her freedom and “infinition,” disappears among the lifeless corpses of systematic categories and philosophic constructs. In using such a metaphor Levinas is attempting to make us aware that when the absolute otherness of the Other is reduced to being simply one instance among many in a totality of the same, whether in the form of diagnostic classifications, on the one hand, or an event within Being, on the other, murder has indeed been committed. 11. Prescriptive utopic visions seem self-serving in at least three senses. First, they serve the interests of the same. They allow the same to totalize the other by reducing otherness to the status of a problem to be solved, such that the other becomes nothing more than a disorder to be ordered. Second, because such visions offer up a routinized way of conceptualizing human existence and conducting therapy, they make life easier on me as a therapist. I need not overly concern myself with this unique Other before me, for she simply represents a particular instance of a more general case. Finally, not only do such utopic visions make life easier on me as a therapist, they also make life easier on me as a human being, in that they allow me to absolve myself of the demand for moral response. 12. Again, we can see here that Levinas employs overtly religious metaphors in order to describe the experience and nature of the ethical moment. The image of the stranger, the widow, and the orphan is one drawn principally from the writings of the Old Testament prophets (see for example Deu. 10:17–19, 14:29; Psa. 39:12; Isa. 1:17; Zec. 7:10). Although Levinas seeks to maintain a distinction between his philosophical endeavors and his more religious works, it is instructive that he finds in the metaphors of an overtly religious language the means with which to articulate his philosophical and phenomenological insights. Granting that psychology should not be about the business of theology, it may nonetheless prove fruitful for psychology to more carefully consider some of the metaphors available from outside the narrow confines of a strictly modernist, positivist, or natural scientific worldview. 13. By “living an equitable life,” Levinas does not mean simply adopting and living by a particular moral code. He always stops short of proposing a prescriptive morality, leaving that to us. His contribution lies in taking us to the phenomenological foundations of the ethical obligation that must ground any and all moralities. See Williams and Gantt (1998) for a fuller development of the distinction between ethics and morality in Levinas’s work. 14. It is worth noting here that the Greek term from which we derive our word “therapy” is therapeia; a term denoting service or attendance as well as

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healing. In addition, it connotes an act of service, or “tending to,” which is freely and devotedly given rather than forced or purchased. (For more on this provocative point, see Williams and Faulconer 1994, 346).

Notes to Chapter 4/Kugelmann 1. Another context would be the place to develop the similarities between Buytendijk and Levinas on pain, and to elaborate as well the differences in their religious articulations of pain. Let me simply indicate that for Buytendijk, pain has a purpose “in its bringing man to himself in the midst of his affliction so that he shares in the distress of the whole community, in their fate and their longing for release. As an isolated phenomenon, as pure feeling, pain is without any meaning . . . [A] sufferer can only discover the sense underlying the senselessness of pain in so far as he shares in the solidarity of man in nature and sin” (Buytendijk 1961, 161–62). These themes resound in Levinas and while Buytendijk closes his book invoking the cross and the burden of Christopher, Levinas, near the end of Totality and infinity asks about the “completion of time” not being “death, but messianic time” (1969, 285). 2. The material presented in this section comes from a series of interviews I conducted at a pain clinic. Sarah, a pseudonym chosen because of the infectious laughter of this woman, was in a three week pain management program. 3. On this point, Levinas writes: “In its ethical position, the self is distinct from the citizen born of the City, and from the individual who precedes all order in his natural egoism, from whom political philosophy, since Hobbes, tries to derive — or succeeds in deriving — the social or political order of the City” (1988, 165). 4. James (1950) wrote, in The Principles of Psychology, that for purposes of psychology, there is no freedom of the will but that other disciplines may have a greater claim. Ethics, he stated, does have a higher claim. In making psychological claims relative to ethics, James’s insight adumbrates that of Levinas.

Notes to Chapter 5/Faulconer 1. See Time and the Other (1987a, 33) for the summary from which I have developed this outline of Levinas’s position. 2. Note that, as I am using the words, “material” and “physical” are not identical, though the material and the physical are inseparable. Material is a more existential matter, including for example the taste of a thing. In contrast, physical has a more systematic, conceptual meaning. The taste of a good cheese is not the same as the chemistry and physiology of taste with reference to certain combinations of mold and milk, though the two may be concomitant. The first is a matter of materiality, the second a matter of what is physical. 3. Levinas uses the word intention in its technical, philosophical sense rather than its narrower, more ordinary sense. Instead of meaning “what is willed,” it means “what is directed at an object or end.” I will use intention in the same way.

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4. Of course, this does not mean that this ground must be separated from the material. 5. It is important to recognize that when using the word ethics as he does here, Levinas is not using the word in its ordinary sense; for him it means something like, “the arena of fundamental relation” or “the relation to the Other,” rather than “rules or procedures for behaving well.” 6. Though many psychologists would like to claim that they begin, not with ontology, but with “the facts,” the observed world, they actually begin with the received opinion about the world, the kinds of things in it, the character of observation, and so on. In other words, they begin with the received ontology rather than with a set of pure givens. For a philosophical discussion of this, see Heidegger (1977) and Williams (1990). 7. See also the pages that follow this citation. For examples of other discussions of both the criticism of reason as usually understood and Levinas’s reformulation of reason, see Totality and Infinity (1969, 43–59, 71–72, 82–87, 119, 208, 219, and 246–52). 8. Note that I do not assume that the article “the” suggests that the unconscious is an entity of some kind or even a unity of entities or phenomena. Part of the question we must consider is what the unconscious is. I will answer that question here only in a sketch. 9. In this respect, Levinas is an heir of Nietzsche. See, for example, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche 1988a, 1.4) and Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche 1988b, §§ 12 and 19). However, Levinas’s insight goes beyond Nietzsche’s. In Will to Power (1967c, §524), for example, in thinking about the unconscious, Nietzsche says that consciousness is an organ of the agent, only a means of communication. In spite of his turn to the body, Nietzsche continues to think will and the unconscious in terms of intentionality. 10. Levinas explains this tendency to think of human behavior in terms of intention historically, by referring to the general tendency of Western thought to think in terms of ends (1978, 38). 11. See Grünbaum (1984) for one strong criticism of Freud and its contemporary reinterpretation. See Roth (1991) for a critical response to Grünbaum. 12. Some contemporary interpretations of Freud (e.g., Lacan) have the advantage that, in them, it is not clear that the unconscious has the same structure as consciousness, showing that the identity of that structure is questionable, despite the traditional interpretation. 13. Levinas makes an important distinction between desire and need: the former cannot be satiated, the latter can (e.g., 1969, 115; also 1978, 43–44). However, that distinction is not important to this paper, so I will ignore it. 14. Note, however, that as Kant (1987) reminds us, to do so is to move out of the realm of empirical judgments and into the realm of what he calls — positively — speculative judgments. As necessary as such things as ends, consequences, and perhaps purposes may be to biological and other sciences, to speak of such things is not to make an empirical claim. Though genuinely descriptive

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and probably necessary, such claims are not descriptive of the “observable facts.” 15. However, the connection between not-eating and death is much stronger than the connection between eating and life since not-eating is a sufficient condition for death, but eating is not a sufficient condition for life. 16. Two points: First, the work of Davidson (1980) is relevant here. Second, while a science may claim to eliminate consciousness from the world, as Kant (1987) points out, as long as it makes teleological or causal claims, it makes nonempirical claims (see note 14). Such claims are probably necessary to science as science. They certainly seem necessary to human science. However, by making them, a science reintroduces consciousness into its subject matter, though it usually does not acknowledge that it does so. That is not necessarily a problem. A science can legitimately make nonempirical claims and assumptions. It must make them. They become a problem, however, when a science confuses its empirical and nonempirical claims and does not think through either its nonempirical suppositions or its rejection of the nonempirical. 17. However, that discussion would not have to proceed from a prior assumption that all human behavior is pleasure-seeking behavior. Such an assumption is no more well-founded than is the assumption that I eat apples in order to live. Eating and many other behaviors (perhaps most) are, in some sense, pleasure-seeking, but it does not follow that all behaviors are. In fact, even if an orientation toward pleasure and away from pain — pleasure seeking — is a causal component of all human behavior, it no more follows that we act in order to maximize pleasure than that we eat to live follows from the fact that we must eat if we are to live. 18. Note, too, that when I say, “if p, then q,” then “if not q, then not p” is implicate in it, regardless of what I intend. Neither is it a matter of what others intend. Implication is not reducible to intention. 19. Again, this is true irrespective of what I intend or believe. 20. Whether this is true of only persons remains a question, one for which the answer is, I think, “No.” Heidegger’s work shows us that even ordinary objects break our intentions. The implications of Heidegger’s claim raise interesting questions for Levinas (Faulconer 1998), though those implications are irrelevant to this discussion. For more on Heidegger’s claim, see the first part of History of the Concept of Time (1985), where we see that his interest in the excessive character of ordinary objects is the impetus for the later analysis in Being and Time (1962). One way to understand the “turn” in Heidegger’s career is to see it as a recognition that the Dasein-analysis of Being and Time remains within the horizon of the subject, though a subject enmeshed in the world, and as an attempt to deal with that difficulty. 21. It is acknowledged that the reason of apology is always insufficient. Thus the apology, although it is a species reason, does not discharge the obligation that calls it forth in the first place. Indeed, in Otherwise than Being, Levinas (1998d) speaks of the “incessant correction” that characterizes dialogue with the Other (see 99–129).

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22. See Faulconer (1998) for a discussion of how Heidegger makes this mistake. 23. For Levinas, the fact that, in principle, we cannot meet our original obligation means that our obligation is “infinite.” One might ask, “If we know we will not be able to give adequate reasons in the face of our infinite obligation, why do it at all? Why not respond to the infinite obligation with infinite resignation (cf., Kierkegaard) or with infinite cynicism?” To my knowledge, Levinas does not answer this question. However, Pieper (1949) gives an excellent analysis of the “underway” structure of hope. I think that analysis explains why the infinite character of ethical obligation does not bring an end to human intercourse and why resignation and cynicism are not genuine responses to it. Too briefly, Pieper argues, a la Heidegger, that to be human is to be “underway,” directed toward an “end” that one does not, qua human, reach. Resignation and cynicism — despair — deny the underway structure of human existence and, so, are, strictly speaking self-contradictory. 24. For one such creative and provocative analysis, see Moyaert (1994).

Notes to Chapter 7/Williams 1. See Slife and Williams (1995) for a fuller discussion of the unexamined privileging of determinism in contemporary behavioral science. 2. Some might argue that the insights and models of quantum physics provide a basis for defending free will (e.g., Zukov 1980; Heisenberg 1958). Indeed the way of thinking about the natural world that has opened up due to developments in modern physics is both provocative and captivating, allowing for the possibility that we are not as sure as we might have earlier thought about the deeper realities that constitute the natural world. Some interesting parallels between the natural and human world suggest themselves. I have found the work of David Bohm (1957, 1980, 1985) to be very instructive and richly heuristic. However, at this point in intellectual history, it is still very much in question just what quantum mechanics may have to offer the human sciences. Indeed, since mechanism and determinism have been shown to be useful and predictive assumptions regarding the natural world in spite of its apparently looser foundations uncovered by quantum physics, it is certainly premature, based on those same foundations, to assume that the same assumptions (i.e., mechanism and determinism) will fail to be useful in the human world. The case must be made on other grounds. 3. It should be recognized here that Levinas’s understanding of alterity transcends what is generally entailed in the term “possibility,” both as it is used in philosophical discourse informed in part by Heidegger and other phenomenological/existential thinkers, and as it used in common conversation. While I argue that possibility (in the common sense, and even, perhaps, even in the Heideggerian sense) is essential for the existence of agency, meaning, and morality, I should also be clear in my contention that all of these conceptions of possibility are themselves dependent on the a priori alterity to which Levinas draws our

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attention. This is, in my mind, one of the manifestations of Levinas’s genius in going beyond the phenomenological/existential traditions of his day, as well as the traditional modernist conceptions of ego and mentation. 4. This argument is related to the contention of the early atomists that the universe consists of atoms and void. It was argued that if there were no void, there would be no space for atoms to move into, and thus, the universe would be completely full, and no motion would be possible. Neither would any change be possible. In an analogous fashion any theory of human freedom must assume that the world of action is not “full” — that there is room to act, and that the range of actions is neither exhausted, nor exhaustible. In short, whatever is could be otherwise. Unlike early atomism, however, it must also be granted that there is room to move or act in more than one way. If any one space could be filled by only one particular atom, then the movement is foreordained, and the system is really closed. For agency, it is required that there be room to act in more than one way. 5. This discourse on agency was also developed by Aristotle in book 3 of the Ethics. 6. Thomas Hobbes (1952), John Stuart Mill (1910), and Jeremy Bentham (1970) seem to have seen these issues correctly. 7. That agency may be interpreted as “having the world truthfully,” may not be intuitively obvious. The interested reader is referred to Williams (1992). However, an example may help here. Even if it is granted that we can make volitional choices, a choice based on some patent falsification of the world will entrap the chooser in falsity, thus engaging him or her in maintaining the rational justification of a world that does not exist. Thus only in a choice that has a content of truth can there be agency. When we are concerned about the human world, truth necessarily entails whether or not we see persons as they really are, and whether we are true to the moral truth that attends our humanity. Thus agentive acts that impact in any way on other humans must have at their foundation a moral truth. Lacking moral truth, we spend our time in a world that cannot really be. By any account this is not freedom. Thus agency must consist of having the world truthfully. Such a condition is indeed a necessary condition for agency. 8. It should be acknowledged here that obviously many determinists who do not allow for human freedom of the sort we generally have in mind when we raise the question of agency, nonetheless defend something that passes under the name of freedom or agency, but which is defined in such a way that it does not conflict with the hard determinism of the theory in question. Spinoza is one of a number of possible examples. What this makes clear is that one way to deal with the question of agency is to defend it as something that really is not agency, but serves some theoretical, political, or theological purpose. 9. Freedom of action is not as important a concern for the present discussion as freedom of intention. There may be many constraints on our overt actions, but for most discussions our real freedom lies in our freedom to determine to do something, even if we cannot effect what we determine. 10. Examples of such criticisms are too numerous across several centuries to

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cite. The early Greek sophists became the progenitors of future skepticisms because they showed, at least to the satisfaction of their audiences, the weaknesses of reason. Empiricists of every ilk, culminating in Hume, addressed the limitations on knowledge and action entailed in limitations on reason. More recently, structuralist and postmodern positions, for all their diversity, are at least united in their skepticism and sometimes denunciation of reason as a source or criterion of truth and a guide to action. 11. This point is closely related to that made by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) in the final chapter of his Phenomenology of Perception. Freedom is always entailed in perceptions and perceptions are always grounded in the lived body of perceiving persons. 12. It must be understood in his emphasis on the ethical nature of our confrontation with the face of the other that Levinas does not explain our innate sense of ethical obligation to the other as arising from a recognition that the other is “like us,” so that our unique interest in the other which comes to be ethical, is really just derivative from our interest in ourselves, and is thus self-interest. This approach exalts self-interest, and lapses inevitably into hedonistic selfishness. Levinas would have it that we do not really understand our own humanity, or ourselves as human, until given the occasion to do so by the appearance of the human other who at once reflects absolute alterity and calls us into a relationship wherein our own humanity comes to be and to be known. Thus Levinas’s understanding of our ethical relatedness to the other invokes no mere social contract, and does not degenerate into self-concern.

Notes to Chapter 8/Barnard 1. The work of both Levinas and Lacan is distinguished from that of their French philosophical contemporaries by (among other things) an early preoccupation with ethics that became central to their thinking about philosophy and psychoanalysis, respectively. While philosophers such as Foucault and Derrida were (and are, in the case of Derrida) also concerned with ethics, an explicit and sustained interest in ethics emerged only later in their work. 2. Levinas often uses the terminology of “the Self ” to refer to the subject. However, the subject in Lacan and the Self in Levinas are structurally homologous. 3. See Simon Critchley’s essay “The Original Traumatism: Levinas and Psychoanalysis” in his Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas, and Contemporary French Thought (1999), as well as Alphonso Lingis’s Deathbound Subjectivity (1989), for more detailed discussions of the relation between the passivity of the subject and death in Levinas. 4. These concepts include the logical time of future anteriority, objet a as cause of desire, and the temporal and causal paradox involved in the “traversing of fantasy.” 5. Freud discusses this idea both in his letters to Fleiss (1985) and in The Interpretation of Dreams (1965, 574).

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6. Souffrance is translated as “suffering,” “pain,” “suspense.” In relation to the law (or the symbolic order), it is translated as a meaning, decision or judgment “in sufferance,” “awaiting delivery,” or “in abeyance.” 7. See, in particular, Lacan’s analysis of Freud’s story of the dream of the father and the burning child in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1978, 34–35, 55–64).

Notes to Chapter 10/Harrington 1. Portions of this chapter were previously published in “Responsible subjectivity: Levinas and humanistic psychology,” in The Humanistic Psychologist 22: 39–52. The author expresses his thanks to the Division 32 of the American Psychological Association and to editor Christopher Aanstoos for permission to reprint here.

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About the Authors

255

About the Authors Suzanne Barnard is associate professor of psychology at Duquesne University. She received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Loyola University of Chicago and did postdoctoral work in theoretical and philosophical psychology at Georgetown University. She has published on the application of French feminist theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism to questions of subjectivity, gender, the body, and sexuality. She is currently completing an anthology on Lacan’s Seminar XX on feminine sexuality. Michael Chase is associate professor of psychology at Quincy University, where he coordinates the industrial/organizational psychology program. He earned his Ph.D. in counseling psychology at Washington State University. His research addresses the problems encountered in person-organization integration with special emphasis on understanding and managing change and conflict, with particular interest in unconscious and covert processes. A multidisciplinary approach to bridging the person-organization chasm led to his interest in philosophical and theological possibilities, including a Levinasian perspective. Richard A. Cohen is the Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Richard studied under Levinas at the University of Paris-Sorbonne in 1974–75 and received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1980. He is author of Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas (1994), editor of a collection of scholarly essays on Levinas, Face to Face with Levinas (1986), and editor and translator of several books by Levinas (Time and the Other, Ethics and 255

256 About the Authors

Infinity, Discovering Existence with Husserl, and New Talmudic Readings). He has also recently completed a second book on Levinas, Philosophy, Ethics, and Exegesis: Levinasian Reflections (2001). James E. Faulconer is professor of philosophy at Brigham Young University and former Dean of General and Honors Education. His publications include the anthologies Reconsidering Psychology: Perspectives from Contemporary Continental Philosophy (with Richard N. Williams, 1990) and Appropriating Heidegger (with Mark Wrathall, 2000). He is also the editor of Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy. Edwin E. Gantt is assistant professor of psychology at Brigham Young University. He received his doctorate in psychology at Duquesne University in 1998. He is the author of numerous articles on Levinas and psychology, in the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, The Journal of Humanistic Psychology, and Theory and Psychology. David Harrington is associate professor of psychology and social sciences at Sheldon Jackson College. After practicing as a registered nurse on surgical wards and in critical care units, he received a master of arts degree in clinical psychology from Seattle University’s existential-phenomenological program and a doctorate in philosophical psychology at Penn State University. He has written numerous articles and presentations on Levinas. Robert Kugelmann is associate professor of psychology at the University of Dallas. He received his Ph.D. from that institution in 1978. He is the author of The Windows of Soul (1983) and Stress: The Nature and History of Engineered Grief (1992). His areas of research include psychology and medicine and the history of psychology, with articles appearing in the Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, Theory and Psychology and Social Science and Medicine.

About the Authors

257

George Kunz is associate professor of psychology at Seattle University. He received his doctorate in psychology at Duquesne University in 1975. He is the author of The Paradox of Power and Weakness: Levinas and an Alternative Paradigm for Psychology (1998). Robert John Sheffler Manning is associate professor of philosophy and religious studies at Quincy University. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy at University of Chicago in 1990. He is the author of Interpreting Otherwise than Heidegger: Emmanuel Levinas’s Ethics as First Philosophy (1993) and Beyond Ethics to Justice Through Levinas and Derrida: The Legacy of Levinas (1999). Richard N. Williams is professor of psychology at Brigham Young University. He received his doctorate in social/personality psychology at Purdue University in 1981. He is coauthor of What’s Behind the Research? Discovering Hidden Assumptions in the Behavioral Sciences (1995) and coeditor of Reconsidering Psychology: Perspectives from Continental Philosophy (1990) and Critical Issues in Psychotherapy: Translating New Idea into Practice (2001). He has also published numerous articles on the question of agency, particularly in the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology.

II

Williams & Grantt

Index

259

Index

Bachelard, G., 90 Bakan, D., 93 Barton, A., 72–73 Bateson, G., 182 Batson, D., 119 behaviorism, 3, 125, 221 being, 22, 25–30, 32, 36, 49–50, 54, 59, 61–64, 79–81, 89–102, 108, 148, 153–55, 162–73, 179, 184, 211, 213, 217–20 Being and Time (Heidegger), 21, 49, 183 being-for-the-other, 6, 28, 48, 54, 57, 59–60, 63, 122, 129, 157, 216, 218, 223 being-with, 26, 168 Bellah, R., 119 Bentham, J., 164 Bergson, H., 21, 44, 84 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), 173–74 Bible, 20, 58, 186, 189 Binswanger, L., 72, 74 Blanchot, M., 182–83 body, 34, 45–49, 52–55, 86–88, 92, 105–06, 109, 132, 219 Boss, M., 72, 74–75, 87 Buber, M., 23, 209 Buytendijk, F., 84–85, 92

absence, 20, 67, 85, 87, 93, 170, 180, 223 agency, 8, 13, 16–17, 30, 41, 74, 143–60, 167, 171 aggression, 197, 201, 203 alienation, 5, 28, 32, 35, 47–48, 56–58, 103–04, 140, 221–23 alterity, 8, 26, 28–29, 33, 40, 43–45, 47–48, 55, 57, 60, 62, 78, 132, 144, 148, 154–55, 158, 162–63, 168–72, 176–79, 184–85, 195, 220–21 Alterity and Transcendence (Levinas), 23 altruism, 8, 112, 119–20, 201 amour-propre, 216 anxiety, 72, 75, 88, 174 American Psychological Association (APA), 2, 187, 191, 193, 195, 198–200 APA Monitor, 187, 191–93, 197, 199 American Psychological Society (APS), 188, 191, 193, 199–200 argumentum via negativa, 67 Aristotle, 146, 164, 171 Augustine, 44 authenticity, 71–75, 120, 184 authority, 33–37, 43, 66, 192, 197, 200–03, 205, 207 automaton, 171–72 autonomy, 75, 90–91, 94–95, 165, 185–86

Cartesian, 102–03 certainty, 3, 18–19, 25 client-centered therapy, 7, 66, 74 259

260 Index

cogito, 25 cognition, cognitive functioning, 15, 29, 102, 105–06, 127, 132–34 Cohen, R. A., 22, 31 community, 2–3, 16, 35–36, 103, 152 conatus, 54, 216 conatus essendi, 91 conscience, 74, 127 consciousness, self-consciousness, 3, 7–8, 27–28, 35, 38, 40, 44, 46–47, 51, 55–56, 59–61, 71, 84, 90, 93, 95–96, 105–14, 117, 120–29, 134–36, 140–41, 153, 155, 162, 165–79, 184, 214, 216, 219–21, 223 consolation, 99–100 control, 84, 101, 121, 124, 133, 140, 201, 212 corps-propre, 52 culture, 2–3, 6, 9–10, 13–14, 18, 20, 30–32, 117, 131, 144, 190, 192, 197, 204, 217 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 41 Cushman, P., 65

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association), 34 dialectic, 41, 57, 73, 129 dialectical materialism, 34 dialogue, 8, 61, 78, 89, 161, 188, 221 Diderot, D., 22 difference, 8, 11–19, 26–30, 38, 49, 51–52, 77, 80, 131 Difficult Freedom (Levinas), 40 discourse, 1–2, 4, 8, 10, 20, 27, 31, 33, 47, 51, 60, 66, 79, 90, 96, 100, 104, 145–47, 176, 180, 188, 209 disinterestedness, 113, 120, 132, 136–37 divine, 58 Dostoyevsky, F., 21, 60, 64 Dovidio, J., 119 dualism, 92, 105 Durning, A., 141 duty, 164, 176 dwelling, 90–91 dwelling-with, 80–82

Darwinian, 201, 206 Dasein, 49, 89, 184 death, 19, 43, 55, 57, 89, 93–96, 161, 169, 179 deconstruction, 19, 28, 36, 65, 161, 182, 211 Derrida, J., 4, 23, 51, 161, 182, 193 Descartes, R., 156, 165 desire, 39, 42, 49–51, 61, 79–80, 86, 93, 96–97, 107–11, 123–29, 132, 134–35, 141, 163, 166, 172, 177, 179–80 despair, 72, 80, 93 Determinism, 3–4, 10, 15–18, 27–28, 30, 143–53, 160 Devereux, G., 91–92, 98 diachrony, 44–49, 63, 160, 166, 168–69, 171

eclecticism, 68 ego(s), 8, 25, 27, 35, 41, 48, 53, 58, 69, 77, 98, 102–03, 113, 120, 128–29, 132–38, 144, 159, 163, 165–80, 219, 222 egocentrism, egoism, 42, 63, 79, 91, 93, 96, 119–20, 122, 128, 133–35, 152, 167–68 egoist, egoistic, 90, 123, 128 egology, 132–36, 162 eidos, 46–47 election, 42, 57, 64, 91 elevation, 55, 58, 64 Ellul, J., 101 embodiment, 106 emotion, 15, 60, 68–69, 73–76, 84–85, 88, 90, 112–15, 152, 173, 215

Index

261

empathy, 8, 59, 201 empirical, 3, 29, 68, 94, 118, 193, 197 empiricism, 16, 197 enjoyment, 54, 90–92, 128–29, 140, 216, 223 Enlightenment, 3–4, 18, 140, 142, 160, 162 epiphany, 79 epistemology, 4–5, 10, 13–14, 17, 19, 25, 41, 136 essence, 11, 22, 25, 28–29, 43, 49–50, 54, 62, 64, 91, 95, 100, 113, 143, 146, 157, 211, 218–19, 221 ethics, 1, 8, 19, 23, 29, 37, 40, 61, 70, 86, 89–90, 99–101, 102–03, 111–15, 129–31, 138, 160–66, 170, 176–77, 180, 183, 185, 188–91, 198, 208, 209–10, 215, 218 exegesis, 51 Existence and Existents (Levinas), 22, 95, 102, 184 existentialism, existential psychology, 7, 19, 66–67, 71–72, 74–75, 94, 100, 184 experience, 5, 7, 11, 15, 18–19, 28–29, 50, 55, 60, 67, 70–74, 77, 84–85, 98–101, 102, 104, 112–19, 124–25, 128, 130–31, 135, 137, 139, 149, 162, 167–68, 172–77, 184, 186, 191, 198–202, 206, 213–17, 221 experimental, 3, 15, 191, 193, 200–04 expiation, 55, 59–60, 64 exposure, 49, 53, 64, 84, 93, 113, 128–129, 213 exteriority, 91, 184

136, 142, 154–58, 166–70, 180, 184–86, 190–208, 212–13, 219–20 family, 2, 20, 22, 32, 35–36, 86–88, 131, 134, 136 Fechner, G., 174 feminism, 6, 13 finitude, 94, 220 Foucault, M., 101, 161, 182, 191 Fowler, R., 2 freedom, free will, 7–8, 16, 18, 20, 33, 36–37, 43, 58, 66, 69–76, 81, 85, 89–99, 104, 121, 123, 126–27, 129, 131–32, 134, 136–38, 42, 143–59, 164, 168, 175, 177–78, 180, 185–86 Freud, S., 34, 38–41, 69, 71, 73, 107, 116, 119, 162–63, 166, 170, 173–74, 178–79, 186 Friedman, M., 69

face, 9, 22–23, 26, 29–31, 34, 39–40, 44, 47, 50, 62, 66, 76, 78–80, 91, 95–98, 104, 124–25, 130–31,

Heaton, J., 78 hedonistic, 119 Hegel, G. W. F., 4, 22–23, 162

Gans, S., 80 Gehlen, A., 36 Geist, 49 Gelassenheit, 43 God, 31–34, 36, 53, 58, 60–62, 67, 70, 183 “God and Philosophy” (Levinas), 60–61 Gogol, N., 20 Good (life), the, 25, 62, 66–74, 125–26, 131, 138, 141, 164, 176, 218, 220 goodness, 42, 64, 91, 96, 120, 125–26, 130–31, 134, 157 Greek, 16, 18, 132, 148, 162, 211–12 Greenberg, G., 118 Guignon, C.B., 72 guilt, 20, 34, 58, 222–23

262 Index

Heidegger, M., 8, 17, 21, 23, 32, 36, 44, 49, 71, 79, 89, 91, 93, 101, 111, 127, 144, 162, 183–84, 211 height, 42, 61, 63, 97 hermeneutics, 65, 118 heteronomy, 58, 166, 169, 172 history, historicity, 2, 4, 6, 10, 12, 14, 21, 25, 34, 44, 89, 104, 117, 143, 148, 162, 169, 180, 187, 192–96, 208, 212, 218, 220 Hitler, A., Hitlerism, 21, 185, 204 Holocaust, the, 202–05 Homer, Homeric, 132 hospitality, 82, 90 humanism, 16, 100, 116, 125, 160, 189, 210 humanity, 9, 32, 52, 55, 63–64, 99, 143, 146, 155–56, 204, 208 humility, 7–8, 57, 62–63, 118–23, 132, 134, 136–37, 141–42, 210 Husserl, E., 2, 21–23, 25, 38–39, 41, 44, 46–47, 101, 167, 183–84, 186, 211 idealism, 5, 34, 81–82, 162–64 identity, 2–4, 14, 27–29, 44, 47–48, 51–53, 59–60, 64, 108, 132, 134, 152, 158, 163, 172–73, 176, 180, 197 illness, 14, 48, 97–98 individualism, 3–4, 75, 104, 119, 133 infinite, 29–30, 54, 60–61, 76, 83, 91, 110, 113, 125, 130–31, 135–37, 154, 158, 163, 175, 184, 209, 213, 217 Infinity, 22, 113, 123–25, 132, 135, 154, 158, 184, 213 insomnia, 47, 55–56, 60, 64 inspiration, 45, 55–62, 64, 134–35, 139, 178 intentionality, 38, 44–46, 59, 100, 106–10, 112–13, 115, 117, 122–23, 127, 136, 166–68, 176

interhumanity, 54–55 interiority, 91, 104 interlocutor(s), 26, 40, 78, 104 intersubjective, intersubjectivity, 39, 41, 52, 55, 164, 184–87, 196, 199–200, 206 intuition(s), 24, 71 investiture, 91, 97, 123, 126–27, 129, 131–32, 137–38, 143, 156, 158–59 James, W., 8, 87, 101, 143, 147, 214 Judaism, 187 justice, 42, 54–55, 62–64, 91, 97–99, 114, 123, 157, 163–64, 190, 198, 208, 217–18, 220, 224 Kant, I., 25, 33, 41, 43–44, 90, 151, 156, 163–64, 185–86 Kehre, 24 Kierkegaard, S., 71 kindness, 12, 64, 204 knowledge, 4, 19, 33, 36–37, 42, 65, 78, 91, 93–94, 100–01, 102–03, 111, 114, 121–22, 124–25, 134–36, 140–41, 151, 165, 171–72, 176, 179–80, 182, 185, 216, 218 Kvale, S., 5 Lacan, J., 8, 40, 69, 117, 160–81 la langue, 162 language, 5, 14, 26, 42, 49–53, 56, 60, 73–74, 79, 92, 100, 113, 165, 168, 172, 174–77, 183, 186–88, 199, 209–10, 213–16, 219, 224 law(s), lawfulness, 17, 63, 91, 103, 114, 119, 131, 144 Leahey, T. H., 3 Lermontov, M., 20 Lifton, R. J., 121 logic, 34–35, 37–38, 57, 109–11

Index

Logische Untersuchungen (Husserl), 39 logos, 37, 70–72, 175 love, 33–34, 58, 69, 72, 141, 205 Marx, K., 4, 13, 33, 40, 162 materialism, 34, 105, 148 maternal, 32–64 meaning, 3–4, 7–8, 10–11, 12–20, 22, 26–31, 33, 35, 38, 40, 43, 49–51, 53, 55–57, 63–64, 71–73, 75, 78–80, 88, 94, 96, 97, 105, 108, 113, 121, 127, 130, 138–39, 141, 144–45, 147, 148, 151, 153, 155, 160, 164, 166, 172, 174–77, 191, 198, 209, 211, 219–20 mechanism, 3, 10, 15–18, 28, 109 mental health, 7, 48, 66, 67, 72, 76, 194–95 Merleau-Ponty, M., 5, 8, 23, 52, 89, 117, 149 metaphysics, 1–2, 4, 8, 15, 17–19, 23, 25, 27–30, 33–34, 37, 40, 90, 155, 182, 188–89 method, 1, 3, 6, 15, 34, 39, 68, 78, 82–83, 110, 122, 133–34, 143, 184, 189, 193–94, 205, 226 Milgram, S., 200–05 Mill, J. S., 235 modernism, 3, 5–6, 9–10, 12–13, 15, 18, 20, 25–27, 225, 228, 230, 235 morality, 1–2, 4–8, 10–20, 22, 25, 27–31, 34, 36, 41–43, 45–46, 48, 50–66, 73, 78, 83, 85, 97, 101–03, 112, 114, 129–31, 144–45, 147–50, 152–55, 157, 160, 163–64, 172, 188–89, 209–10, 217–18 murder, 22, 80, 95–96, 105, 182, 206, 213 mysticism, 34 narcissism, 26, 61, 66, 79, 90 naturalism, 1, 3, 7, 16, 126, 193

263

Nazi, 22, 187, 204 Nietzsche, F., 2, 34–36, 56, 162, 226, 228, 232 nihilism, 5, 18, 26, 30, 34, 119, 211, 257 “No Identity” (Levinas), 186 non-lieu, 167, 170 objectivity, 1–2, 12, 36, 49–51, 53, 63, 65, 88, 101, 104, 106, 114, 136, 141, 198–99 obligation, 1, 7, 9, 14, 26–31, 40–42, 48, 54–56, 60–61, 79, 102–04, 111–17, 157–59, 183, 190, 192, 194–95, 197–98, 204, 207–208 On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche), 34 ontology, 2, 9, 22, 25–27, 38–39, 42, 47, 52, 85–86, 88, 90–91, 96–97, 100–01, 103, 112, 134, 149, 161–71, 176–77, 179, 218 Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (Levinas), 6, 22–24, 32, 40, 43– 45, 47, 50, 56, 59–60, 62, 63, 79, 102, 111, 123, 128, 130, 163, 166, 175, 179, 186–87, 211, 217– 19 Outside the Subject (Levinas), 23 Oxford English Dictionary, 132 pain, 7, 10, 30, 46, 82, 84–89, 92–101, 113, 121–22, 129, 139, 214–16 Pain: Its Modes and Functions (Buytendijk), 84 patience, 7–8, 93, 118–23, 132, 134, 138–39, 142 peace, 145, 190, 196, 208 Penner, L., 119 personhood, 1, 76, 201, 221 phenomenology, 2, 8, 18, 20–26, 29, 38–39, 46–47, 52, 84–87, 89–90, 98, 100, 103, 122–23, 126, 129,

264 Index

132, 134, 183–84, 212–13, 224 philosophia prima, 23 Piliavin, J., 119 Plato, 25, 90–91, 104 pleasure, 39, 54, 69, 90, 102–03, 107, 109, 119, 139, 173, 223 politics, 4, 36, 37, 40, 65–66, 73, 131, 143, 160, 162, 191, 194, 217 positivism, 1, 3, 16, 19, 125, 167 possession, 48, 61, 104, 126, 140, 165 possibility, 7, 15, 17, 19, 69, 71, 77, 90, 93, 144, 146–48, 158, 163, 164 postmodernism, 4–6, 9, 10, 12–14, 16, 18–20, 23, 25–27, 29–31, 65, 119, 141, 193, 224 post-structuralism, 160–61 pragmatism, 68 praxis, 160–63, 218 prophecy, 55, 60–62, 64 psyche, 6, 32–33, 37–64, 125–27, 130, 132–35, 140 psychoanalysis, 7, 38–40, 65, 69–71, 73, 85, 89, 91–92, 119, 163, 166, 172–74, 179 Psychological Science Agenda (American Psychological Association Science Directorate), 191 Psychology of Helping and Altruism, The (Schroeder et al.), 119 psychotherapy, 7, 65–83, 97, 195, 223 Pushkin, A., 20 rapprochement, 8, 117, 162 rationalism, 3–4, 6, 18, 26, 33, 37, 41, 69–70, 73, 86, 104, 111, 130, 147–48, 150–52, 156–58, 176, 201 realism, 64

reason, 4, 29, 41–43, 45, 69–71, 102, 104 reductionism, 106, 109, 116, 125, 128, 148, 221 Reid, T., 8, 146, 156 relationships, 14, 18, 27–28, 53, 72, 78, 94–100, 123, 149, 154–55, 158, 165, 204, 209 relativism, 5, 13, 14, 17–20, 25–26, 28, 30, 39, 47, 160–62 religion, 2, 23, 31–37, 42, 53–54, 56, 60, 62, 70, 118–19, 183, 186–89 Republic (Plato), 104 res cogitans, 174 responsibility, 6, 41–43, 45, 47–50, 53–58, 60–64, 66, 72, 74–76, 78, 80, 83–84, 96–97, 99, 120–23, 126–39, 145, 147, 154–58, 164, 175–76, 178–80, 183, 185–87, 192, 196, 198–99, 201–02, 205–08, 210, 216–19, 223 revelation, 34, 60, 62, 64, 78, 131, 134 righteousness, 64, 223 Rogers, C., 7, 19, 66–67, 70–72, 74, 125 Rousseau, J.-J., 22 Said, the, 49–52, 62, 79, 215–16, 221 Same, the, 19, 25–28, 32, 43, 45–48, 56–57, 59–60, 62, 64, 77–79, 81, 92, 101, 163, 168 Sartre, J. P., 23, 58, 71, 148, 182 de Saussure, F., 162, 215 Saying, 40, 49, 51–52, 56, 62, 79, 215–16 Schroeder, D., 119 science, 1–6, 8, 10, 15–17, 25, 31, 33–39, 41, 50, 63, 65, 68–69, 71, 91, 97, 101, 105, 109, 111, 117, 119, 122, 125, 129, 131, 140,

Index

144–45, 151, 184, 188–89, 191–95, 198, 200–01, 205, 224 scientism, 5, 37 self, 8–9, 20, 27, 30, 35, 40–48, 50–51, 53–64, 72, 79, 85, 87–89, 91–97, 99–101, 102–04, 113, 118–24, 126–29, 131–39, 142, 155, 159, 163, 166–67, 172, 175, 178–80, 184–85, 197, 210, 221–23 selfhood, 29, 37, 41, 43, 55, 57, 62, 92, 179 sensibility, 6, 19, 40–43, 45–47, 53–55, 58–60, 64, 97, 128, 214–16, 223, 224 signification, 39–40, 43, 45–47, 49, 51, 54–55, 62, 97, 113, 180, 216 simplicity, 7, 118–23, 132, 134–36, 142 skepticism, 39, 97, 101, 120, 135, 159 Skinner, B. F., 119, 125 social constructionism, 13, 19, 27–28, 30, 65, 150 sociality, 7, 26–27, 29, 75, 81, 164, 166, 184, 221 Socrates, 33, 36 solipsism, 80, 102–03, 149, 152, 153 Sollen, 113 souffrance, 174 soul, 33–34, 41, 45, 48–49, 58, 61–62, 132–33, 212 Spiegelberg, H., 21, 24 Spinoza, B., 36, 54, 148, 216 spirit, 2, 33–34, 43, 56, 105, 133, 165 spirituality, 20, 32–33, 36, 54, 56, 61–62, 105, 119, 129, 133, 165, 199 Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bateson), 182 structuralism, 40

265

subjectivity, 7–8, 28, 32–37, 39–41, 44, 51–52, 55, 58, 62, 70, 82, 84–86, 89–93, 95, 97, 100, 113, 122, 127–28, 158, 160–61, 164, 175, 177–79, 184–87, 210, 215–23 substitution, 48, 59, 64, 97, 121, 133, 137, 157, 175, 179–81 suffering, 7, 26, 31, 34, 46, 49, 51, 54–55, 58–60, 64–69, 72, 74, 79–82, 84–86, 89, 92–94, 97, 99, 121–22, 128, 138–39, 142, 157, 174, 194, 222 Talmud, 20, 23, 54, 186–87, 189 Theological-Political Treatise (Spinoza), 36 theology, 32, 34, 62, 193 Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, The (Levinas), 38 therapy, 7, 14, 24, 32, 34, 67–83, 133, 141 Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms (Walker), 118 time, 32, 44–47, 53, 55, 99, 163–64, 166–71, 210–20, 222 Tolstoy, L., 21 totality, 123–25 Totality and Infinity (Levinas), 22–24, 39, 44, 52, 90, 93–94, 102, 111–12, 116, 123, 128, 131, 163, 184–85 totalize, 26, 30, 61, 76–81, 100, 124–125, 156 tradition, 2, 5, 7, 13, 31, 33, 35–36, 54, 65, 186, 211 transcendence, 43, 45, 51–52, 57, 61, 95, 103, 163, 220 transcendentalism, 25, 38, 43, 113, 218, 221–22 truth, 4, 16, 19–20, 25, 30, 33–34, 36–37, 39, 51, 66, 68, 72, 74, 80, 91, 97, 100, 108, 136, 146–47, 157, 160, 165, 180–81

266 Index

tuché, 160, 166, 171–74, 177–79 “Tuché and Automaton” (Lacan), 173 Turgenev, I., 20 tyranny, 19, 91, 157 unconscious, 7, 69, 73, 98, 102, 105–07, 109–13, 116–17, 165–66, 170–72, 174 unheimlich, 166, 174 universalism, 65, 160–61, 176 “Useless Suffering” (Levinas), 138 utopia, 7, 65–77, 79–83 values, 33, 35–37, 41, 70, 152, 160 violence, 24, 51, 61, 80, 91, 95, 123,

129–30, 136–37, 163, 175, 177, 185–86, 208–09, 218, 220 virtue, 164, 176 Visible and the Invisible, The (Merleau-Ponty), 52 vision, 4, 35, 71, 73, 75–77, 81–82, 87, 96–97, 100, 185 volition, 33, 35–37, 43, 69–70, 186, 205 Wachtel, A., 141 Wahl, J., 22 Watson, J. B., 3, 125 wisdom, 33, 35–37, 43, 69–70, 186, 205