Abstract
This text deals with the interpretation of where the meaningfulness of existence and our being in the world in Emmanuel Levinas’s conception originates in its contrast to the similar conception developed by phenomenology of appearing - which is represented by M. Heidegger and H. Maldiney. I want to show on what premises Levinas argues that the epiphany of sense can only emerge in the case of a continuous overcoming of the nonsense of appearing and thus of Being as such. Therefore, I intend to go through the steps of Levinas’ reasoning, which he never developed systematically, and explain why he can view Being as nonsensical and what this notion of nonsense could possibly mean in Levinas’s philosophy. As a result, I would like present an implicit argumentation behind Levinas’s well-known claim that the birth of sense must be of ethical origin and cannot arise through the process of appearing or Being alone.
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Notes
In this text I have tried to introduce a common terminology for all the theories mentioned. However, let us recall that Heidegger for example also linked his philosophy to the notion of transcendence (Heidegger, 1996b: 214).
I think Levinas’s view of nonsense hasn’t changed in its essence. It evolved, clarified, concretized, and above all became truly coherent, in my view, as Levinas’sthinking matured, when he developed his philosophy of ethics more precisely (see Sealey, 2010: 100). I also recommend Bernasconi’s article (2005).
I write the capital B here deliberately because of the connection with Heidegger’s terminology: so Being for us will be Being as such.
It must be noted that the terms vulnerability, mortality, sensibility or, e.g., insomnia are used by Levinas (in contrast to our text) mostly, although not exclusively, in an ethical context; that is because they attain their true meaning in the process of transcendence, only within an ethical situation, when excess remains excess (or transcendence). Still, I believe it is important to keep in mind the wider, more general import of these concepts as the cornerstones of embodied existence, because what is constitutive of their meaning is their “ambiguity,” their role in the categories of sense and nonsense (see Levinas, 1998b: 190, footnote 30.)
To be fair, I think Maldiney goes further than Heidegger’s philosophy in his conception of what is non-apparent because he is concerned with corporeality (see for example Maldiney, 1973: 136). However, Maldiney, like Heidegger, subscribes to the same and more general paradigm of thought, in which the Transcendent as the non-apparent is the hidden side of being, while its revealed side is the apparent (see Maldiney, 2012: 204). For this reason, I classify both authors under “phenomenology of appearance” and thus contrast them with Levinas.
Futher interpretation can be found in Rolland (2000).
Very illustrative are Levinas’s descriptions of madness stemming from our subordination to the processes of Essence as experiences of the impossibility to touch pure nothingness, death (Levinas, 1978: 61), in this sense experiences of never-ending dying which is denied a different dimension, the future (Levinas, 1987: 11), i.e., the suffering from the hell of the Same and the desperate totality of Being, which not even death can pierce. “Death, which was to be the fading away of life, confirms the being of life in its generality of pure being, and becomes part of it” (Levinas, 1996: 161).
Compare with interesting development of Maldiney’s and Romano’s concept of personal uniqueness in Prášek (2021: 721-740).
Bernstein (2004: 266) summarises well the problem of immorality of such behaviour, which leads to the evil of theodicy. As far as the problem of theodicy is concerned, an interesting article by Han (2020: 45-79) presents the opinion that in Levinas we may find clues for the interpretation of the ethical expectation of the so called “messianic future” and hope as well, contrasting to Heidegger’s analyses of future connected to mortality.
Maldiney’s philosophy is an example of such a philosophy that extends the concept of otherness beyond other people (see Maldiney, 1973: 152), and it is therefore possible to use his thesis, for example, in ecophenomenology and to defend the need of an ethical approach to animals and nature too. This is a much more difficult task in Levinas’scase. On the other hand, as I said, if the otherness of things, animals, etc. comes from factual transcendence in Maldiney’s case, by contrast it is harder to justify philosophically the necessity of an ethical approach to them. A very inspiring synthesis of Levinas and Maldiney in an ecophenomenological perspective was made by Per Prášek in his forthcoming article Levinas vs. Maldiney: On a Face of Sensible Nature for the Journal of British Society for Phenomenology.
Levinas deliberately uses these words, against and in spite of death, for description of transcendence as an opposition to Heidgger’s Sein zum Tode, being towards death.
Levinas thematizes suffering as evil in the text Transcendence and Evil (Levinas, 1998b: 122-136).
Regarding text Transcendence and Evil, one could object that Levinas literally wrote that evil is some sort of “transcendence” (Levinas, 1998b: 129). However, I believe that the intention of the article leads to a different assertion (as is the case in the text Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” Levinas 1998a: 91-102). That is why several pages later Levinas comes to the conclusion that it is exclusively the awakening of soul (awakening by evil and to Goodness) which responds to “a transcendency that is no longer absorbed by my knowledge” (Levinas, 1998b: 132).
A partial answer as to why it is not possible to elucidate why transcendence is connected with the question of good and evil is supplied by Cohen (see 2004: 276f.). I think it’s a matter of an assumption that can’t be further justified (and which of course every theory has), which Levinas shares with the Jewish and Christian religions.
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Funding
The “Face of Nature” in Contemporary French Phenomenology-Czech Science Foundation, GAP 21-22224 S, realized at the Czech Academy of Science, Institute of Philosophy.
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Matysová, D. The World and Its Nightmare (Levinas on Sense and Nonsense). Hum Stud 46, 79–99 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-023-09662-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-023-09662-w