Abstract
Levinas’ work is composed across a series of almost dialectical tensions. There is, for example, the tension between totality and infinity, the tension between ethics and religion, the tension between need and love, and, of course, ultimately between oneself and another. Initiates into the work of Levinas will know that one of the principal ways one becomes familiar with his thought is through learning how to chart and navigate the subtleties of these various tensions. Mastering Levinas’ thought, however, is a more complicated task. Not only does it require a thorough understanding of the indissolvability of these tensions and differences, but also the insight that beneath them lies an even more essential relationship. This is, of course, one of the great paradoxes of Levinasian thought, that, at its deepest level, the tensions and differences so diligently and meticulously detailed by him are ultimately resolved without being abolished or absorbed within some higher Hegelian unity.
Indeed, we must remember that for Levinas the promise of some final or eventual unity is not ultimately the promise of the resolution of differences, but the threat of their final abolition – the collapse of any possible relationship between them and the rise of an indifferent morass. The tendency to resolve tensions through any sort of dialectical progression, which Levinas famously identifies as the prevailing tendency of ‘idealism’ in western philosophy, must forthrightly be rejected by any serious reader of his work.
Where so many go wrong in their interpretation of Levinas is, after having sensed the fundamental interrelation between the various tensions and differences established by him, then to assume that some sort of primordial unity must exist behind or beyond them. The dangers of resorting to such Hegelian readings of Levinas should never be underestimated and must be resisted at every turn, for it, is precisely against such tendencies that the entire trajectory of Levinas’ work strives.
Despite the dangers, scholars must not be deterred from striving to recognize that the tensions and differences established by Levinas do not exist absolutely distanced from one another. Instead, they are always described as inexorably related to one another – separate from and other than one another, sure; but, as such, open to relating to one another. The (im)possibility of this relation, which is the real heart of Levinas’ work, is after all demonstrated quite openly in Levinas’ unusual and seemingly uninstinctual use of the conjunction ‘and’ to pair the seemingly opposite (i.e. totality and infinity, enigma and phenomenon, God and philosophy, etc.).
It is the ability to recognize and maintain the differences established by Levinas while at the same time seeing the way he forges their inextricable relation to one another that distinguishes a truly masterful read of Levinas’ texts from a merely average one. It is precisely such a read that we find in Sarah Allen’s The Philosophical Sense of Transcendence: Levinas and Plato on Loving Beyond Being. There Allen addresses the subtleties, meaning and eventual relationship between some of the most difficult tensions found in Levinas’ work. Allen’s book aims to trace the relation between the idea of transcendence, usually considered to be in the domain of religion, and the philosophical project itself by following the development of the concept of transcendence in Levinas. This requires in part, she argues, exploring the influence of the Greeks, specifically Plato and the neo-Platonists, on Levinas, paying particular attention to his inheritance and interpretation of their understanding of desire along the way.
Levinas’ relationship to the ancients in general, and to the Platonic tradition in particular, is of course a troubled one. On the one hand, Levinas often posits his project as a kind of post-Heideggerian return to Plato (1996: 58) and borrows heavily from the Platonic tradition, especially, as Allen documents, in his use and development of the idea of the ‘beyond being’ and love. Just as often, however, Levinas distances himself from Plato, saddling him with a long list of modifiers which even the casual reader of Levinas will recognize as less than flattering. Plato’s thought, he argues, establishes an economy of need (1987: 64 ff.) and nostalgia (1998b: 149) that favors a kind of Odyssean return over an Abrahamic exile (1996: 141; 1998a: 151) and which ultimately aims at a fusion of differences (1987: 93–4), which is symptomatic, he thinks, of a latent tendency towards solipsism (ibid.: 100–1; 1996: 88; 1998a: 49). Surely Levinas’ relation to Plato is anything but straightforward; prompting a number of worthwhile secondary explorations of his relation to the Greeks, most recently Brian Schroeder and Silvia Benso’s excellent collection Levinas and the Ancients (2008). Allen’s exploration is a worthwhile contribution to this direction of study informing the often obscured dependency in Levinas’ thought to the Platonic tradition.
It is important to note, however, that any thorough exploration of Levinas’ relation to the ancients, and the Platonic tradition in particular, must do justice to this ambiguity in his relation to them; and, at times, Allen can gloss over those complications making Levinas appear to be much more complicitous with the Platonic project than he clearly is. One danger of such a tendency is that it lends itself to a forgetting of the importance of particularity in Levinas’ work, an idea he maintains precisely against the Platonic account of existence. The particular does not gain its value, for Levinas, from the way it leads to or reflects what is beyond it, some ideal realm of the forms or the beyond being. There is no one transcendence in Levinas which lies beyond all determinate appearances and which can be discovered or achieved through them. Instead, there is an infinity of transcendences offered in the singularity of every particular other. These transcendences appear in the face of the specific Other, for Levinas, and not through the face of the Other in general. This danger becomes especially poignant in Allen’s work when Levinas’ account of desire is read through the lens of Plato’s account of eros. We must maintain that for Levinas, in contrast to Plato, the desire for the Other is not a ladder which leads beyond the Other, but, in contrast, which leads to and is terminated in the Other, without, of course, ever being fully abolished or satisfied. This distinction must be clearly made lest the Other be reduced to a rung on the subject’s ascent towards the beyond. I do not think that Allen goes this far, but it is a delicate distinction which must be constantly reinforced to avoid these dangers; and I think at times Allen does not do enough to maintain it. What is more, I am not always in agreement with Allen’s interpretation of Plato, which tends towards the neo-Platonic, a tendency that, given her project, seems to make Levinas in line with someone like Plotinus, a position I do not see much support for in his work.
Still, her arguments are well reasoned and generally well grounded and so my complaints must be understood to be minor given the overall trajectory of the work. After all, I take it that the point of this exploration of Levinas’ so-called Platonism is to enrich the author’s larger project of navigating between and offering some resolution to what could be termed the problem of religion in Levinas. And, it is here that the real strength of this work lies and Allen’s mastery of Levinas is demonstrated.
There is an apparent contradiction within Levinas’ work on the subject of existence and transcendence. On the one hand, Levinas insists on a phenomenological account of ethics which needs no recourse to the divine. Quite to the contrary, Levinas argues, ethics is established on a ground which seems to require the absence of the divine, hence Levinas’ account of the subject as ‘an orphan by birth, or an atheist’ (1998c: 105). The power of the Other to call us into question does not lie in some supernatural force, he maintains. The Other is not the emissary or ambassador of the divine. The power it levies is not borrowed from the beyond, it is its own. The ethical potency of the other resides in its face, in the Other’s power to see and observe us. The appearance of the face, which, strangely, resists being reduced to any mere phenomenon, convicts the subject and demands a reckoning entirely on its own – without recourse, Levinas claims, to any previously held religious convictions or divine intervention.
Likewise, insists Levinas, the subject that is convicted by this address arises on its own ground, independent of any outside force. This process he refers to as the hypostatic act which he defines as the ‘upsurge of an existent into existence’ (2001: 25) announced in the first-person articulation of the cogito, ‘I think, I am.’ Subjectivity does not appear then as some sort of created entity, dependent on some outside intervention. It is instead entirely its own – radically free and independent. Indeed, it is precisely because of this independence that the interruption proffered by the Other in its look/face is so poignant. The Other introduces something entirely new to the subject – an entirely new way of being. The face of the other breaks with the subject’s previously uninterrupted independence and freedom radically reorienting it, now as subject to another. This is the real sting of the ethical encounter as Levinas details it.
It should be clear from this that Levinas’ entire account of ethics, indeed the hard core of his philosophical project, does not seem to need, indeed seemingly prohibits, any recourse to a religious metaphysics. But this is, of course, not the whole story. Quite to the contrary, for according to Levinas, this ethical encounter introduces something new into the subject. It introduces the possibility of the subject’s having been preceded, the possibility of its being dependent upon another. In a word, the ethical encounter introduces the possibility of subjectivity being experienced as a creature and not as a wholly free independent and self-sufficient ‘upsurge’. This possibility on an anterior dependency which appears, claims Levinas, posterior to the subject’s independent and ungrounded ethical encounter with the Other introduces precisely, he thinks, the need for a kind of religious metaphysics (1969: 54). More to the point, it introduces the possibility of the divine – of a God who retreats from the scene and whose passing is only felt in the trace left behind, which is the ethical orientation of the world and the power of the Other. From this it seems that the real hard core of the ethical encounter for Levinas is the way in which it functions to ground the appearance of the divine, making Levinas’ phenomenology appear to be little more than a prelude to religious metaphysics.
So it is that we discover a real tension at the heart of Levinas’ work on the subject of religion – a tension that concerns the question of transcendence. What precisely is the nature of the transcendence offered in the ethical demand of the Other? Is it merely an ethical transcendence or is it a religious transcendence? How are we to think of the subject: as primordially independent or as dependent? More to the point, is subjectivity primarily an activity in the world or a passivity? These are the tensions and dilemmas that are truly troubling to a close reader of Levinas. And it is to these dilemmas that Allen’s book speaks so powerfully.
For Allen, these ambiguities and tensions can in part be explained by an apparent shift in Levinas’ conception of transcendence over the course of his career. This is an exceptionally important insight and one supported by a thorough charting of the subtle transitions in Levinas’ accounts of the ethical encounter and the nature of subjectivity between his earlier and his later texts. But the real genius of Allen’s argument comes in tying this transition to a parallel and simultaneous metamorphosis in Levinas’ account of desire; and finding in this account a common thread to his various positions on transcendence. Through a detailed study of Levinas’ account of the nature of love, Allen is able not only to offer an explanation of these seemingly different and contradictory positions found in Levinas, but also to reveal that they may not be so contradictory after all. This she does without collapsing the significant differences between Levinas’ accounts of transcendence, nor by resorting to some artificial ‘higher’ Hegelian unity beyond them. As a result, Allen strikes a delicate balance on a very sensitive subject in Levinasian scholarship which marks a real contribution to the literature on the subject. For these reasons The Philosophical Sense of Transcendence is of great value to those who strive, like Allen, to master the complexities of Levinas’ thought.