The responsive "I": Levinas's derivative argument.

• Author: Arnett, Ronald C.
• Position: Review Essay

Emmanuel Levinas, considered the premier voice of ethics in the twentieth century, continues to manifest significant and continuing impact on twenty-first century postmodern scholarship providing a challenging communicative argument that displaces the privileged view of "agency" in the study of ethics. Agency assumes that an autonomous individual acts upon human life through self-generated volition. Levinas begins by countering the assumption about the primacy of self-willed agency, detailing a phenomenological alternative--responsiveness to the Other. The "I" finds identity in response to the Other.

Understanding the self as derivative rather than originative moves concern for the Other and the historical situation into privileged territory. The "I" or self emerges as a by-product, a responsive derivative construction. Levinas's ethics begins with answering the call of responsibility from the face of the Other, attentive to the call of the Other that shapes the identity of the "I" as a by-product. The uniqueness of Levinas's argument is akin to Marx's turning Hegel upside down. Levinas reframes the self from a willful agent to a responsive creation, moving from a traditional focus on autonomy and independent agency to interhuman responsive action responsible for the Other (Arnett, "A Dialogic Ethic 'Between' Buber and Levinas: A Responsive Ethical 'I'").

Levinas argues that ethics is first philosophy, turning upside down conventional assumptions about willfulness and beginning origins of the self. Levinas posits a phenomenological alternative to conventional self-construction, leaving us with alternative assumptions about responsiveness and the construction of the "I." His argument for communicative consideration is the origin of the self, which he begins with the Other, not self-will.

Jacques Derrida, profoundly influenced by Levinas, cited Levinas's close friend Maurice Blanchot on the importance of Levinas's voice:

However, we must not despair of philosophy. In Emmanuel Levinas's book [Totality and Infinity]--where, it seems to me, philosophy in our time has never spoken in a more sober manner, putting back into question, as we must our way of thinking and even our facile reverence for ontology--we are called upon to become responsible for what philosophy essentially is, by welcoming, in all the radiance and infinite exigency proper to it, the idea of the Other, that is to say the relation with autrui. It is as though there were here a new departure in philosophy and a leap that it, and we ourselves were urged to accomplish. (Blanchot qtd. in Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas 8-9)

For postmodern scholars, Levinas repositioned philosophy and the study of ethics--moving metaphysical theoretical discussion to attentiveness to phenomenological reality. The reality Levinas envisioned was phenomenological, not metaphysical. Ethics for Levinas is a phenomenological reality--one attends to the Other, not out of theoretical dictum, but from the call of a phenomenological reality witnessed as a trace in the face of the Other.

This essay frames Levinas's argument--the responsive construction of the self--and its application to the study of communication and rhetorical studies, offering communicative insights that "interpret otherwise" than conventional Western assumptions about the self. This essay engages books on Levinas in order of difficulty of engagement with attention to increasing complexity of Levinas's project. To that end, this essay begins with two books "about" Levinas (Manning's Interpreting Otherwise than Heidegger and Derrida's Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas), moving to a transcript of a radio interview with Levinas (Ethics and Infinity), ending with two major works of Levinas (Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence and Totality and Infinity).

This essay outlines Levinas's counter-argument concerning the privileged position of the self in Western culture, underscoring major ideas that shape his work and offering entrance into Levinas's thought from invitational to more demanding primary reading. This essay invites another to engage the significance of Levinas's argument that challenges basic communication presuppositions that begin with assumptions of individual agency and willfulness.

THE ARGUMENT

Levinas's argument dethrones the privileged place of the "I" in Western culture. Levinas does not question the importance of the "I." His argument rests on the question: Is the "I" responsive or originative? Levinas's work presupposes the former; the "I" is responsive, eventually framing an ethic contrary to Western individualism with an equally strong, if not stronger, sense of "I"--an "I" called forth by the Other.

It is not the notion of the "I" that Levinas questions, but how one understands the origins of the "I." Levinas is not doing mysticism where the "I" loses identity in some strange meshing with the universe. Levinas has a strong sense of "I" in his ethics; the question is, "How does the 'I' originate?" Levinas points to a "responsive ethical 'I'" (Arnett, "A Dialogic Ethic 'Between' Buber and Levinas: A Responsive Ethical 'I'") called forth by the face of the Other.

Levinas relies upon phenomenology to offer an answer to the origin of the "I." Phenomenology returns to radical roots, Husserl's project of "to the things themselves" (Husserl, Ideas 120-21). The "thing," in this case, is the phenomenological ground of the origin of the "I." The roots of the "I" begin, for Levinas, with the Other; since the construction of the "I" is a social fact, the "I" finds identity and shape from the Other. Ethics becomes a phenomenological call to responsive care of the Other, from which action shapes the "I." The "I" is derivative of attentiveness to the Other and responsive to an ethical call.

Levinas suggests that human life is a phenomenological call to attend to the Other, thereby shaping one's own identity in response. For Levinas, the "I" is a phenomenological consequence of attending to the face of the Other. Knowledge of the Other permits one to discover new possibilities, ever shaping and reshaping the "I." The Other is radical alterity that makes transcendence and discovery possible. It is encounter with the unknown that permits constant reshaping of the "I" through meeting of the Other.

Levinas's commitment to the Other is phenomenological; the "I" finds identity in social interaction. Additionally, this phenomenological line of reasoning brings him to a peace position situated in phenomenological reality. If one does not take care of the Other, one puts one's own identity at stake. The "I" finds renewed life, new insight, in the meeting of radical alterity. Levinas's frequent quoting of "I am my brother's keeper" (Cohen, foreword, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence xii) suggests that if one does not take care of the Other, there is no "I." The "I" is derivative of attentiveness to the Other. The ethical call of responsibility is a phenomenological assumption that cares for the Other out of necessity if the "I" is to develop in a fuller sense of humanness. The social nature of humanity calls us to attend to the Other. The phenomological reality that Levinas describes is that without the Other, there is no "I."

Sociability makes us caretakers of one another. Richard Cohen ends the translator's introduction to Levinas's Time and the Other by reminding us of the "interpreting otherwise" that emerges from Levinas's pen:

To live the end of metaphysics, its fulfillment and termination, requires, Levinas insists, that we take bad conscience seriously, that we recognize the full extent and weight of our debts and obligations to the Other and to Others, that we value goodness and justice above being and order. (Cohen, translator's introduction, Time and the Other 27)

Levinas's work provides an argument that interprets otherwise--arguing for a responsive understanding of the "I"; a "responsive ethical 'I'" differentiates Levinas's work in ethics from metaphysical contributions on ethics. What makes this responsive view unique is that the "face" of the Other reminds one of an ethical responsibility--to care for the Other. The Other is a human face, a living ethical signpost pointing back to an a priori--to fail to take care of the Other puts the self at risk.

Ethics for Levinas is not religion, but prior to religious discourse. Levinas disagreed with critics, including Derrida, who suggested his work is composed simply of religious assumptions. Levinas countered this claim, suggesting the necessity to retrieve ethics from religion: "[...] Kant says in The Critique of Practical Reason: 'ethics leads to religion'" (Manning, Interpreting Otherwise than Heidegger 144). Levinas interpreted ethics at what he considered the end of theocracy--God conceived ontologically as a Supreme Being. His ideas matured at the time that Dietrich Bonhoeffer, another ethics theologian, penned the notion of "a world come of age" (Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison 326-29), calling the church to a changing reality. Such was the wisdom of those fighting Nazi power-they understood that they were a part of a philosophical and practical shift in the understanding of the human being: "[...] Levinas's philosophy achieves its greatest significance for religious thought precisely because it retrieves religion through ethics in the face of the Holocaust" (Manning 154). Levinas retreated from the commonplace Western practice of beginning with the self, assuming instead the phenomenological a priori of ethics that we discover in the face of the Other.

From our ethical action responsive to the Other, the "I" finds identity in response to the Other, the historical situation, and reconnection to an ethical a priori--"I am my brother's keeper." The "I" finds identity as a derivative invention.

Levinas's philosophy is designed, as...