Session 3: Being vs. beyond being; person vs. thing.

(Discuss pp. 302-306 of Guwy interview.)

A: Being vs. beyond being

All we have said thus far about being is that it is the object of ontology, and that it has generated the logical axiom: "aut dei sunt aut non sunt." (Either the gods are, or they are not.) The form of this sort of sentence is such that it is always true, whatever is substituted for the word "gods." It is called the law of the excluded middle. This could also be expressed symbolically as -(p & -p), where - means "not" and & means "and". The German philosopher Hegel (1770-1831) viewed being and nothingness as twin abstractions, and used them to fuel the engine of history, in the sense that they were positive and negative moments in a dialectic movement, sometimes characterized as thesis (positive) and antithesis (negative); these were then sublated or gone beyond ("aufgehoben," literally "put up") or preserved/destroyed, in a synthesis. The latter was then viewed positively, as a new thesis, generating a further antithesis and synthesis, etc. Another way in which positive and negative appear in Hegel is as the definition or limitation of the entity by what it is not.

Moving on into the 20th century, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) laments the emptiness of the abstract notion of being, and appears at once to attack the notion of the subject (an abstract version of the human being) or of subjectivity, and to transplant aspects of it into "existence." He used the phenomenological ideas of this teacher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) to describe the way things present themselves to us, and described human-presence-in-the-world or Dasein (Da = there, sein - being) as a being-toward-death.

Levinas was a great admirer of Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927), but became increasingly disenchanted as Heidegger embraced Nazism. While championing Heidegger's new philosophical idiom, his existential/phenomenological analyses and renewal of ontology, Levinas became critical of the neutral, impersonal tone, and with few exceptions a lack of interest in ethics (the notion of Mitsein, or being-with, remains largely undeveloped). Levinas proposed to base his philosophy not on ontology but ethics. He characterizes being, for example, not as a neutral abstraction, but as a "conatus essendi" (Spinoza), Latin for the effort of being to continue to be. Consider, for example the following passage from the author's introduction to Entre Nous (my translation).

"To be: already an insistence on being as if a 'survival instinct' that coincided with its development, preserving it, and maintaining it in its adventure of being, were its meaning. The tensing of being back onto itself, a plot in which the reflexive pronoun, -self, is bound up. An insistence before all light and decision, the secret of a savagery excluding deliberation and calculation, violence in the guise of beings who affirm themselves "without regard" for one another in their concern to be.
Origin of all violence, varying with the various modes of being: the life of the living, the existence of human beings, the reality of things. The life of the living in the struggle for life; the natural history of human beings in the blood and tears of wars between individuals, nations, and classes; the matter of things, hard matter; solidity; the closed-in-upon-self, all the way down to the level of the subatomic particles of which physicists speak. But behold! The emergence, in the life lived by the human being (and it is here that the human, as such, begins--pure eventuality, but from the start an eventuality that is pure and holy) of the devoting-of-oneself-to-the-other. In the general economy of being in its inflection back upon itself, a preoccupation for the other, even to the point of sacrifice, even to the possibility of dying for him or her; a responsibility for the other. Otherwise than being! It is this shattering of indifference‑-even if indifference is statistically dominant‑-this possibility of one-for-the-other, that constitutes the ethical event."

Notice the inclusion of the three modes of being: things, living beings, human beings. In all three modes of being (and the second mode of being seems to subsume and include the first, as the third does the previous two), it is possible to give a descriptive epithet to being: this hardness of being, excluding the other beings in an effort to continue to be. In the human being, however, Levinas discerns the possibility of something higher, and "otherwise" than being. Or beyond being.

What can be said about this "beyond being"? As a phenomenologist (from Greek "phaino" I show, and our old friend "logos"), Levinas cannot leave the world of appearances. Even what is beyond being shows itself, in his view, and the prime example of this is in the human face. But the face, while being what shows itself par excellence, paradoxically reveals what is hidden.

I remember that in conversation with Levinas after I had finished translating a work of his (Entre Nous), he remarked that he really did not like the cover of the original French edition, which had on the cover a rather realist portrayal of a portion of a face (forehead, nose, eyes). This plasticity was not what he meant by the face! he said. I am not sure whether he ever saw the cover of the English translation, which had on the cover... a photograph of Levinas's face.
There is a passage in that work (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, page 232) in which he makes his meaning clear.

(Levinas) "In Life and Fate, Grossman tells how in Lubyanka, in Moscow, before the infamous gate where one could convey letters or packages to friends and relatives arrested for "political crimes" or can get news of them, people formed a line, each reading on the nape of the person in front of him the feelings and hopes of his misery."
(Questioner) "And the nape is a face..."
(Levinas) "Grossman isn't saying that the nape is a face, but that all the weakness, all the mortality, all the naked and disarmed mortality of the other can be read from it. He doesn't say it that way, but the face can assume meaning on what is the 'opposite' of the face! The face, then, is not the color of the eyes, the shape of the nose, the ruddiness of the cheeks, etc."

The otherwise than being or beyond being only makes itself evident (less than evident) in the trace, the vestige, a disturbance in being. The trace of a passage. This is what is behind Levinas's choice of the rather unusual expression "Of God Who Comes to Mind" for one of his works (French De Dieu qui vient à l'idée, 1982/1986; trans. by Bettina Bergo, 1998). God who "comes to mind" is not God, but the only God we can ever know.

B: Person vs. thing

For the medieval thinker it would seem that we have overlooked the third category of entity: angels. If you ask a college student today what the opposite of the humanities are, he or she would probably answer, the sciences. But when that division of study arose during the Renaissance its pendant was Divinities. We should be aware of this important paradigm shift. The modern world is considered to be made up of persons and things.
In the area of religious thought, over the long term, it seems to be the case that the divine or sacred has moved from the thing (idol worship) to an enhanced version of the human being. Psalm 135:16 may be taken as an indication in Judaism of this shift ("They have mouths, but they speak not; eyes have they, but they see not..."). Christianity has adopted a man-god position, theologically refined into a trinitarian concept of the divinity. Judaism, from Maimonides to Hermann Cohen, has expressed wariness with respect to a rather apparent anthropomorphism in the Tanach. Emmanuel Levinas has shown little interest in attempting to understand what he refers to somewhere as "la vie intime de Dieu," or the private life of God. As Mme Guwy notes in the interview that has been distributed to you (p. 308), Levinas "turns away from philosophical and theological theories that want results and answers."
In closing let me say that for ethical thought there can be no neat separation between persons and things, given the conditions of human existence. As the Lithuanian-born Rabbi Israel Salanter said, "A person should be more concerned with spiritual than with material matters, but another person's material welfare is one's own spiritual concern." This is sometimes stated as "My neighbor's material needs are my spiritual needs." The intermediary between the world of persons and things, via need, is money. It has been said that ובכל-מאדך might be interpreted as (You shall love the Eternal your God...) "and with all your money." The struggle for economic justice, whether we think it better advanced on a personal or a collective basis, owes its ethical relevance to this role of money as mediation between man and the world of things--from which we are not free.