Abstract
Truth can consist only in the exposition of being to itself, in a singular inadequacy with itself which is also an equality, a partition in which the part counts for the whole, is the image of the whole. The image immediately welcomed without undergoing modifications is a sensible image. But the divergency between the image and the whole prevents the image from remaining in its fixity; it must stand at the confines of itself or beyond itself, so that truth not be incomplete or one-sided. The image has to symbolize the whole. Truth consists in a being whose images are its reflection, but also its symbol, being identified through new images. A symbol is apperceived or set up, and receives its determination in passivity and immediacy, or sensible concretion. But this immediacy is, in the knowing of the truth, always repressed. Knowing is then indirect and torturous. It is produced on the basis of the sensible intuition, which is already the sensible oriented toward that which, in the midst of the image, is announced as beyond the image, this as this or as that, this stripping itself of the halo of sensibility in which it nonetheless is reflected and abides. The intuition is already a sensibility becoming an idea, of another this as this, aura of another idea, openness in the openness. This dovetailing of ideas nowise prejudges the analytical, synthetical, dialectical spring which enables us to bring one idea out of another. Nor does it prejudge the hard work of “experimental” or “rational” research (which, in the concrete, is always divination and invention) which makes these implications explicit, draws one “content” out of another, identifies this and that. The subjective movement of cognition thus belongs to being’s very essence, to its temporalization in which essence takes on sense, in which the image is already an idea, a symbol of another image, both theme and openness, pattern and transparency. This subjective movement, however, belongs to the very indifference of a noema to a noesis and to the thinker that is absorbed and forgotten in it.
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References
Cf. our study “Langage et proximité,” in En découvrant l’existence avçc Husserl et Heidegger, 2nd ed. ( Paris, Vrin, 1967 ) p. 217.
It will turn out to be possible to understand the manifestation of being on the basis of justice, to which is led a saying which is not only addressed to the other, but is addressed to the other in the presence of a third party. Justice is this very presence of the third party and this manifestation, for which every secret, every intimacy is a dissimulation. Justice is at the origin of the claims of ontology to be absolute, of the definition of man as an understanding of Being.
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.
It is the-one-for-the-other in the incarnation of the same that makes the “transcendence” of intentionality understandable. The for-the-other proper to the psyche is a passivity of exposedness which goes so far as to be an exposure of the exposedness, to be ex-pression or saying. Saying becomes a thematization and a said.
Cf. supra.
Contrary to what is maintained in Creative Evolution,all disorder is not another order. The anarchy of the diachronic is not “assembled” into an order, except in the said. Bergson, distrustful as he is of language, is here a victim of the said.
Still here too, bread does not belong to the transcendence of the noematic, appearing in the said, offering as a spectacle the infinite peelings of the image. Bread already refers to the incarnate subject who has earned it in the sweat of his brow.
In Totality and Infinity the sensible was interpreted in the sense of consumption and enjoyment.
One can see and hear as one touches: “The forest, ponds and fertile plains have touched my eyes more than looks. I leaned on the beauty of the world and held the odor of the seasons in my hands” (La Comtesse de Noailles).
It is as possessed by a neighbor, as relics, and not as clothed with cultural attributes, that things first obsess. Beyond the “mineral” surface of things, contact is an obsession by the trace of a skin, the trace of an invisible face, which the things bear and which only reproduction fixes as an idol. The purely mineral contact is privative. Obsession breaks with the rectitude of consumption and cognition. But caresses are dormant in all contact, and contact in all sensible experience (cf. note 9): the thematized disappears in the caress, in which the thematization becomes a proximity. There is indeed a part of metaphor in that, and the things are taken to be true and illusory before being near. But is not the poetry of the world prior to the truth of things, and inseparable from what is proximity par excellence, that of a neighbor, or of the proximity of the neighbor par excellence.
One does have to admire the bold intellectual move in Cartesianism: the body as source of the sensible has no longer anything in common with the knowing of ideas. Even if one does not follow Descartes as to the bond he affirms between sensibility and action and the rank he assigns to the sensible, from now on the union between soul and body is not only an obstacle encountered by thought.
Cf. note 11.
Cf. infra,pp. 81ff.
Cf. infra,Chapter V, pp. 157ff.
Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller ( Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1977 ) p. 60.
This impossibility to slip off even into death is the point where, beyond the insomnia which can still be dissimulated, the subject is a saying, an uncovering oneself to the other, a psyche.
And one can deduce from the signifyingness of a subject, from its being one-for-the-other, these possibilities and even these necessities of the theoretical.
The implication of subjectivity in proximity, by which proximity is inevitably an approach - an implication which conveys the diachrony of signification - nonetheless becomes synchronic in the said, if only in these very pages. Is this simultaneity in the said more or less true than the diachrony affirmed by it? The question presupposes an independence of the true, of manifestation and the openness with respect to signification. With such a supposition there will be no doubt about the answer. The said in which everything shows itself is the origin and the ultimate of philosophy. But one thus forgets the pre-originary in which signification is articulated. One forgets the extraordinary possibility of a skeptical statement, returning as a bastard child of the Spirit after each of the refutations that drive it from the paternal house, contesting truth in a statement alleged to be true, a thought that is one, but at the same time not a thought.
Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment, trans. James S. Churchill (Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1973) p. 38.
A neighbor concerns me outside of any a priori. But perhaps before every a priori, or from an earlier moment than that of the a priori. This is the notion all our inquiry means to bring out, so as to reach the concept of an absolute passivity. Receptivity with regard to the given, a modality of cognition, is not adequate for it, for precisely the a priori that cannot be excluded from it lets all the weight of the given be welcomed. This would still be an act.
It is perhaps by reference to this irremissibility that the strange place of illusion, intoxication, artificial paradises can be understood. The relaxation in intoxication is a semblance of distance and irresponsibility. It is a suppression of fraternity, or a murder of the brother. The possibility of going off measures the distance between dream and wakefulness. Dream and illusion are the play of a consciousness come out of obsession, touching the other without being assigned by him. A play of consciousness is a semblance.
This term translates the Platonic term 4piurl in the Phaedrus.
Cf. in Hamlet,Act Il, scene 2: “What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?”
The obsession is like a relation between monads prior to the opening up of doors or windows, in a counter-direction from intentionality, which is a modality of obsession and nowise a development of this relationship. The expression by each monad of all the others refers to substitution, in which the identity of subjectivity is resolved. The ego obsessed by all the others, supporting all the others, is an inversion of intentional ecstasy. In passivity the ego is a self under a persecuting - accusation of a neighbor. Rabbinical thought states the extent of responsibility: “…to the point of being delivered over to stoning and insults” on the part of the very one for whom the responsible one answers. (Cf. Rachi’s Commentary on Numbers 12, 12. which here follows the ancient tradition of Siphri.)
The passivity of affection is more passive than the radical receptivity Heidegger speaks of in connection with Kant, where the transcendental imagination offers the subject an alcove of nothingness so as to precede the given and assume it.
Canticle of Canticles,IV, 6.
The sense of this alteration must indeed be clarified in its turn. But it was here important to underline the possibility of the libido in the more elementary and more rich signification of proximity, a possibility included in the unity of the face and the skin, even if only in the extreme turnings about of a face. Beneath the erotic alterity there is the alterity of the-one-for-the-other, responsibility before eros.
And even with a double alternation. Cf. note 29.
In this disparity nothing can be conceived as a correlation, that is, as a synchronization of a temporal succession, whose losses would be recuperated. This equivocation of disparity is doubled up with an ambiguity in which the contact of proximity takes on a doxic meaning: contact becomes palpation, groping, exploration, search, knowing of a nudity such as that which a doctor examines, or an athlete exhibits in health. This reverting of contact into consciousness and into a discourse that states and that is logical. in which the communicated theme is more important than the contact of communication, is not due to chance or the clumsiness of a behavior. It is due to the relationship between the neighbor and a third party, before whom he may be guilty. It is due to the justice that is nascent in the very abnegation before the neighbor.
Even if a caress can reenter the teleological order of the said and become a symbol or word.
But obsession is not an intentionality once again, as though there were question in it of an aim at some correlative term, however complex it may be. The obsession by the other in the face is already the plot of infinity which could not materialize as something correlative. and exceeds the scope of intentionality. It is the excession of the here, as locus, and of the now, as an hour, excession from contemporaneousness and consciousness, which Jea yes a trace. In space as a void which is not nothingness but is a like the night, this trace of infinity shows itself enigmatically, like a blinking light. But this new plot does not remain in a negative theology. Its positive character still leads us to the notion of substitution.
Numbers, Xl,12.
The description of proximity as a hagiography of the-one-for-the-other subtends society, which begins with the entry of the third man.. In it my response prior to any problem, that is, my responsibility, poses problems, if one is not to abandon oneself to violence. It then calls for comparison, measure, knowing, laws, institutions — justice. But it is important for the very equity of justice that it contain the signification that had dictated it.
Hegel thus formulates the bad infinite: “Something becomes an other: this other is itself somewhat; therefore it likewise becomes an other, and so on ad infinitum. This Infinity is the wrong or negative infinity; it is only a negation of a finite: but the finite rises again the same as ever, and is never got rid of and absorbed.” The Logic of Hegel. trans. William Wallace (London, Oxford University Press, 1873) §§ 93, 94. In the situation we have described the other does not become likewise an other; the end is not reborn, but moves off, at each new stage of the approach, with all the alterity of the other.
Ethical language, which phenomenology resorts to in order to mark its own interruption, does not come from an ethical intervention laid out over descriptions. It is the very meaning of approach, which contrasts with knowing. No language other than ethics could be equal to the paradox which phenomenological description enters when, starting with the disclosure, the appearing of a neighbor, it reads it in its trace, which orders the face according to a diachrony which cannot be synchronized in representation. A description that at the beginning knows only being and beyond being turns into ethical language. The enigma in which transcendence comes to flush has to be distinguished from arbitrariness and illusions. The exteriority of illeitr,refractory to disclosure and manifestation, is a having-to-be in the face of another. In it there is announced not a Sollen,which is always asymptotic, but glory.
Can the question of the divinity of the One God be put as the question of the humanity of man is put? Does the One have a genus? Can the divinity of God be conceived apart from God, as Being is conceived apart from entities? The whole problem consists in asking if God can be conceived as being or as beyond. Even if, by a ruse of language, the divinity of God is enunciated, one will immediately have to add to the being that designates the divinity the adverb supremely. But the supremacy of the supreme can be conceived in being only starting with God. This is involved in Malebranche’s saying, which has not yet been meditated on enough, “The Infinite is unto itself its own idea.”
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Levinas, E. (1991). Sensibility and Proximity. In: Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Martinus Nijhoff Philosophy Texts, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7906-3_3
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