Freedom, Normativity and Finitude: Between Heidegger and Levinas

Husserl defines evidence as the “experience of truth”. See Husserl (1984: 652; 1973: 54). This however does not mean that evidence is the standard or warrant of infallible truth, as many have argued. See for instance Ströker (2005: 116, 136). Rather, evidence denotes the unique experiential character perception as well as other intentional acts has; there is, as Mohanty says, “a sense of unalterable facticity” (Mohanty 1985: 93).

What role does God play on the path of the Cartesian meditations? As Levinas argues, “the Cartesian cogito is discovered, at the end of the Third Meditation, to be supported on the certitude of the divine existence qua infinite, by relation to which the finitude of the cogito, or the doubt, is posited and conceivable. This finitude could not be determined without recourse to the infinite…The Cartesian subject is given a point of view exterior to itself from which it can apprehend itself” (Levinas 2007: 210). Paul Ricoeur has once made a similar remark on the third meditation (Ricoeur 1994: 8f.).

Levinas argues that the world “is posited in a discourse, in a conversation which proposes the world” and “the objectivity of the object and its significance comes from language” (Levinas 2007: 96). According to Levinas, objectivity is only possible on the condition of a relation with the other. The present article cannot engage in a discussion on how Levinas argues for it, but only shows that his idea of objectivity is tightly related to the notion of freedom.

In her recent book Das Begehren der reinen praktischen Vernunft. Kants Ethik in phänomenologischer Sicht, Inga Römer makes a similar distinction between two concepts of freedom in Levinas, namely, freedom of arbitrary will (Willkürfreiheit) and justified freedom (gerechtfertigte Freiheit) (see Römer 2018: 381).

For instance, the views of the classical utilitarianists such as Bentham and Mill.

Levinas’s comment shows that he is not completely ignorant of Heidegger’s works and lectures after Being and Time. Then there is the question of how we should understand Heidegger’s notion of “will” (see Davis 2007).

In Totality and Infinity, the notion of finite freedom is a bit ambiguous. On the one hand, it is sometimes identical to limited freedom (Levinas 2016: 164), which refers to spontaneity that is itself unconstrainted and yet is limited in a certain situation, or a form of freedom that consists in a free part, causa sui, and a non-free part. Levinas points out the difficulty of such a notion: “to say that the free part is impeded in the non-free part would bring us back indefinitely to the same difficulty: how can the free part, causa sui, undergo anything whatever from the non-free part?” (Levinas 2007: 223) On the other hand, Levinas seems to point towards a proper understanding of finite freedom, as he comments, “the finitude of freedom must therefore not signify some limit within the substance of the free being, divided into one part endowed with a causality of its own and one part subject to exterior causes” (Levinas 2007: 223) This proper notion of finite freedom is precisely what we wish to explore in this article. Notably, in Otherwise than Being, Levinas is more distinct in proposing a finite freedom in a proper and positive way (Levinas 2016: 121f.).

We shall see in the later section that Levinas in fact does not mean to argue that human beings are heteronomous in the Kantian sense. By calling into question Kant’s theory of autonomy here, he is only to suggest that our freedom needs to be invested by the other.

Some recent interpretative attempts have been made to understand Heidegger in light of the notion of normativity. A leading work on this topic is written by Steven Crowell (2013). Crowell understands the normativity at stake in a broad sense, as he writes, “there is a wider sense according to which a norm is anything that serves as a standard of success or failure of any kind, and it is in this sense that I understand the term here”.

“Beholden to” is a term John Haugland uses in his essay “Truth and Rule-following” (see Haugland 1998: 305–362).

Heidegger has expounded the same idea and refers to the primordial freedom as “from the very outset a free holding oneself toward whatever beings are given there in letting oneself be bound” (Heidegger 1983: 496).

Heidegger also refers to it as a “play-space” (Spielraum).

As Levinas also writes on the same page, “the marvel of creation does not only consist in being a creation ex nihilo, but in that it results in a being capable of receiving a revelation, learning that it is created, and putting itself in question”.

See Gabriela Basterra (2015: 2, 134). In her book Basterra offers an illuminating interpretation on Kant’s and Levinas’s doctrines of freedom. She argues that both the Kantian moral law and the Levinasian other indicate an otherness or excess within the subject, thereby making the subject of freedom an auto-heteronomous one.

Römer argues that Levinas is concerned with a new form of autonomy, “which does not begin with me and my engagement, but, however, as the taking over of the command, has always turned heteronomy into autonomy” (Römer 2018: 389). In contrast to Römer’s interpretation which emphasizes more the autonomy of the Levinasian subject, I propose to understand the human freedom as a unity or reconciliation of autonomy and heteronomy.

Or should we say, expressions that need be understood on an ontological rather than ontic level?

As Heidegger writes in “On the Essence of Ground,” “if, however, transcendence in the sense of freedom for ground is understood in the first and last instance as an abyss of ground, then the essence of what was called Dasein’s absorption in and by beings also thereby becomes sharper. Dasein—although finding itself in the midst of beings and pervasively attuned by them—is, as free potentiality for being, thrown among beings. The fact that it has the possibility of being a self, and has this factically in keeping with its freedom in each case; the fact that transcendence temporalizes itself as a primordial occurrence, does not stand in the power of this freedom itself. Yet such impotence (thrownness) is not first the result of beings forcing themselves upon Dasein, but rather determines Dasein’s being as such” (Heidegger 1976: 174f.; 1998: 134f.).

As Heidegger continues, “this awesome (ungeheuerlich) being, that we really know and are, can only be as the most finite of all beings, as the convergence of opposing elements within the sphere of beings, and thus as the occasion and possibility of the separation of beings in their diversity”.

In his lecture “Dying for…,” Levinas (1998) explicitly talks about the issue of authenticity. While he on the one hand cannot agree with Heidegger that authenticity comes from “a dissolution of all relations with the Other” in being-towards-death, he on the other hand suggests that being-towards-death does not necessarily shut us from all the Others and authenticity could be realized in “dying-for-Others”. Does Levinas’s criticism of Heidegger’s Mitsein and authenticity involve a misreading of Heidegger? A more sophisticated discussion on the issue could be seen in Chantal Bax’s paper “Otherwise than being-with: Levinas on Heidegger and Community” (Bax 2017: 381–400).

Needless to say, a more historical-oriented analysis may shed significant light on the difference between Heidegger and Levinas.