Intersectional Levinas and an Origin for the Ethics of Love
Nikolaus Carey
Introduction
In our experience of living in the world, we are confronted with a sustained situation of total surprise, an exterior to the self that imparts sensible impressions and yet remains absolutely removed from our capacities to comprehend or control. Human minds, honed over aeons of struggle in this world, have developed novel strategies for survival. Among these, we seek predictable patterns of causes and behaviors, and once armed with these patterns, the individual self might be extended into the world to resolve the uncertainties of living in that world. Through the arduous development of philosophical thought, our concerns about the nature of being alive in the world have led us to arrive at ontologies that provide foundational principles of being. That is, in the pursuit of a reliable framework for understanding existence, we have sought out universally applicable truths about existing (Hofweber, “Logic and Ontology”). Among those philosophers who have contemplated these ontologies of living in the world, Emmanuel Levinas constructed a criticism that opposed their reduction of the immanent uniqueness of individual human experience (Grondin 243). In this paper, I will demonstrate how Levinas suggests an ethics of love in his description of the face of the Other, how our proximity to the Other might yield an emotional response of love, and how the encounter demands we reckon with embodied vulnerability in a world of harms. Following Levinas’ theory, I believe that this ethics of love is grounded in responsibility to the Other’s alterity, its singular otherness, as a companion in the lived experience of this momentary situation of embodiment in the world, willingly vulnerable in the encounter.
Levinas and the Absolute Other
Levinas formulated his criticism around an argument for an absolute Other who, in its alterity, is totally unknowable and infinitely irreducible. In contrast to the ontology of Heidegger, which Levinas characterized in Totality and Infinity as a, “philosophy of power,” he rejects any “tyranny” of subordinating all individual others in the world to being in a general state of sameness, thereby constituting an injustice upon their individuality (46). According to Levinas, we instead encounter the Other in its presentation of a “face,” which is not limited to an idea of its sameness in our subjective estimation, but instead an expression of itself in its own lived experience (50-51). From this encounter, Levinas builds the argument that we, in our subjective self inhabiting the momentary situation, are called to yield to the alterity of the Other, and must accept the face presented before us in its own ineffable lived embodiment. Levinas, as a student of the phenomenology of Husserl and ontology of Heidegger, was initially impressed by the argument for the embodied self approaching understanding by conscious engagement with phenomena and subsequent intention toward lived experience (Bergo, “Emmanuel Levinas”). However, Levinas would come to disagree with an imposition of a subjective understanding arrived upon through an egocentric intent, suggested in Husserl’s phenomenology, by which the definition of being in the world extends outward from the subject, captivating the whole array of worldly experiences into a universal account of objects (Beyer, “Edmund Husserl”). For Levinas, this approach was tantamount to violence perpetrated against other living persons in the world, whose own experience of phenomena and depth of understanding is something we could not ethically claim to define, nor of which we could have any sensible account. Therefore, the response of ethics in the encounter with other lived experiences became a central component of Levinas’ argument that any study of being in the world must necessarily depend first on acknowledgement of the Other as a living agent in the world with their own subjective experience that we are powerless to define.
The Subject in Encounter with the Other
In order to examine this encounter to locate the origin for an ethics of love, we must orient ourselves as subject in relation to the Other. Electing to describe this as “encounter,” Levinas demonstrates this orientation toward the Other as an object in our subjective lived experience, and as such brings us into proximity in the momentary situation. However, there is an important caveat from Levinas, a distinction by which the Other resolves as more than an object to be known. In its alterity, the Other presents before us its face, a lived embodiment in the world that may be witnessed but not reduced to sameness. Referring to Levinas’ work Totality and Infinity, we find that the Other exists not to be grasped, but, as a living and embodied self experiencing the encounter in its own way, acting as a counterpart in the world, they cannot be known (43). This encounter with the face also presents us with our own sensible and cognitive limitations: a boundary where the “I” in the self ceases and all that is not the self begins. In a world of experienced phenomena in which our self cannot grasp the alterity of exterior lived embodiment, we find ourselves in a persistent state of vulnerability. This is in part because the world of lived embodiment is also a world of harms, where our fragility and mortality are apparent to our sensibility through experience. Yet the Other, as a lived embodiment in this world of harms, must also reckon with this vulnerability. In our encounter with the face of the Other, we are confronted by it in its own fragility. It is from this point that Levinas illustrates the transition from an intuitive sense of one’s own experience, passing through the directed intention in relation to the Other, that we arrive at a rational realization about beings as vulnerable agents in the world, and this realization compels us to a responsibility toward them in the encounter.
Emotion in Proximity to an Exterior Self
Approaching proximity to one another in this encounter, the Other presents its face to our subjective self. There, the subject is available to the sensible experience of that presentation. From this sensible experience an affective emotion is possible, and of the possible emotional responses, the complexities of love might arise. The affective experience resulting from the encounter can elicit from us as subject a desire to reflect upon this encounter, such that our emotional response, including a personal form of love, is directed with our intention toward the Other in our proximity. If we are to direct the experience of love, we follow a rational thread: the subject of a lived experience, the emotional response to the sensible, the reflective call in response to the object of the emotion, and thereafter an intention directed toward the Other, constituted in the phenomenon of want. Lived embodiment in the encounter with the face of the Other reveals a self outside the self, a “you” to the “I” of subjective experience. This face approaches the threshold of our identity as a willing agent in the momentary situation of lived experience, and in proximity to our subjective self, our vulnerability is absolutely apparent. We remain sensitive to our vulnerability, which is present even in our own sense of want. Thus confronted with our vulnerability to the face of the Other, the phenomenon of want develops from a promise that, in our vulnerability, we might be witnessed as we witness the Other. Experiencing this vulnerability in proximity yields the sense not that we lack without the object of our intended emotion, but instead the sense that there is promise in this moment of vulnerability that a responsibility to care can be fulfilled (Bergo, “Emmanuel Levinas”). Love exists, then, in the promise that the “you” before the “I” might be willing in its vulnerability to experience lived embodiment in proximity, where our responsibility to the Other will find a ready counterpart. In love, we choose to expose our flaws, weaknesses, fears, and so on, in order to fulfill the promise that the face, so presented by the Other, will observe our deepest expressions of self with the responsibility that we, in turn, owe to it.
Vulnerability and Responsibility in Love
As a result, love is not solely a surrender of our vulnerability to this face, since it arrives in the momentary proximity between lived embodiments. It is also the acceptance of the face as Other, and in accepting the alterity of its being, we accept the responsibility to care for its vulnerability (Levinas 75). The promise of love is, in part, the promise that our responsibility to care is something that we are present and bound to fulfill. Our feeling of love begins when our intention is directed toward the face of the Other, but at this moment it is not necessarily a real love. Love’s realization comes in a reflective response to that encounter with the face as the expression of the Other’s lived experience; its phenomenon occurs between the encounter’s intended participants, the “I” and the “you”, in each with regard to the exterior other, outside the self. From the sense of self in the moment of experience and the sensible perception of the embodied self in the world, we can understand that the encounter is intersubjective (Beyer, “Edmund Husserl”). That is to say, the experience of the “I” occurs in the world in which the experience of the “you” occurs in tandem. Each self then experiences embodiment in the encounter with the embodied and exterior Other in the world. In a lived experience of vulnerability in a world of harms, we accumulate memories of pain, loss, and regret. The subjective self within this momentary situation in the world is a wounded self, implicit in vulnerability’s very etymology. Immersed in the phenomenon of want, the subject directs intended love toward the Other and reckons vulnerability with promise, expressing their own face to be witnessed. The promise of love, as before, thus also lies in surrendering to alterity in order to willingly undertake the intersubjective experience of being vulnerable in lived embodiment. In this way, love is actualized in the world by the commitment to an ethics found in a mutual vulnerability and reciprocal responsibility to care, a yielding forward of the capacity to be wounded in a world of harms, and, simultaneously, a want to safeguard the wounded exterior self expressed as the face of the Other.
Conclusion
An ethics of love must arise first in the momentary situation of the encounter, witnessing the face of the Other, and relenting before its alterity, rather than imposing foundational principles of being in the world. The face presents to us an expression of lived embodiment, but the Other’s mystery lies in its infinite unknowability. This mystery, like many uncertainties in the world of harms, exposes our capacity to suffer wounding. Yet, the Other, in its lived embodiment, is necessarily a part of that same world (what Husserl referred to as the Lebenswelt or “lifeworld”), and our ethical responsibility to the Other in its singularly unique experience of living is also necessitated by its vulnerability. An ethics of love therefore also arrives in the radical embrace of a mutual vulnerability that demands the responsibility to care, despite the uncertainty of living in the world.
References
Grondin, Jean. Introduction to Metaphysics: From Parmenides to Levinas. New York, Columbia University Press, 2012.
Lévinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis, Duquesne University Press, 1961.
Bergo, Bettina. “Emmanuel Levinas.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 7 Aug. 2019, plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/levinas/. Accessed 10 Nov. 2021.
Hofweber, Thomas. “Logic and Ontology.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 3 Feb. 2021, plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-ontology/#Ont. Accessed 11 Nov. 2021.
Beyer, Christian. “Edmund Husserl.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 18 Nov. 2020, plato.stanford.edu/entries/husserl/#EmpIntLif. Accessed 12 Nov. 2021.
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Reflections 