10/05/2022 – Levinas and the Other: Hermeneutics Part 5

How do you win at chess? You gotta know what moves are coming from your opponent and then devise a strategy to counter them. That’s exactly what Levinas did with Heidegger. You wanna find out why and how he did this? It gets a little personal. Stick around. This is TenOnReligion.

Hey peeps, it’s Dr. B. with TenOnReligion. If you like religion and philosophy content one thing I really need you to do is to smash that sub button because it really helps out the channel. The transcript is available at TenOnReligion.com and I also have a ko-fi linked in the description if you’d like to help out the channel and help me keep this baby going.

This is the last part of our five-part series on hermeneutics, the art of interpretation and understanding. We’ve covered the death of the biblical author, Gadamer and dialogue, Habermas and critique, and Ricoeur and suspicion. To wrap this series up it’s Levinas and the Other. Let’s get into it.

Like several of the other figures we’ve talked about so far, Levinas comes out of this Husserl-Heidegger tradition in Germany. It’s hard to overstate how important these two figures were for understanding phenomenology and hermeneutics and the legacy they left. So many later scholars, including many we didn’t cover in this hermeneutics series, take these two as their starting point. For Levinas, however, it became a bit…well…personal. You see, Levinas was born to a Jewish family and remained dedicated to Judaism his entire life. After studying Husserl and Heidegger’s philosophy he became very attracted to their thought. Butttt… Heidegger joined the Nazi party. And remained a member throughout World War II, though his only role was teaching philosophy at the University of Freiburg. Even after the end of the war, Heidegger never really said anything about the Shoah in which six million lost their lives. Needless to say, Heidegger’s silence stunned many of his colleagues. Levinas’ wife and daughter were spared by being hidden in a monastery by his close friend, but many of his family members in Lithuania were murdered by the Nazis. So, this is more than just an intellectual issue for Levinas and basically his philosophy really reflects this. Check this out.

Some familiarity with Heidegger’s philosophy is needed to fully appreciate Levinas’ chess moves. We clearly don’t have time for even a simple overview here, but one thing is important. Heidegger’s view of interpretation is explained by the hermeneutical circle of Dasein’s “being-in-the-world.” There is what Heidegger terms a fore-structure which is comprised of a fore-having, a fore-sight, and a fore-conception. We have an idea about what something should be like, we project that into our consciousness, and when we actually experience it, the picture gets filled in – simultaneously partially fulfilling our expectations and partially changing them. Then the cycle continues. This is similar to Gadamer’s view of a horizon. Levinas obviously has personal reasons to find a way to circumvent this interpretive model and so he suggests there is something even more primordial, more basic or foundational to a proper model of hermeneutics. There is a necessary ethical component which is prior to the interpretive process. Levinas refers to this as a preontological, ethical relation between the “I” and the “Other.” It is preontological because it preceded Dasein’s fore-structure making ethics come before ontology, the study of being. This is a huge move. Checkmate. Boom.

Levinas states that Heidegger’s Dasein is only ethically accountable to itself. But when one looks into the face of the “other” one does not merely see one person among many, but a unique existence. The responsibility to the “other” comes before the formation of any subject-object relation. But here’s where things get a little deep. When looking into the face of the “other,” it “speaks” not in a verbal sense, but in a philosophical sense in that it is infinitely different from us. The alterity – or “different-ness” – of the other is transcendence. The other is so different from oneself that we don’t even know how to begin to compare the two. Kind of like the difference between our conceptualization of infinity and the actual reality of infinity is so vast that there doesn’t seem like there’s a connection. For Levinas, there’s this irreducible gap between our view of the difference between “self” and “other” and the true reality of that gap.

So, in this view, we have a reductive view of the “other.” We create categories to describe the “other” and classify, thematize, anthropomorphize, totalize, and even worse, dehumanize. Sadly, humans can actually be quite good at those things, but Levinas argues that all our human language about the “other” ultimately fails. Levinas states that we only have access to the alterity or otherness of the “other” through a trace, like the reality of infinity leaves a trace in our human idea of infinity so we sort of think we know what infinity is like despite the fact that we really don’t. Even though our language attempts to remove this alterity, it’s unable to because such an erasure of difference is unerasable. One common example given is footprints in the sand slowly eroded by the ocean. After enough waves, the footprints themselves disappear but small rounded indentations are left behind. They are a sign of human presence, but a former human presence. They’re not there anymore. Thus, they represent both presence and absence. Those rounded indentations in the sand are like the alterity or “different-ness” of the “other” which cannot be fully erased by language. Maybe, or better yet, “perhaps,” language has meaning beyond that which is allowed by Western rational thinking and understanding of being (i.e., Heidegger). This “perhaps” is an ethical relation of the trace. And that, my friends, is the key idea in Levinas’ hermeneutics.

Levinas argues that our sense of being a unified self is not ready-made, but rather formed through our ethical subjected-ness to the “other.” The starting point is not the subject-object binary relation of the human sciences, the ontology of Heidegger’s Dasein, Gadamer’s historically-effected consciousness and dialogue with tradition, nor Habermas’ critical theory and ideology. It’s this preontological relation to the “other.” We are not first accountable to a set of disciplinary methods, but first ethically accountable to the “other.” Since Levinas was a devout Jew, he extended this as being accountable to one’s neighbor, a horizontal relationship, and to G-d, a vertical relationship, within the context of one’s community and religious tradition. The quest for justice preempts the search for explanation. The true “self” exists when the “other” summons it to responsibility. And that is how Levinas beats Heidegger at his own game. Mic-drop.

So, what do you think about Levinas and his hermeneutics of the “other?” Leave a comment below and let me know if you ever felt an ethical accountability for someone else. And that’s a wrap for our five-part series on hermeneutics, the art of interpretation and understanding. What did you think? Did you like it? That’s what I thought. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, support the channel in the link below, please like and share this video and subscribe to this channel. This is TenOnReligion.