PHIL4205 - Emanual Levinas: The Difficulty in Letting Other Be Other

In reading Totality and Infinity it is often necessary to remind oneself the impossibility of defining infinity. One could easily be tempted to follow the short handed analogies of the infinite that may come to mind like wide open spaces or of length numerical values but these are merely diversion. A reader must read then re-read the word "infinite" where ever it appears on the page rather than attempting to solve it conceptually. But while this may be a more faithful reading of Levinas (something that he is mindful of and the paradox that writing on the subject of infinity introduces) it remains ultimately unsatisfying to never arrive at any definitive answer.

This dissatisfaction, as we are told, can be attributed to the preference in the philosophic cannon towards totality. Totality is a mode of being that is based in the act of "disclosing". This emphasis on totality goes back to the Greek understanding of "logos" but it is in modern philosophy with the introduction of Cartisian subjectivism that consciousness for-itself takes on the role as the arbiter of truth in its domination of externality. Individuals from this perspective become the "bearers of forces that command them" and do not realize the extent that the self referential "I" is only possible by the Other that is given. Levinas' description of the preference for totality is not to overstate its influence but to regard it as only one possibility among other possible modes of being.

In contrast to totality, Levinas affirms that subjects are much more passive in their experience of the world, a condition he calls infinity. Rather than an active subject who discloses exteriority, Levinas understands infinity as the relational condition wherein the unintentional subject is encountered by a preexisting and irreducible Other. By describing infinity, Levinas is trying to break the subject/object binary and return to a place of origin where such divisions of the world become strange and unfamiliar again. Infinity represents that which is "signification without a context" (p.23). In describing his method, Levinas explains that phenomenologically "we can proceed from the experience of totality back to a situation where totality breaks up, a situation that conditions totality itself. Such a situation is the gleam of exteriority or of transcendence in the face of the Other." (p.24)

After struggling with the concept of infinity or the attempt to force it into a concept, it soon became apparent the error that was being made - an error that is faultless on my part but one that nonetheless betrays the Other. When using the term Other to refer to what opens me to the infinite I am in a sense employing the category of the Other to totalize that experience. From what I have heard this same criticism was offered by Derrida and was answered by Levinas' "Otherwise than Being" that attempted to avoid all forms of the verb "to be". But can we see this ambition to reconcile the infinite fated to failure before it starts? Should we just reserve ourselves to this radical skepticism and be satisfied with admitting our limitations?

In reading Totality and Infinity I do not believe that this is at all Levinas' intention. While recognizing that the Other is irreducible, it nonetheless interrupts us. The Other in its being-there responds and demands a response. This relation to the Other is the point where ethics is both possible and inevitable. Any form of relation is a communication with the Other, we are not "duped by morality" into thinking that relational being is an after-thought of consciousness but points towards an origin (p.21). Levinas claims "ethics is an optics" because of the condition of our relation to exteriority in the percieving of the Other.