PHIL4205 - Levinas' Disinterest in the Invisible

Reading Totality and Infinity, within the first chapter titled "Desire for Invisible", I encountered one of the first of many stumbling blocks. The page seemed to flow steadily in waves of critical thought, but it was there at the end of the chapter, in the decent, that I most resisted the currents force.

Levinas begins the chapter with a focused account of desire and what it means in the relation to the Other. Desire in itself is never complete. As was the case in Diotima's speech in the Symposium, to obtain one's love is to no longer desire them. We must be without. We cannot possess yet the lover must always seek closeness to the beloved. Love is a bitter sweet. One is unfulfilled by the separation away, but so grateful for the hope that love provides for the future. Applied to an account of metaphysics, the desire for a radical exteriority of the self, the absolutely Other, is one that is never complete. While things in the world are not necessarily excluded from it, material things can not completed it either. What is important to note about all this talk of desire is that metaphysics does not signifies something that is non-relational or an illusion of sorts, it is a real experience of the relation to what is invisible/non-present and incalculable.

Where I began to get caught up is in the translation of this desire for the invisible into an ethical philosophy. While this desire is to remain fundamentally without satisfaction and cannot exhaust the understanding of "the remoteness, the alterity, and the exteriority of the other", how is this a genuine regard for the particular Other in proximity to me? Every Other is unique and a potentiality that I cannot account for. I can never exhaust my responsibility to the other, nor can I be assured that the other will regard me as I regard the other. Rather than a set of rule or laws, as is typical of most ethical systems, Levinas provides no "ought" that will compel us to act and no way to separate ourselves from ethics. We simply exist always in an ethical relation to the other without our choosing to be. By recognizing these limitations of knowing the Other, to regard the Other is to take it away from its Otherness, it is to attempt to make visible what is invisible. Moreover, I am not responsible for the regard of the Other which I cannot satisfy, but it is the Other who encounters me in proximity. Only when we experience the closeness of the Other, the one who we can never know in a desire that only deepens, is the condition for ethical responsibility. We cannot satisfy our responsibility to the Other. My regard for and the response to the Other are always in question. This notion of ethics seems reminicent to the Kantian categorical imperative that understands ethics that is anything but categorical. In the Grounding of the Metaphysic of Morals Kant emphasizes the role of a disinterested ethics where the acting subject is not to regard the "means" but rather the "end" in itself that has not or may not be fully disclosed. In being disinterested, avoiding the error of restricting the Other to a concept is seen as the point where a pure ethics, what Kant calls the good, becomes discernible.

As an example of ethics, Levinas' description is far removed from any system that has typically represented ethics. Perhaps my confusion is a predictable response. The Other is never an answer for me - as close or finite totality - but rather I must continue infinitely to ask the question of my relation to the Other.