Not Knowing, not Being, but Goodness

Levinas: Ethics and Infinity

It's not about knowing (epistemology). It's not about Being (ontology). It's not about God (theological). It's about the Ethical.

Levinas was a student of Heidegger, who worried about being (Dasein). For him, philosophy's question was one of fundemental ontology, of essence, the copula "is". What is? Levinas wanted to move beyond this question of what is and if we can know what is into the realm of action--ethics, the Self and the Other.

But Ethics ("What is ethics") should be situated outside of that question. There's more than just ontology. Do we have to "Know" what is good to do good? No, first you act. Because we can never "know" fully. At some point we have to just sign up to with MVS. Even if they don't want us. The good beyond being, said Plato, says Levinas.

Heidegger worried about Being from the point of view of Time. The nature of the human is embedded in time. But is this the time we all know, where X did happen and Y therefore could not have also happened? The single, simple Aristotlean time. If "Time is the Horizon of Being" as Heidegger wants to say, if there is an analytic affinitutde ("to be" requires limitations), if we are limited by death and old age, then the question cannot cover those parts of living that are outside time. One of which is "How do we position ourselves ethically?"

Heidegger was a Nazi.

"It's hard to forgive Heidegger." We must not do violence, however. And Heidegger's inability to work past the ontological question left an opening for Levinas. Not just to take Heidegger's project, but to turn that project. It is not a question of Time and our own Being, but the Time of the Other (l'autrui). Time is not the limit of our being, but the Other's being is. Not just the Other (a category) but an Other Person, a real living being (no pun intended)--the real neighbor we must love as ourselves (in fact, we can only love ourselves if we love the other).

Oh, what does this have to do with Burke, you ask? (Okay, I ask.) Burke also, like Heidegger, noted that "essence" is a difficult question, that it has something to do with "grounds." Like Levinas, Burke moved the question of being into the question of the other, specifically, consubstantiality and rhetoric. Burke, however, only noted how these appear in communication and society, an anthropological, sociological approach. Burke would never place the theological, the revelatory, or sacred in the same question set. Ethics for Burke can be separated from revelation. He was a humanist. We are "response-able" because we as humans are speaking creatures, inventors of the negative. Burke believed we can act without the voice of the Revealed.

I'm not sure I do.

What I should do? (The ethical) Is what everyone ought to do (Kant). Goes through the juridical, the civic, the logical, a third party.
Levinas asks "What then shall we do?" Is what we should do when faced with a specific Neighbor. Goes through nothing but the Neighbor, is not a civic or societal question.
If it were only You and I, our actions would be easy. But a third party always enters--politics, "always" or "time" or "government" and we act through it instead, complicating our response. Do we bomb Iraq to save the oppressed? Which neighbor are we serving in which party?

What then shall we do? Large action in a democracy must always be produced through a civics. If we could move without government ("anarchy") if we could have only ethical (to the Other) repsonses, then we could have utopia--lack of suffering, equality, keeping our obligations to each other. This is what dystopias point to as the current lack. But if we recognize that we are not acting ethically, we cannot band together to create an ethical utopia--that would again create a new politics, a just politics, but still not one necessarily obliged to the neighbor. As the postmodern dystopianists say, one man's utopia is another's dystopia.

The Levinasian version of utopia is not possible, however. We can never reach that--we're too damn human, as Girard notes. Does this mean we stop trying?

Of course not. Hence Bluffton University's question posed to seniors: "What then shall we do?" We still must act despite the impossibility of acting.

Good luck.