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ABSTRACT
Levinas maintains that there is a lasting significance to hedonism if we consider the important role of pleasures for our embodied existence. In this essay, we go back to Plato to explore the nature of pleasure, different kinds of pleasures, and their contribution to the good life. The good life is a considerate mixture of pleasures which requires knowing, understanding and remembering. Pleasures take us to the most basic level of existence which the Presocratics can help us understand through their idea of elements. With the help of Levinas, we can expand the concept of elements to include elemental states. As a result, we see how our embodied existence opens us up to various levels of otherness.
Notes
1 When it comes to the alternative between enjoyment and suffering, the development of Levinas’s philosophy plays a role as well. For an exploration of enjoyment, the more detailed analyses can be found in Totality and Infinity; and it is not surprising if we mostly turn toward Otherwise Than Being for a discussion of suffering. But it has to be kept in mind that, clearly, both dimensions are present in both works, and the more detailed analyses should not lead one to assume that there has been a shift from enjoyment to suffering.
2 In this article, we follow the standard way of translating “autre” and “Autre” in French, as utilised by Alphonso Lingis and others: “other” is used for something other in general (and includes, for example, elements) whereas “Other” stands for “other person”.
3 Levinas, Totality and Infinity 134/107.
4 Levinas, Otherwise Than Being 73/92.
5 Hamblet, The Lesser Good.
6 Allen, The Philosophical Sense of Transcendence.
7 Achtenberg, Essential Vulnerabilities.
8 See Staehler, Plato and Levinas.
9 Levinas, Totality and Infinity 181/156.
10 Levinas, “Diachrony and Representation” 109.
11 Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind 87/140.
12 At the same time, Levinas resisted all requests to formulate the method of his philosophy, stating in an interview:
I do not believe that there is a transparency possible in method. Nor that philosophy might be possible as transparency. Those who have worked on methodology all their lives have written many books that replace the more interesting books that they could have written. (Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, 89/143)
13 It seems that the other capacities are introduced to stay closer to common sense by offering more generally comprehensible options, and also in an attempt to include everything which seems linked to knowledge and which the hedonist dismisses or does not want to claim.
14 This early refutation of hedonism strikes me as important and convincing. It is based on human nature and the significance of temporality for our existence, and such an argument might well be more convincing than the later argument (Phil. 54e) which claims that even true pleasures do not have sufficient stability. The later argument can be characterized as a “purely ontological one” (Frede, “Disintegration and Restoration” 454).
15 Levinas, Totality and Infinity 118/91.
16 The debates in the literature about the question as to why Socrates analyzes false pleasures, given that “if we review our everyday pleasures we will find that few of our pleasures are of the propositional kind” (Frede, “Rumpelstiltskin’s Pleasures” 177), indirectly confirm Levinas’s criticism. While it indeed seems plausible to interpret Socrates’s account of false pleasures to imply that some pleasures are not as innocuous as they may seem, but already have ethical implications (Frede, “Rumpelstiltskin’s Pleasures” 178), Levinas would argue that a (phenomenologically) convincing account of pleasures will focus on the level which underlies the ethical interruption of my enjoyment. From a phenomenological perspective, Gosling’s frequent objection that Plato confuses the picture of a pleasure with the pleasure of a picture also seems questionable since it formalizes pleasure even beyond Plato’s own formalization (Gosling, “False Pleasures: Philebus 35c-41b” 52; Gosling, Plato: Philebus 314 f.).
17 Levinas, Totality and Infinity 136/110. Earlier, less developed instances of Levinas’s criticism along these lines can be found in Time and the Other, where he argues that, “it is not right to judge enjoyment in terms of profits and losses” (64n.), and in Existence and Existents (30).
18 Levinas, Totality and Infinity 134/107.
19 For a discussion of temporality as it emerges in encountering the other person and the differences between synchronous and diachronous temporality, see Lin, The Intersubjectivity of Time and Severson, Levinas’s Philosophy of Time.
20 Levinas, Totality and Infinity 141/155.
21 Levinas, Totality and Infinity 140 f./114 f.
22 Although I may be able to close myself off against the call of the Other, such hiding is not really a remedy. It does not diminish the call as such, nor does it absolve me from my responsibility.
23 Levinas, Totality and Infinity 139/112.
24 For feminist critiques of these discussions, see especially Chanter, Ethics of Eros and Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference.
25 Prior to giving-birth, the child is literally underneath the mother’s skin. Birth-giving itself can be seen as the most intimate combination of proximity, suffering, and responsibility; or, as Levinas puts it:
Is not the restlessness of someone persecuted but a modification of maternity, the groaning of the wounded entrails by those it will bear or has borne? In maternity what signifies is a responsibility for others, to the point of substitution for others and suffering both from the effect of persecution and from the persecuting itself in which the persecutor sinks. Maternity, which is bearing par excellence, bears even responsibility for the persecuting by the persecutor. (Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 75/95)
26 Levinas, Totality and Infinity 114/87.
27 Levinas, Totality and Infinity 253/231. For more detail on the ambiguity of Eros, see Staehler, Plato and Levinas: The Ambiguous Out-Side of Ethics, Chapter 5. This topic is also related to the issue of teaching in Plato and Levinas which is discussed in Schroeder, “Breaking the Closed Circle: Levinas and Platonic paideia”.
28 Levinas, Totality and Infinity 115/88.
29 Levinas, Totality and Infinity 115/87.
30 Llewelyn, Emmanuel Levinas, 78.
31 Levinas, Otherwise than Being 109-11/140-42. See also Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings 90.
32 Levinas, Otherwise than Being 110/140.
33 In this essay, we will not confront some of the hermeneutical problems exemplified by such questions as: does Plato represent and interpret the Parmenidean doctrine correctly? Does Levinas read Plato correctly when he refers to him as explaining the self’s mode of Being? We will leave these questions to one side as we consider just why Levinas deems the Parmenides helpful for exploring the self and its sensibility.
34 Levinas, Otherwise than Being 110/140.
35 Levinas, Otherwise than Being 53f./69.
36 Hence the success of the phonic learning system in British infant schools.
37 Alison Stone describes this character very well:
Reciprocally, the material elements are not fixed components external to their forms, like particles or corpuscles (as on Antiphon’s view). Rather, being fluid, these elements are ever-changing and unstable, existing only in the process of entering into successive forms and under the successive shapes into which they enter. (Stone, “Irigaray’s Ecological Phenomenology. Towards an Elemental Materialism” 119)
38 Levinas, Totality and Infinity 131/104.
39 Levinas, Totality and Infinity 163/137.
40 Levinas, Totality and Infinity 164/138; his italics.
41 It should be noted that it has become conventional to use the term “Presocratics” not so much in the temporal sense – as several of these philosophers lived at the same time or even after Socrates – but rather in the sense of a joint concern with questions which are not primarily concerned with humans and ethics (as it is the case for Socrates, Plato and Aristotle). Rather, their primary concern were the origins or elements of everything that exists, and as we will see, they placed special emphasis on movement and sense qualities.
42 All citations from the Presocratics are numbered according to Diels and Kranz (Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker) and given in the translation by Kirk and Raven (The Presocratic Philosophers) provided the fragment was included by them.
43 Benso, “The Breathing of the Air: Presocratics Echoes in Levinas” 14.
44 Levinas, “Reality and its Shadow” 4.
45 Levinas, “Reality and its Shadow” 4.
46 Levinas, “Reality and its Shadow” 4.
47 We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for several helpful suggestions.