Levinasian Reflections on Somaticity and the Ethical Self

Abstract

In this article, I attempt to bring some conceptual clarity to several key terms and foundational claims that make up Levinas's body‐based conception of ethics. Additionally, I explore ways that Levinas's arguments about the somatic basis of subjectivity and ethical relatedness receive support from recent empirical research. The paper proceeds in this way: First, I clarify Levinas's use of the terms “sensibility”, “subjectivity”, and “proximity” in Otherwise than Being: or Beyond Essence. Next, I argue for an interpretation of Levinas's thought that I suggest is buttressed by recent experimental work in both developmental psychology and neuroscience. I provide examples of research that I suggest opens up Levinas's phenomenological analysis in new and interesting ways. I also urge the importance of Levinas's phenomenological analysis in contextualizing the ethical significance of these empirical findings.

Notes

1. John Drabinski (2001) notes that “Levinas's work works according to a definitive logic, but the particular items of that logic are left, for the most part, to the reader's appropriation of scattered and enigmatic remarks” (p. 170).

2. Most of what follows will be concerned with Otherwise than Being: or Beyond Essence. However, I will discuss a few ideas from Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, and thus establish something of a thematic continuity between these two texts—at least on a few points relevant to this discussion—despite the theoretical shift that takes place between the writing of these works.

3. I want to qualify Drabinski's remarks somewhat. The bedrock level of human reality I am working towards (and which I am arguing that Levinas is concerned with) can indeed be thought of as exhibiting intentionality of some sort—insofar as we construe “intentionality” to here denote a kind of global openness to or directedness towards the world and things in it, or a generalized comportment or poise that allows the world to give itself to us as being a certain way in our experience of it. Nothing in this rather vanilla characterization of intentionality‐as‐openness entails that intentionality be thought of exclusively as a mental phenomenon, however, or an intrinsic feature of mental states (and only mental states). If Drabinski is arguing that Levinasian sensibility is rather the very possibility for cognitive intentionality, than I am in agreement with him. For as I will argue, cognitive intentionality—intentionality as an intrinsic feature of mental states—is a derived form of intentionality, according to Levinas. “Sensibility” is a more primitive structure that, phenomenologically speaking, not only exhibits its own sort of openness and world‐directedness but is additionally (and importantly) prior to cognitive intentionality. Therefore, as Drabinski notes, sensibility in fact provides the conditions of possibility for (cognitive) intentionality and is more basic than the latter.

4. This way of putting things might be somewhat misleading, since to be a subject (or to have human subjectivity of some sort) is to already be an ethical subject, for Levinas. One is not first a subject and only later an ethical subject. Rather, subjectivity is always already suffused with ethicality, both in terms of how human subjectivity relates to itself as well as how it relates to others (its inter‐subjectivity, in other words).

5. By “personal consciousness”, I am referring to the experiential states and processes that comprise the unified manifold or flow of phenomenal awareness as given to a subject. Subjectivity is thus the articulation of this flow in the subject's personal experience of it. Subjectivity, at the level of personal consciousness, is constituted by the mental phenomena—the stream, if you like—at any moment making up the subject's qualitative experience of both itself and the world. In contrast, Levinas's conceptions of sensibility and subjectivity (under this reading) are situated at a level beneath or prior to personal consciousness as I've here defined it—though we'll see as the discussion unfolds that Levinasian sensibility is not, strictly speaking, sub‐personal or unconsciousness. It manifests subtly at the level of personal consciousness. But it is not articulated with the same directness and immediacy that differentiates experiential states such as seeing a red apple or remembering that I need to turn the oven off. Both Levinasian sensibility and subjectivity are therefore situated at an originary or prereflective dimension of human reality, beneath the flow of personal consciousness and cognitive‐intentionality, since the latter is operative at the level of personal consciousness.

6. Though he does not explicitly argue for the existence of nonconceptual content, Levinas's characterization of sensibility seems to presuppose that subjects can, in fact, have different sorts of experiential states (or subpersonal states that may potentially be articulated at a conscious experiential level) which ultimately outstrip the conceptual capacities of the subject. For contemporary treatments of the issue of nonconceptual content, see Gunther (2003).

7. This analysis of the somatic origin of subjectivity anticipates much contemporary work in cognitive science, and thus places Levinas in step with current empirical research. I return to this connection in the final section of the paper.

8. In Totality and Infinity, as is well known, the ethical relation for Levinas is always a matter of encountering radical alterity: an external relation to otherness constituted by my encounter with the face of the Other, whose alterity or difference cannot be reduced to a concept, category, or content for me, immanent to my experience of this Other. However, by the time he writes Otherwise than Being, Levinas will argue that the alterity of the Other is always already an invariant structure of my interiority. In other words, my relation to alterity becomes an internal relation: otherness is built into the very structure of my subjectivity. The significance of this shift for Levinas is explored in more detail in section three of this essay. The point salient to present concerns is that, despite this shift in where he situates alterity, Levinas nonetheless remains deeply concerned with the nature of our bodily experience of otherness throughout his writings, and therefore continually devotes careful attention to developing a phenomenology of the body.

9. Levinas (1998a) writes in “Intentionality and Sensation” that “The world is not constituted as a static entity, directly delivered over to experience; it refers to “points of view” freely adopted by a subject who, essentially, walks and possesses mobile organs…The subject moves in the very space it is going to constitute…Movement and gait are in the very subjectivity of the subject ” (p. 146–147).

10. In “Violence and Metaphysics”, Derrida (1967/1980) notes that Levinas is neither interested in formulating “moral rules” nor “determin[ing] a morality, but rather the essence of the ethical relation in general” (p.111). For Levinas, this essence is found within the experiential structures, the lived immediacy, of concrete human encounters—especially their sensibility and affective valence, which draws me out of myself and into the encounter itself.

11. I have thus far been using “sensibility” and “affectivity” somewhat interchangeably. I want to be clear that sensibility, as I read him, is the broader term for Levinas, encompassing affectivity, more generally, as well as more particularized moods and emotions. Recall that sensibility in Levinas is not simply the passive reception of information about the world through the modalities of our senses (this would be a restricted use of the term). Rather, sensibility is his attempt to capture the holistic way that perceptual content, including information about both one's environment (exteroception) and one's environmentally‐embedded body (interoception), always gives itself an affective valence. Levinasian sensibility encompasses affect, in other words. The experiential world is always saturated with feeling, and perception and affect intermingle all the way down through the most primitive forms of our body‐world couplings. Bettina Bergo puts the point nicely when she writes that “Levinas will always insist on the ontological significance of the body and the flesh: these are always in relation with something, be it air or light. And sensibility consists of an indeterminate number of affectations, of which we become conscious only by turning our attention to them. Levinas's ‘pre‐conscious’ sensibility is thus the ongoing shadow of the intentional ‘I’…the self of sensibility is the locus of relationality and transcendence…” (Bergo, Spring 2007). For some of Levinas's other attempts to think through the idea of prereflective levels of the bodily sensibility, see the essays “Intentionality and Metaphysics” and “Intentionality and Sensation” in Levinas (1998a). My thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing this point.

12. My discussion of Dewey was greatly helped by listening to Mark Johnson's excellent paper, “Dewey's Zen: The ‘Oh’ of Wonder”, given at the 2007 meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy in Columbia, SC.

13. With this detour though Dewey, I do not mean to imply that Levinas was at all familiar with or influenced by Dewey. He clearly was not. Rather, I simply use Dewey's well‐developed discussion of how a meaningful world is disclosed to the bodily‐affective subject, on a primitive and preverbal level, in order to highlight Levinas's similar treatment of this idea. Of course, Levinas was quite familiar with Husserl's work—his published thesis, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology was the first book‐length introduction to Husserl in French, and he later translated Husserl's Cartesian Meditations—and one might look to the fifth meditation within the latter text for a more direct line of influence (Levinas's essay “The Ruin of Representation” (in his 1998a) discusses how Levinas understands his debt to Husserl). That said, Dewey's account here is a clear and cogent antecedent to Levinas on this point, and it is therefore helpful for understanding what Levinas is trying to say.

14. By “situation”, Dewey means the rich complex of physical, biological, social and cultural structures that comprise our lived environments. In addition, the situation also includes the organism's characteristic ways of interacting with its lived environments. A situation thus included both features of the environment as well as the living organism interacting with features of that environment in particular ways. Dewey writes that a situation “is a complex existence that is held together, in spite of its internal complexity, by the fact that it is dominated and characterized throughout by a single quality” (Dewey, 1931, p. 97). See also (Dewey, 1958, pp. 249–297).

15. Thus Dewey notes that, when we are stricken with it, a pervasively felt quality “speaks so completely for itself that words are poor substitutes—not that thought fails, but that thought so completely grasps the dominant quality that translation into explicit terms gives a partial and inadequate result” (Dewey, 1931, p.102).

16. By putting things this way, I don't mean to imply that Levinas was endorsing a kind of ethical communitarianism. Rather, my point is simply that sensibility and proximity in Levinas both point to the felt relationality to the Other that underwrites our fact‐to‐face transactions with them—a primitive affective force that, in itself, does not entail any reduction of their uniqueness and alterity. This point will be explored in more detail as we progress. I'm grateful to an anonymous referee for urging clarification here.

17. For more on Theory Theory, see Baron‐Cohen (1995) and Gopnik and Welklman (1995). For a version of radical simulationism, see Gordon (1996). For phenomenological criticisms of Theory Theory and Simulation Theory, see Gallagher and Zahavi (2007) and Gallagher (2007).

18. According to both Theory Theory (TT) and Simulation Theory (ST), infants and young children are precluded from empathic awareness, as are nonhuman animals. This is because infants and nonhuman animals all lack the requisite conceptual capacities needed to formulate theories or simulation routines by which we enter into other minds. Again, both TT and ST see empathy as a relatively late, high‐level developmental achievement—and not as a structural invariant of phenomenal consciousness, or a primary feature of bodily experience present from the very onset of consciousness. Rather, according to TT and ST, empathy rests upon domain‐specific conceptual mechanisms that only begin to develop in early childhood. In order to understand, explain or predict another's behavior, as well as the beliefs and desires informing it, the empathic subject must come to possess a minimal conceptual knowledge enabling the classification of beliefs and desires, in addition to a conceptual understanding of what it means to actually have beliefs and desires. (This would also seem to entail a minimal conceptual knowledge of self‐identity, self‐other relations, social recognition, etc.).

19. Meltzoff's (1995) research has also found that the nonconceptual body knowledge possessed by children seems to enable them to be able to recognize the intentions of others. In these studies, an experimenter pretends to have trouble completing a particular task with a toy. The child then takes the toy and completes the experimenter's incomplete action, indicating that she apprehends the experimenter's failed intention. In other words, the child immediately perceives the intentions of another agent—reading these intentions directly off the agent's bodily gestures and expressions—without assuming a theoretical stance or attempting to simulate their state of mind.

20. I would like to thank Claudia Welz for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. I am also grateful for the insightful and thorough criticisms offered by two of this journal's anonymous reviewers.