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Abstract
This paper sketches a Levinasian theory of action. It has often been pointed out that Levinas' ethics are incapable of providing principles of adjudication for guiding actions. However, a much more profound problem affects Levinas' metaphysical ethics and negates the possibility of adjudication and that is a patent lack of freedom from the yoke of the ethical. If ‘ethics is primordial’ indeed, then no act can be unethical in that there is no alternative possibility to the acceptance and performance of the law. In this paper, I will argue that it is from the totalization of the acceptance and performance of law ‘implicit in the subject's action’ that alternative possibilities become visible. This is to say, it is through totalization that the subject demarcates the locus for the emergence of principles, which can permit adjudication among different acts without negating the radical primacy of ethics, which is probably Levinas’ greatest contribution to the field.
Notes
1 See, for instance, Diane Perpich’s The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, in particular Chapter 4. Though her argument is not new, it continues to be systematically overlooked and bastions of Levinas’ readers insist in making Levinas the exponent of normative categories.
2 The term uptake I borrow from J. L. Austin (Citation1976), who makes this form of active receptivity a central mechanism of his account of linguistic praxis in How to Do Things with Words.
3 This is, in essence, Frankfurt’s principle of alternative possibility. In this instance I am not concerned with the question of ‘moral responsibility’ as Frankfurt is. The issue at stake is that alternative possibilities are a condition necessary for prescriptivity not to be superfluous. Simply put, it would seem that the necessity of a prescription is given only by the possibility of ‘doing otherwise’ (McKenna and Wilderker).
4 By this, I do not mean to suggest that the Talmudic commentaries should not be counted on their theological value or that their conceptual kinship to the broader Levinasian corpus cannot be a useful tool to situate Levinas’ philosophy in the context of his Judaism or vice versa. My point here is simply that – taken solely on their philosophical merit – the treatment of questions of prescription, which are prominent in these texts but conspicuously absent from other writings, present the best occasion for the elaboration of a Levinasian moral philosophy. And that in this one regard – that is, in assessing the relation between the primordiality of ethics and the contingency of prescription – the texts need to be read for their assessment of jurisprudential normativity rather than for their illumination of religious doctrine.
5 As opposed to Catherine Chalier (Citation2002) in What ought I to Do?, I take Levinas to be simply unwilling or incapable of providing anything like an action guiding principle and al claims of Levinas commitment to some putative duty of responsibility, respect for alterity of the other, et al. are profound misunderstandings of the metaphysical nature of Levinas’ use of the term ethics. Levinas’ metaphysics is merely concerned with the manner in which heteronomous principles of action happen to operate. Only in the Talmudic work and in his interviews we have any inkling of his positions concerning how an autonomous agent ought to behave.
6 At page 198 of Totality and Infinity Leivnas (1990) writes: ‘The infinite paralyzes power by its infinite resistance to murder, which, firm and insurmountable, gleams in the face of the Other.’
7 These are instance in which breaking the law is morally desirable. Critiques of Kantian moral philosophy are plagued with this examples and the positions advanced by Hart in his attempt to reestablish the Utilitarian cum positivist distinction between ‘law as it is’ and ‘law as it ought to be’ (Hart, Citation1958: p. 593).
8 The Talmudic commentary on this passage can be found in the tractate Sabbat 88.a. The position is stated in the words of Rab Eleazar: ‘R. Eleazar said: When the Israelites gave precedence to “we will do” over “we will hearken,” a Heavenly Voice went forth and exclaimed to them, Who revealed to My children this secret, which is employed by the Ministering Angels, as it is written, Bless the Lord, ye angels of his. Ye mighty in strength, that fulfil his word, That hearken unto the voice of his word: 31 first they fulfil and then they hearken?’ Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Shabbat, Folio 88a
9 Here I am not declaring a commitment to consequentialism nor am I suggesting that adjudicative deliberation is the best explanation for action-guidance and choice. My point is simply that the precedence of deliberation and adjudication to choice and then, of choice to action are central elements in the qualia of moral deliberation from which questions of responsibility, autonomy and freedom issue. It is this cartography of action which Levinas is indeed disputing.
10 This can be found both in ‘Tractate Shabbat 88a’ in the words of Rabi Simla, which Levinas discusses in his treatment of the passage and in commentaries ever since.
11 This, I believe, is the essential feature of Otherwise that Being. This is an issue that, I think, ought to be worked out in detail and I believe that Austin’s philosophy of language could prove of great use for that purpose. That is, the uptake of any act of speech seems to amount to obedience – however qualified. I will give a tentative account of the prescriptive force of simple performances in the following section.
12 This is the critique of ostensive indication in what is often called the Augustinian picture of anguage which leads into the private language argument. For an extensive treatment of this discussion on rule following and rule learning see: Cavell, Citation1999, Brandom, Citation1998, especially Chapter 1 and, of course, Wittgestein, 1999, in particular the sections on the private language arguemtn and rule following.
13 If this law can be deduced at all, an entire political theory needs to be elaborated from which the detailed report of the monetary duties of the citizen towards the state – with each of its intricacies – can be enunciated.
14 See for instance Rousseau’s (Citation1997) Second Discourse in relation to actions in accordance to the law and knowledge of the law.
15 I am not here underestimating the hard labors of parenting, which oftentimes demand the strict repetition of a command or the threat of punishment to adjust the behavior of an unruly child. No place offers a more plausible stage for infantile anarchy than an expedition to the park, I suppose. My suggestion, however, is that even if such rectification is sometimes required, the infant does not need the guiding rule for every action pronounced in order to act in accord with it.
16 See for instance Vygotsky (Citation1986) on the mimetic grounds of rule following in particular in language acquisition, or Nelson (Citation1998), among others.
17 And often, albeit less visibly, the already competent speakers learning new patterns of speech in changing argots.
18 This issue could be articulated along the lines of Ryle’s distinction between ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’ in Ryle, Citation2000. In the continental tradition, this is best represented by Derrida’s term difference in Derrida, Citation1985, which in its legal and political dimension is treated for instance in Beardsworth, Citation1996, among others.
19 A mounting amount of evidence is pointing in the direction of neurological grounds for this mechanism of rule learning. Of particular interest is current work being done on mirror neurons now at its very early stages. For instance Demiris, Citation2002.
20 The problem of realism in metaethics, for instance, is a glaring expression of this. Even in the context of theological voluntarism, it seems that the response to perceived evils is more often than not a lapse into Manicheism.
21 Here we must abandon, at least momentarily, the type of quietism that refuses to say anything about Levinas’ Other under penalty of totalization. It is precisely from the space of totalization that the articulation of alternative possibility in the articulation of judgment emerges.
22 In addition to the passage about the normative force of the master who ‘retains its fundamental Otherness’, that is its recalcitrance to totalization, in the final section of ‘Exteriority and the Face’, most illuminatingly, Levinas writes: ‘The accomplishing of I qua I and morality constitute one sole and same process of being: morality comes to birth not in equality, but in the fact that infinite exigencies, that of serving the poor, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, converge at one point of the universe’ (Levinas, Citation1990: p. 245).