On the meaning of the word other in Levinas

Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

Volumn 27, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 36-52

  Large, William ^a  

^a PLYMOUTH MARJON UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 14844325099     PISSN: 00071773     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00071773.1996.11007135     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida & Levinas, (Oxford, Blackwell, 1992), p. 48.
2. Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas. The Problem of Metaphysics, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), p. 93.
3. I understand the realist interpretation of the word Other to be one that takes it to be referring to something outside consciousness, whether this something is ordinary, like another person, or extraordinary, like God. For the realist interpretation, the word Other just refers to some special object that cannot be reduced to consciousness. However, it leaves in the dark how something can be ‘other’ in this sense, and if it can, how I can have a relation to it.
4. Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu'être ou au-dela de l'essence, (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986) p. 230. In a conversation which took place after the publication of Otherwise than Being, Levinas repeats this commitment to phenomenology, although he refers to his earlier book, Totality and Infnity, rather than Otherwise than Being: ‘What is said in the preface of Totality and Infinity, remains true for me, as far as the question of method goes, right up to the end. It is not the word “transcendental” which I would retain, but the notion of intentional analysis. I think, despite everything, what I do is phenomenology.’ De Dieu qui vient a l'idée, (Paris: Vrin, 1986), p. 139.
5. I am reminded here of the following warning by Lacan: ‘Don't let this impress you! Don't Start spreading it around that I is an other—it won't impress, believe me! And what is more it doesn't mean anything. Because to begin with, you have to know what an other means. The other—don't use this term as a mouthwash. One of our colleagues, our ex-colleagues, who used to hobnob a bit with Les temps modernes, the journal of existentialism, as it's called, told us as if it were news that in order for someone to be analysed he had to be able to conceive of the other as such. A real smart Alec that one. We should have asked him—What do you mean by the other—his fellow man, his neighbour, his ideal I, a washbowl? These are all others. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II. The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955, trans, by S. Tomaselli (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1988). pp. 7–8. This paper obviously takes up Lacan's challenge.
6. Cf. Autrement qu'être, p. 233.
7. Edmund Husserl, Die Idee der Phänomenologie, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), p. 39
8. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen V, (Tnbingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993), §14, pp. 382–383.
9. He even calls his method in Otherwise than Being a reduction. Cf. Autrement qu'être, pp. 56–58.
10. Die Idee der Phänomenologie, p. 59.
11. Jean Luc Marion, Réduction et Donation, (Paris: PUF, 1991), pp. 81–82.
12. ‘One can reproach Husserl for his intellectualism. Even though he attains the profound idea that, in the ontological order, the world of science is posterior to and depends on the vague and concrete world of perception, he may have been wrong in seeing the concrete world as a world of objects that are primarily perceived. Is our main attitude toward reality that of theoretical contemplation? Is not the world presented in its very being as a centre of action, as a field of activity or of care—to speak the words of Martin Heidegger.’ Emmanuel Levinas The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology, trans. André Orianne, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 119.
13. For Levinas’ reading of Heidegge. Cf., ‘L'Ontologie est-elle fondamentale?’, in Revue de Métaphysique et de la Morale, 1951, Vol. 56, pp. 88–98. Lévinas’ later writings on Heidegger do not really depart from this early interpretation.
14. Emmanuel Levinas, En découvrant l'existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, (Paris: Vrin, 1982) p. 131.
15. It is not quite right to say that Husserl failed to see the unconscious on his own terms, rather one has to be more precise about what kind of unconsciousness one thinks is absent from Husserl's work. There are three kinds of unconscious: there is the unconscious of pulsions and their representations, the ethical unconscious of Levinas, which is described by the structure of the Other-in the-Same, and there is the strictly phenomenological unconscious of Husserl, which is connected to the inexactness of judgements and perceptions. What interests me in particular is the relation between the ethical and phenomenological unconscious. I do think that the phenomenological unconscious is where Lévinas’ own original style of thought begins; it enables him to break with what he sees as the excessive intellectualism of Husserl's thought from within Husserl's thought itself. This is apparent in Levinas’ essay “The Ruin of Representation”, which I refer to in this monograph. Any yet, I believe that as Levinas’ thought progresses a distance opens up between the phenomenological unconscious and the ethical unconsciousness. Very briefly, I would say this: the phenomenological unconscious is thought as immanent to the subject, in which the two moment of self and other are part of the transcendental subject. The ethical unconscious on the other hand is thought in terms of a split subject, and in this sense is much closer to the Freudian unconscious (however, Cf footnote no. 27). The legitimation of the talk about the ‘otherness of the Other’ is to be found in the relation between the phenomenological and ethical unconscious, in what way they are similar to one another, and more importantly how they are different. (I would like to thank Wolfe Mays for making me think again about this topic and pointing out that indeed there is an unconscious of some kind in Husserl's work).
16. In brief, one might say, Husserl conflates meaning with reference, i.e. the word ‘cat’ refers to a cat or to all cats and this is what it means. I want to say, on the other hand, that meanings are highly complex interrelations of symbols which cannot be explained by a referential model of language. Husserl avoids this complexity by restricting the valid use of language to evidence. Empty significations must be ‘fufilled’ by the immediate presence of the phenomenon to which they refer to count as true. Words in themselves are ambiguous, but this ambiguity can be surmounted by ‘returning’ the words to the presence of the things they signify.
17. En découvrant l'existence avec Husserl et Heidegger p. 135.
18. The reason why Levinas finds Descartes argument for the idea of infinity so important is that is employs this notion of a gap between idea and the ideatum which is immanent to the cogito and not one between the cogito and a transcendent object. Cf. Totalité et infini, p. 19.
19. Levinas does not believe that this idea of unconsciousness should be characterised in the same way as the Freudian unconscious. Cf. Autrement qu'être, p. 157 n.27, for a further description of the ethical relation in terms of the unconscious and also Autrement qu'être, p. 130 n.6, where Levinas is careful to distinguish this from the unconscious of repressed desires. This unconscious described here belongs to first of all to the structure of intentionality and then later in Levinas’ work to a original phenomenological description of sensibility. This does not mean that Levinas is of the opinion that the Freudian unconscious does not exist.