Response to Friedman, Rosenbaum, and
Minister
Megan Craig
SUNY Stony Brook
In what follows, I highlight complexities I think
are the most productive, as well as the questions I
find the most difficult, in the three responses to my
book, Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic
Phenomenology.[1] It is a great honor to
have such sharp and generous commentators, and I
regret that I cannot address all of the points they
have raised. I am struck, initially, by the degree to
which they respond to each other. For instance, Randy
Friedman and Stuart Rosenbaum ask about and quote
significant portions of poetry in their remarks,
while Rosenbaum raises a question about Levinas'
relationship to art that Steven Minister beautifully
addresses in his paper. All of them exhibit a healthy
skepticism about bringing Levinas and James together,
and they each suggest points of tension that might
provide breaking points for the connections described
in my book. I love Friedman's opening image of James
and Levinas sitting down to produce the most awkward
dinner party imaginable. But if James (rather than
Edmund Husserl) is the grandfather who arrives late,
then I imagine him sauntering down to become the life
of the party—while Levinas might be gracious and good
mannered at first but would end up being joyfully
swept up in the clamor.
1.
Let me begin with Friedman's response. He poses
two central questions about the viability of reading
Levinas and James together. The first has to do with
what he terms "the metaphysics of a wider self"
underpinning James' philosophy. Embedded in this
question are other inquiries concerning Levinas' and
James' conceptions of the ego or self, how Jamesian
pluralism fits with Levinasian asymmetry, and the
extent to which Levinas might be (or might not be)
pluralistic and James is (or is not) communal.
As all of my commentators noted, I am not
suggesting that Levinas and James are the same or
reducible to one another. In fact, it is precisely in
their differences that they expand on one another.
While writing the book, I was struck by Levinas'
invocation of and use of James' concept of
"indolence" in Existence and Existents, a text
I read as crucial for Levinas' philosophical project.
In this book, Levinas invokes James by name. Despite
the fact that this is a unique reference in Levinas'
philosophy, I found it significant in part because it
was a book written while in captivity, where Levinas
recalled texts and figures without having recourse to
his books. James stood out for me as an unusual, but
crucial, addition to a now familiar cast that
includes Husserl, Heidegger, Kant, Plato,
Dostoyevsky, and others. It is also significant
insofar as James gives Levinas the initial resources
for thinking about wakefulness and insomnia, two
concepts that remain central to all of Levinas's
subsequent thought. The resonances between Levinas
and James point to blind spots in each of them, while
simultaneously opening up a philosophical terrain
irreducible to American or French philosophy and
beyond the scope of either Pragmatism or
Phenomenology. Reading them together is one way of
stressing their strengths, while simultaneously being
honest about their weaknesses, and moving philosophy
toward a more creative, pluralistic future.
Friedman has rightfully pointed out several
differences between James and Levinas. The most
striking, I think, is the degree to which Levinas
stresses asymmetry while James' pluralism seems
inherently resistant to hierarchies. James gives us
the image of a stream, and it is difficult to
reconcile this metaphor with the angular sense of the
other's height in Levinas. It becomes a difference of
philosophical geography—as if James' philosophy takes
place in a riverbed whereas Levinas' philosophical
conversations occur in the mountains (to use Celan's
expression).
Both of them, however, conceive of life and of
subjectivity as fluid or plastic (in James'
terminology). While it is true that James' conception
of the self is much more distinct and seemingly
self-sufficient (especially in The Principles of
Psychology)—like Levinas—he envisions a
self-in-the-making, never entirely made. For
instance, James' "radical empiricism" describes the
plural, fallible, and always shifting aspects of
experience.
As Friedman so elegantly describes, Levinas posits
the self (le soi) as called forth by the face
of the other. James, particularly the early James, is
more concerned with choosing oneself, finding inner
strength, cultivating the will, and being attentive
to the ennobling and corrosive forces of habit.
However, James advances a profound sense of community
insofar as he stresses the role of other lives in
moving the Ego beyond the bounds of its necessarily
limited and secluded point of view. While this aspect
of James' thought comes through most forcefully in
his essay "A Certain Blindness in Human Beings," I
traced the social/ethical emphases found throughout
his work. His radical empiricism entails a commitment
to incessant interruption and revision definitive of
what it means to be a subject and to have any
experience. Although he does not elaborate such
interruption in the starkly ethical terms Levinas
favors, James' radical empiricism is indicative of
his ethical writings on the plurality of ideals and
the inevitability of difficult realities that require
something more complex, personal, and obscure than
the internalization or memorization of any golden
rule. His is not as radical an account of passivity
as Levinas', but he does elaborate the soul's being
carried away, inspired, and transformed by being
called forth at the beckoning of some enigmatic,
exterior urgency–particularly in his accounts of
conversion and grace in the Varieties of Religious
Experience. Levinas actively questions the myth
of the Ego and points out that le Moi is a
fiction, a crutch, or a mask. James' project is not
about showing the inadequacy of the Ego (though he
expresses deep skepticism about the term "Ego" in
The Principles and beyond), but it does entail
describing the self as plural and relational, and
conceiving ethics as an ongoing attunement to the
lives of others.[2]
I may have an idiosyncratic sense of the
metaphysical in James, but I think he gives us
resources for thinking about the community of life in
broader terms than Levinas might like. James remains
indiscriminately open to multiple sources of
significance, including a line of poetry, a painting,
a dog, a landscape and myriad other others.
This is one area where James' philosophy radicalizes
Levinas' work, and it is one reason why reading
Levinas and James together helps us to envision more
creative, experimental forms of being together than
either of them conceived by themselves. James' sense
of "more" described in The Varieties of Religious
Experience expresses the excessive quality of the
living: more surprise, more adventure, more mystery.
Levinas is not as radically pluralistic as James. His
sense of a face is decidedly the human face (despite
moments of hesitation about this), and his discourse
is disciplined around this central point in a way
that James' is not. All the while, both of them point
us toward the entanglement of lives and the hope and
risk made possible by the surplus of life beyond any
singular instantiation of life. In this way, I see
how their work remains attuned to a fluid, plural
self, even if their mechanisms of articulation are
different. Both defend an ethics that rests upon
ongoing receptivity to ever-new demands.
Perhaps some of this begins to address Friedman's
second major concern, which is about my claim that
Levinas renders James' fringes visceral in the
embodied form of the other. By suggesting this, I
mean that James sees consciousness itself (insofar as
he uses the term at all) fringed by an obscure
excessiveness that extends ever beyond it. As
Friedman and Minister rightly point out, Levinas
contests the very language of consciousness–as does
James in his essay "Does Consciousness Exist?" in
Essays on Radical Empiricism. James' short
answer to the question posed in his title is "no."
Levinas sees the subject as fringed by others who
extend infinitely beyond view; the face registers as
enigmatic sense insofar as it exceeds the bounds of
consciousness. I think Levinas takes up a Jamesian
notion of "fringe" in a way that shows it has another
lineage than that leading back to Husserl's notion of
intentionality. I think that Levinas can and should
be read in other ways than as a direct descendent of
Husserl and Heidegger. The face is nonintentional;
yet, it inspires the subject by its very
excess—showing her life more widely and variably
fringed than she could have imagined.
A final, somewhat oblique, question that Friedman
posed near the beginning of his remarks was about my
use of a Dylan Thomas quotation from Under Milk
Wood on the opening page of the book. He claims,
in part, that this and other quotations I used at the
opening of each chapter "push [me] away from [my
readers]." The line in question reads: "Time passes.
Listen. Time Passes. Come closer now." Under Milk
Wood is subtitled "A Play for Voices," and it
begins with the pre-dawn dreams and sounds of a small
Welsh seaside town awakening to a new day. There is
something utterly mundane and yet extraordinary in
the rising of each creature according to its own
rhythms and routines: "Dust the china, feed the
canary, sweep the dining-room floor...." I stressed
the value of this kind of ordinary, ongoing awakening
in my discussion of indolence in the third chapter of
the book. It is found also in my defense of what I
termed "ethical minimalism": an ethics rooted in the
repetition of singular, small acts like holding the
door and saying hello.
My book remains centered on the ways in which
Levinas and James point us toward the cacophony of
life being lived in multiple registers and how we
might reorient ourselves to live in closer intimacy
with others. This requires a capacity to listen, to
be close, and to be still. Listening to the passage
of time might be another way of hearing the call of a
face. It would entail listening for passages that may
or may not be measurable according to one's own sense
of history or time. Listening to works like Dylan
Thomas' Under Milk Wood is another way of
being reminded that life unfolds at variable paces,
under conditions, and according to devotions that may
be invisible or unsayable.
2.
Let me turn now to Stuart Rosenbaum's essay.
Rosenbaum poses three interrelated questions: (1)
would Levinas be tolerant of scientific and artistic
elaborations or confirmations of the face; (2) is
Levinas a deconstructionist, a relativist, or a
nihilist; and (3) is it not the case that James is
concerned with constructing while Levinas is
concerned with deconstructing-and is this not the
difference that makes the real difference between the
two philosophers?
I doubt that Levinas would endorse psychological
research about the face and facial recognition or the
blurring of fields as Rosenbaum suggests. Like James,
I remain more open to this kind of discussion and
collaboration. From a Levinasian perspective, the
note of caution would be that research into the
face-whether conceived as Oliver's poem or Eckman's
studies-risk presuming the face as an object of
investigation, or treating faces as quantifiable or
solvable. I think this is less the case with Oliver's
poetic engagement, which bears comparison to Levinas'
own linguistic acrobatics as he attempts to evoke the
face without reducing it to any definitive
description. Levinas' term "face" is the most
deceptively simple word in his philosophy. Rather
than signify a face in any ordinary understanding of
the word, it stands for the gripping quality of
another's vulnerability, nudity, or humanity. As
Levinas points out in several passages, the face may
be the nape of a neck. Its enigmatic quality is
central to its arresting power, which always
overwhelms the subject and exceeds her powers of
understanding. Scientific research into facial
recognition would have a hard time dealing with this
kind of enigma, since the very "object" of study is
nonobjective and essentially obscure. Levinas was
deeply worried about the dangers and temptations of
explaining the face away, and so the face refuses to
solidify as a concept in his writing. It must be
encountered, and even then it evades intelligibility.
I think we can be sensitive to this worry but, at the
same time, embrace multiple methods of description
and investigation. James achieved this in his work,
and so long as we follow his mantra that no word is
final, no image absolute, then I think we enrich our
work by reaching out beyond the borders of any one
discipline.
Stephen Minister provides a lovely reflection
concerning Levinas' relationship to art, which begins
to answer some of Rosenbaum's worry that Levinas and
James break apart along the fault line of their
respective relationships to art. James was a painter,
and openly reveled in the arts and artistic examples
(so much so that his Talks to Teachers and to
Students on Some of Life's Ideals are almost
entirely comprised of images from literature and
poetry). Levinas has a much more fraught relationship
to imagery. However, from Existence and
Existents onwards, his work is riddled with
references to poetry. Moreover, his philosophy
remains deeply imagistic. For example, the
face-to-face, is one of the most emblematic images of
twentieth century ethical philosophy. Reading Levinas
as simplistically hostile to art would miss the
aesthetic dimension of his prose; it also neglects
the degree to which his thought leans on Rimbaud,
Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, and a host of
other writers.
I am very sympathetic to Rosenbaum's sense that
Levinas is deconstructive (and potentially
relativistic or nihilistic), while James seems more
overtly constructive. This worry is shared among many
Pragmatists, and it is part of the reason why some
American philosophers feel allergic to Levinas. The
question is what does Levinas leave us with if he is
so intent on dismantling the Ego? He gives us
resources for moving amidst an essentially broken
world. I read James as very much concerned with the
same problem: things do not fit into neat or whole
pictures, and given the complexity and sheer
messiness of life, we had better find ways of
navigating without maps or discover ways of drawing
provisional maps as we go. In identifying Levinas'
ethics as lacking definitive overarching principles
and rooted in simple acts of decency (hold the door,
say hello), there is a very practical upshot of his
philosophy-a mandate to take incremental, ongoing
action and to begin where one is, with those among
whom one lives and moves every day. These acts will
never coalesce into an ethical edifice, or a final,
ethical universe, but they are the footholds of local
goodness. Compared to a robust ethical ideal, such
acts may seem like very little. However, in a world
where ethical ideals and norms cannot suffice, such
acts are silent witnesses to the possibility of being
humane even in the darkest times.
Nonetheless, Levinas' picture remains much more
fragmentary and deconstructionist than James'-and
perhaps this is inevitable given the disparate
historical contexts of each of them. Reading them
together may be helpful in alerting us to the spirits
of different times and shifting senses of what is
desirable or possible. Our own time demands new
thinking. Contemporary philosophy would benefit from
relinquishing the old either/or paradigm between
construction and deconstruction, as if the former
represents something optimistic and edifying while
the latter represents something nihilistic and
dismantling. We need more nuanced accounts, ones that
admit the fact that much, if not all, of experience
escapes or exceeds neat categorization. Construction
and deconstruction are always processes enmeshed with
each other.
3.
In addition to his observations and elaborations
about art, Stephen Minister raises questions
concerning (1) emotion and ethics, (2) my notion of
"ethical minimalism," and (3) plurality in Levinas'
and James' philosophies.
Minister is right to point out that "emotion" (as
a term) does not figure centrally across Levinas'
major works. In my chapter titled "Emotion," I drew
primarily from Existence and Existents-again
emphasizing this text over others such as Totality
and Infinity. "Emotion" becomes a critical term
in Levinas' 1975-1976 lecture course "Death and
Time," where he associates death with overwhelming,
excessive emotion; he differentiates this from the
kind of emotion that Heidegger called Angst. In other
texts, Levinas explicitly relates emotion to il y a,
and by extension to art. This means, on the one hand,
that emotion is not something strictly or
merely psychological; potentially, it is at
odds with ethics. On the other hand, in Otherwise
Than Being or Beyond Essence, emotion is linked
to "saying" and "the seeds of poetry that overwhelm
language," which suggests that emotion describes a
force of destabilization that may bring it together
with the non-totalizing impact of a face. This
suggestion relates to the link between emotion
and movement that Levinas stresses in his
meditations on death and time. Elsewhere, Levinas
invokes the "obscurity of feeling" and draws on Jean
Wahl's account of "blind bare contact," as well as
sensibility to indicate that the subject cannot be
reduced to consciousness.
Levinas conceives the subject as radically
embodied and exposed to the transformative forces of
emotion that are ambiguously psychological/physical.
He contests the supposed dichotomy between reason and
emotion, urging us to think of subjectivity in terms
of a sensibility that is supremely meaningful, even
as it remains irreducible to any articulate
reason.[3] In his own writing, he
employs emotive terms ("obsession" perhaps foremost
among them) as the "barbarisms" that disrupt
philosophical prose and as cues for his readers to
experience the grip of his imagery–to be overwhelmed
by the encounter he describes. Emotion is not
normative–there are no good or bad emotions in and of
themselves. There is a spasm, a shiver, a heat, which
only later is named and classified in an act of
reflective consciousness. Levinas never prescribes
certain ethical feelings (like the feeling of respect
Kant champions). Instead, he realigns subjectivity
along the axes of vulnerability and susceptibility to
impact of multiple kinds. On this reading, emotion is
not any definitive feeling or state, but the sheer
pre-conceptual activation of the subject. Emotion
becomes another name for the subjection and passivity
at the heart of ethical subjectivity.
Minister also asks about the proliferation of
principles across Levinas' work, particularly the
"thou shall not kill," which figures so centrally in
Levinas' discussion of the face. He suggests that
Levinas is engaged in a "reconceptualization of the
very notion of a norm" and relates this to
Aristotle's project in the Ethics and his
elaboration of the mean. The "principles" in Levinas,
insofar as there are such things, seem to me to arise
in the face of an other, as pleas. This serves as a
reminder of the precariousness of life, the way the
eyes of the hungry plead for bread or the back of the
victim pleads for mercy. I read these instances as
reminders of the expressions of destitution and how
they call out to us, even as we ignore them or
actively silence them.
Perhaps such "principles" are norms of a vague and
abstract nature-ways of simply registering "there is
life here," but they are also empty without the
singular instances of articulation and the responses
they provoke. This is the crucial point. If Levinas'
philosophy were reducible to the principle "thou
shall not kill," his ethics would be entirely
abstract and empty, an even less compelling than
Kant's moral law. It would also fail to address the
question Levinas poses in the preface to Totality
and Infinity: namely, whether we are not duped by
morality in the wake of the Holocaust. The radical
aspect of Levinas' ethics lies in the degree to which
the very few ethical acts he underscores are entirely
mundane, ordinary gestures (saying after you, holding
the door). They are terribly possible-and thereby put
a tremendous responsibility on us and disallow
recourse to the excuse that ethics is just too hard,
too remote, or too complicated. The concurrence of
holding a door with the mandate "thou shall not kill"
also serves as a reminder that killing can be
pedestrian, pervasive, and routine. It can be
something drawn out and uncertain; it can take many
forms. This is a profoundly unsettling but ethically
urgent thought. We are asked to reflect upon the ways
our own aversions and evasions implicate us in a
violence we would rather assign to others. What is
radical about the responsibility to the face in
Levinas is that it never ends: there is always
another face, another door to hold open. Therefore,
while I employ the expression "ethical minimalism" to
describe Levinas' ethics, I do not downplay radical
responsibility within his moral reasoning. Rather, I
show that his ethics is "radical" because it demands
a vigilance of which we are capable.
James, too, was committed to a vision of the world
in terms of the importance of incremental acts and
enlarging the subject through openness to others.
While the tone, emphases, and style of Levinas' and
James' philosophies are markedly different from one
another, the "ethical republic here below" that they
describe and defend remains in need of ongoing,
incremental responsiveness.
In bringing these two thinkers together we might
broaden the conversation about ethics and what it
means to dwell together and forge communities. At the
same time, we might dislodge the suspicions and
entrenched interpretations surrounding Levinas' and
James' work. This entails re-imagining the lineage of
American and French philosophy and surrendering old
battles between Pragmatism and Phenomenology. As
evidenced in this special issue on Levinas and
pragmatism, this work is underway with a new
generation of philosophers who are increasingly
committed to experimentation, collaboration, and
dialogue.[4]
Notes
[1] Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2010.
[2] For example, in the
Principles, James writes "I do not wish just
yet 'to commit myself' about the existence or
nonexistence of the Ego..." (William James, The
Principles of Psychology Volume 1 (New York:
Dover Publications, Inc., 1980), 278).
[3] Ultimately, I have argued
that emotion, art, il y a, and face are terms
that cannot be disentangled in Levinas' work: they
require one another even as they challenge each
other.
[4] Thank you to the
organizers of the 2011 North American Levinas Society
conference at Texas A&M University, and to Jacob
Lynn Goodson for organizing the panel. Special thanks
to Randy, Stuart, and Stephen. It was such an honor
to have this session and to have such sharp, focused
and generous commentators on my book.
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