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Obligation to the Other in Levinas and the Experience of the Sublime in Kant

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2011

Stuart Dalton
Stuart Dalton
Affiliation:
University of Hartford
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Extract

In an interview with Philippe Nemo, Emmanuel Levinas makes a very revealing comment about what he was trying to accomplish in his ethical philosophy. In response to a question about the ‘starting-point’ of his ethics, Levinas protests: ‘My task does not consist in constructing ethics; I only try to find its meaning … One can without doubt construct an ethics in function of what I have just said [in describing his philosophy up to this point in the interview], but this is not my own theme’ (El 95–9/90).

Type
Articles
Information
Kantian Review , Volume 3 , March 1999 , pp. 81 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © Kantian Review 1999

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References

Notes

1 This project of investigating the ethical dimension of the sublime parallels other recent attempts to read the sublime as something other than a strictly aesthetic phenomenon. The increasing use of the sublime as a topos for studies of literature, and of the meaning of textuality in general, is representative of this general tendency. For an example of such an application, see Silverman, Hugh J. and Aylesworth, Gary E. (eds.), The Textual Sublime: Deconstruction and its Differences (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1990).Google Scholar The meaning of the recent fascination with the sublime in philosophy and a variety of other disciplines is analysed by Nancy, Jean-Luc in ‘The Sublime Offering’, Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, tr. Libren, Jeffrey S. (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1993), pp. 25–54Google Scholar; by Aguado, Maria Isabel Pena in her Ästhetik des Erhabenen: Burke, Kant, Adorno, Lyotard (Vienna: Passagen, 1994)Google Scholar; and by Hepburn, Ronald W. in ‘The concept of the sublime: has it any relevance for philosophy today?’, Dialectics and Humanism, 15 (1988), 137–55.Google Scholar

2 In keeping with an accepted convention for translating Levinas, I will translate ‘autrui’ as ‘Other’ and ‘autre’ as ‘other’. ‘Autrui’ refers to the other person. It tends to be more individual and personal. ‘Autre’ refers to alterity or otherness in general. It should be noted, however, that Levinas himself does not always clearly maintain this convention with respect to his use of ‘autrui’ and ‘autre’., especially in his early work. Therefore it is important to consider the overall context of Levinas's usage in order to interpret his meaning whenever he refers to the Other or otherness.

3 Wendy Farley argues that the uniqueness of Levinas's starting-point — beginning with an analysis of the face of the Other person rather than with a critique of reason — is what sets Levinas's ethical theory apart from the rest of the philosophical tradition, including most of postmodernism. See her ‘Ethics and reality: dialogue between Caputo and Levinas’, Philosophy Today, 363–4 (1992), 210–20.

4 Descartes, René, Meditations on First Philosophy: The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume II, tr. Cottingham, John, Stoothoff, Robert and Murdoch, Dugald (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984), pp. 35–6.Google Scholar Some of Levinas's references to this Cartesian idea can be found in TI 10/25, 41–2/49–50, 79/80, 84–5/86, 94/93, 214/196, 230–3/210–12; El 61/60, 82/77, 96–7/91–2, 116/109; S 377/184–5; OS 112–13/76; GP 108–11/159–61; PI 171–2/53–4. This is not by any means an exhaustive list. The philosophical history of the idea of the infinite, as well as some of its implications, are presented in Moses, Stéphane, ‘L'Idée de l'infini en nous’, in Aeschlimann, Jean-Christophe (ed.), Répondre d'autrui: Emmanuel Levinas (Neuchâtel: Baconnière, 1989), pp. 41–51.Google ScholarLavigne, Jean-François analyses Levinas's use of Descartes in ‘L'Idée de l'infini: Descartes dans la pensée d'Emmanuel Levinas’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 921 (1987), 54–66.Google Scholar Robert Bernasconi analyses Levinas's appropriation of the idea of the infinite in Descartes, and also argues that Levinas adopts the essential structure of the Cartesian circle in his ethical philosophy. See his ‘The silent anarchic world of the evil genius’, in Sallis, John (ed.), The Collegium Phaenomenologicum (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), pp. 257–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Because the event of obligation was never actually experienced by the subject — it is recalled from a past that was never part of the subject's experience — the temporality of obligation does not implicate the subject in any kind of nostalgia. Edward Casey describes Levinas's opposition to nostalgia in his ‘The world of nostalgia’, Man and World, 204 (1987), 362.

6 It should be noted, however, that all of the conclusions to Totality and Infinity (pp. 321–43/289–07) are focused on exteriority and its implications.

7 In this respect I disagree with Paul Crowther, who claims that the idea of infinity is not an essential part of the sublime. (See his The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), pp. 78–107.)Google Scholar I concur with William B. Hund that Kant argues that the sublime in its purest form is always occasioned by nature in ‘its appearances whose intuition carries with it the idea of their infinity’ (K3 255/112), not by human artefacts (such as St Peter's in Rome or the Pyramids — the examples which Crowther relies on to make his claim), which are vast, but do not necessarily call forth the idea of infinity when the subject tries to comprehend them. Hund articulates his disagreement with Crowther's thesis in his ‘Paul Crowther and the experience of the sublime’, Kant-Studien, 853 (1994), 337–40.

8 This feature of the sublime has been carefully explicated by Rudolf Makkreel in his Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hertneneutic Import of the Critique of Judgement. My analysis here owes much to Makkreel.

9 I would argue that it is still appropriate to use the term ‘experience’ when describing aesthetic comprehension, because the unique temporality instituted by the imagination's regress does not transcend time completely — which would makt it something other than experience — but only suspends, in an instant, one dimension of time, while still remaining in time. For this reason, the instant of aesthetic comprehension can still be regarded as a form of experience: a unique moment of ‘quasi-experience’ that departs from the linear temporality of ordinary experience.

10 As Gilles Deleuze notes, the second moment of the sublime is presented by Kant not as a mere assumption, but more in the form of a proof, where the second moment is the natural consequence to be derived from the first moment (KCP 73–5/50–2). Readings of the Kantian sublime often ignore its second moment, and consequently characterize the sublime as an event that is simply disruptive and disturbing to the subject. One example of such a reading can be found in Sallis, John, Spacings — of Reason and Imagination in Texts of Kant, Fichte, Hegel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 82–131.Google Scholar