Abstract
There are two seemingly opposed descriptions of the subject in Totality and Infinity: the separate and autonomous I and the self that is ready to respond to the Other’s suffering and need. This paper points out that there is in fact another way Levinas speaks of the subject, which reinforces and reconciles the other two accounts. Throughout his first major work, Levinas explains how the ego is allowed to emerge as such by the Other who constantly confronts it. At certain points in that work Levinas comes to describe the self as a creature given to itself by another. The notion of the created ego allows for both freedom and responsibility as Levinas understands the creature as capable of thinking critically, becoming an independent individual, and turning to the Other in responsibility.
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Notes
For an appreciation of Levinas’ view of the home or the dwelling, see Harris (1995), p. 433–444. Harris discusses two understandings of home, one drawn from the New Testament and the other from Levinas. Harris emphasizes that Levinas’ ethics, which calls for the free opening of the ego’s home so as to welcome the destitute Other, can be a corrective to an other-worldly spirituality that may be putting more attention on the world to come or to a homecoming in another life or realm.
For a discussion of the significance of the feminine for the entry of the I into ethics, see Catherine Chalier’s essay in Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (1991).
For Husserl, it is in empathy that I come to be aware of another ego apart from myself. The other ego is understood as an intentional modification of my awareness of myself as constituted in my sphere of ownness and as an ego governing my body. There is a transfer of sense from my apprehension of my body as animate to the alien body that enters my perceptual field and which is anticipatively grasped as having the same sense. To recognize another body as a lived body, that is, to transfer the objective sense of my animated body constituted in my primordial sphere to that of the other, requires this seeing of the ‘similarity’ (apart from and beyond physical appearance) that obtains between my own lived body here and another alien body. The similarity ‘serve[s] as the motivational basis for the “analogizing” apprehension of that body as another animate organism.’ In this manner, when I see another body that is like my own, I suppose that it too is constituted within a sphere of ownness distinct from my own and is governed by another ego. See Husserl (1960: 111).
Leibniz speaks of the monad as ‘a complete being’ the nature of which ‘is to have a notion so complete that it is sufficient to contain and to allow us to deduce from it all the predicates of the subject to which this notion is attributed’ (Discourse on Metaphysics §8). A single monad is that which exists by itself, independent of everything else save God: ‘in rigorous metaphysical truth, there is no external cause acting on us except God alone, and he alone communicates himself to us immediately in virtue of our continual dependence.’ (Discourse on Metaphysics §28) Each monad is windowless (Monadology §7) and as such can be affected by nothing from without. The life of a monad is the unfolding of accidents enfolded within it since the moment of creation. The actions of one monad are to be understood merely as expressing more perfectly the sufficient reason of another that undergoes these actions. Each substance is self-enclosed, needs nothing, and is relation-less. Since nothing can penetrate it, it could not be affected by any other creature. All quoted passages are from G.W. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, eds. and trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1989). Though he conceived of the idea of the monad’s openness to its creator, perhaps Leibniz failed to see that such an original openness allows for genuine relations with other individuals.
Two essential things that Richard Cohen notes characterizes man as a creature in Levinas’ thinking. See Cohen (1994), p. 216–217.
For a basic explanation of this idea, see Ponce (1973), p.79-81.
See also Levinas 1987a: 58.
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Capili, A.D. The Created Ego in Levinas’ Totality and Infinity . SOPHIA 50, 677–692 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0263-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0263-3