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Embodied ethics: Levinas’ gift for enactivism

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Abstract

This paper suggests that the enactive approach to ethics could benefit from engaging a dialogue with the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas, a philosopher who has given ethics a decisive role in the understanding of our social life. Taking the enactive approach of Colombetti and Torrance (PHEN 8:505–526, 2009) as a starting point, we show how Levinas’ philosophy, with the key notions of face, otherness, and responsibility among others can complement and enrich the enactive view of ethics. Specifically, we argue that Levinas can provide, on the one hand, a phenomenological characterisation of ethics itself, of its nature and fundamental meaning, and on the other, an account of how sociality, affectivity and embodiment, as presented in Colombetti and Torrance’s work, combine to bring about the ethical experience. However, we also point out that introducing Levinas to the enactive approach could be challenging. It is not obvious how sense-making and value-making, as centred (à la Jonas) on the precariousness and potential death of the subject, would account for the ethical experience as grounded (à la Levinas) on the precariousness and potential death of the other.

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Notes

  1. We refer here, and throughout the paper, to what is usually viewed as the “classical” or canonical version of enactivism, also called “autopoietic enactivism” or “autonomist enactivism.” We do not consider, for the purposes of our discussion, the sensorimotor and radical (REC) branches of enactivism.

  2. To the best of our knowledge, the only and very recent exception to this diagnosis is the work of Dierckxsens (2020), who attempts to set a dialogue between enactivism and Levinas’ philosophy regarding the question of justice.

  3. This does not mean, of course, that Colombetti and Torrance’s work is the only window in the enactive approach to make contact with Levinas’ philosophy. There are, as far as we can see, interesting possibilities too in the works of De Jaegher (2019), Loaiza (2018), Grunsven (2018), and Di Paolo et al. (2018). We hope, in the future, to explore these possibilities.

  4. We might say that the enactive approach has chosen the description of the lived experience as its explanandum (Hempel and Oppenheim 1948). The debate is still open about how to articulate third-person and first-person approaches epistemologically (Sebbah 2004; Varela 2004; Salanskis and Sebbah 2008). However, the dialogue that the enactive approach develops through phenomenology has been, at least on its side, fruitful.

  5. In The Embodied Mind, beyond the title itself, the authors draw our interest to the work of those “Continental philosophers [who have produced] detailed discussions that show how knowledge depends on being in a world that is inseparable from our bodies, our language, and our social history-in short, from our embodiment.” (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, p. 149. Original emphasis).

  6. Strictly speaking, the true point of contact with Levinas, as we will see in the next section, lies in the specific idea of the encounter with the other, and not, or at least not without some qualifications, in the more general categories of social interaction or even participatory sense-making. For Levinas, not every social encounter would immediately count as an ethical encounter in the sense of an encounter with the other. However, in this presentation, for the sake of setting the dialogue with enactivism, we follow the rather open use that Colombetti and Torrance make of these concepts.

  7. Colombetti and Torrance indicate, in a footnote to the same page, that this conjecture was first formulated by Charles Lenay.

  8. We want to apologise in advance to the reader who is already well-acquainted with Levinas’ work because—for the sake of engaging in a constructive dialogue with the enactive approach and making Levinas’ approach easier to grasp for non-specialist readers—we might sometimes be unfaithful to the specificities of the Levinasian use of technical vocabulary. However, we think it is worth the price of these minor approximations if this paper might contribute to enlarging the impact of Levinas’ work.

  9. Let us insist on the specificity of this ethical resistance or excess that the other opposes to the subject. One could argue that a three-dimensional object, or the perceptive world in general, already exceeds the actual phenomenon and always has a dimension of absence associated with its presence (e.g., the invisible side of the cube). But this phenomenal excess in regard with presence, whose positive name is horizon, is nothing but a constitutive modality of the original acquaintance between consciousness and the world, still contained in the subject/world totality. This totality, Levinas argues, is structured as an asymmetric relation of power, as the subject has a dominating position over the objects she constitutes. The ethical resistance of the face is not of the same kind as the invisibility of the rear side of the cube as what is resisted by the face is the centripetal and domination-ruled closure of the subject/world totality.

  10. It has to be noted that the use of the notion of goodness we are referring to here is the one developed in Totality and Infinity (1979). In Otherwise than Being (1998), Levinas uses this notion in a slightly different way.

  11. In comparison to how other phenomenologists approach the question of the relation with the other, the originality of Levinas’ approach lies in the very specific way he tackles the question of otherness as such, so to speak, and how he draws radical consequences from there, especially regarding the structure of subjectivity and signification. Of course, other phenomenologists have considered the question of the other, but, in Levinas’ view—a view we would be inclined to share—they fail to assume the radical reversal of intentionality it involves. For Levinas, Husserl’s approach of the relation with the other as empathy (Einfülhung), as described in his Cartesian Meditations, still essentially relies on a dynamic of comprehension, centred on and originated in the constitutive subject. And for this reason, it would fail to do justice to the “veritable inversion” called by the face (Levinas 1979, p. 67). Heidegger, with his notion of coexistence, also acknowledged the irreducibility of the social relation to objective cognition. But Levinas deplores that “in the final analysis it also rests on the relationship with being in general, on comprehension, on ontology. Heidegger posits in advance this as the horizon on which every existent arises, as though the horizon, and the idea of limits it includes (...) were the ultimate structure of relationship” (Levinas 1979, pp. 67–68). There could be no radical otherness between the Dasein and the “other,” since their relationship is contained in the more general structure of being. The idea of a radical excess is indeed decisive in Heidegger’s description of the structure of being. But this excess is not associated with the notion of ethics as it is centred on the Dasein itself as its relation with the possibility of its very own death. (We will say more on that topic in Section 5).

  12. Enjoyment not only concerns pleasurable relations with exteriority but also has to do with every relation with exteriority, including unpleasurable ones—like pain, for instance—as their ultimate references: “Far from putting the sensible life into question, pain takes place within its horizons and refers to the joy of living” (Levinas 1979, p. 145).

  13. “The existent is ‘autonomous’ with respect to being; it designates not a participation in being, but happiness” (Levinas 1979, p. 119). The Levinasian use of the concept of autonomy as phenomenological independence from the milieu is affective in character and distinct from the technical way in which (autonomist) enactivism uses it. However, it might be interesting for enactivists to explore whether their technical notion of autonomy proves to be compatible with, or enriched by, the Levinasian one.

  14. So far, the relation with exteriority and the emergence of an independent self, have been approached without any reference to the radical otherness of the other, and thereby could be qualified as a pre-social solitude: “In enjoyment I am absolutely for myself. Egoist without reference to the Other, I am alone without solitude, innocently egoist and alone. Not against the Others, not ‘as for me...’—but entirely deaf to the Other, outside of all communication and all refusal to communicate—without ears, like a hungry stomach” (Levinas 1979, p. 134).

  15. “Egoism, enjoyment, [egoic] sensibility, and the whole dimension of interiority—the articulations of separation—are necessary for the idea of Infinity, the relation with the Other which opens forth from the separated and finite being” (Levinas 1979, p. 148). It is probably important here to keep in mind that Levinas’ descriptions pertain to the phenomenological domain. And it is not obvious if there are easy ways to articulate them with ontogenetic or phylogenetic approaches regarding the question of the conditions of the rise of the ego.

  16. From Totality and Infinity (Levinas 1979) to Otherwise than Being (Levinas 1998), the description of the articulation between, on the one hand, the rise of the egoic, independent I in enjoyment and, on the other hand, the exposure to the ethical call keeps the same structure. Nonetheless, it has to be noted that in the first book, Levinas gives more room to the description of the independent I in order to ultimately make it a condition of the contact with otherness and its peculiar signification. In the second book, the accent moves to the primacy of the contestation of egoism by otherness, that is, to the exposure of enjoyment to the ethical call.

  17. In Otherwise than Being, Levinas refers to maternity as the paradigmatic example of this material “gestation of the other in the same” (Levinas 1998, p. 75).

  18. It might be worth reminding that there is a historical context in which this objection was born. Levinas had studied phenomenology in Germany at the end of the 1920s, including as a pupil of Husserl and Heidegger. Also, he contributed significantly to the introduction of this school of thought in France in the 1930s. But after he had been a prisoner in Nazi camps during WWII, there was an urge for a philosophy that would put the respect for the other person as its main motive, a philosophy that would call out the risk of reducing all human significations to the disclosure of being.

  19. And this is not by accident since Jonas was a pupil of Heidegger.

  20. We use the word “concern” to translate Heidegger’s die sorge. We keep, for the most part, the word “care” for Levinas’ soin: with Levinas, care will be oriented towards the other.

  21. It is centripetal in the sense that in this existentialist scheme, the existent being is concerned with her own existence.

  22. Levinas explicitly refuses Heidegger’s teleological scheme: “Nor is what we live from a ‘means of life,’ as the pen is a means with respect to the letter it permits us to write—nor a goal of life, as communication is the goal of the letter. The things we live from are not tools, nor even implements, in the Heideggerian sense of the term. Their existence is not exhausted by the utilitarian schematism that delineates them as having the existence of hammers, needles, or machines. They are always in a certain measure—and even the hammers, needles, and machines are objects of enjoyment, presenting themselves to ‘taste,’ already adorned, embellished. Moreover, whereas the recourse to the instrument implies finality and indicates a dependence with regard to the other, living from (...) delineates independence itself, the independence of enjoyment and of its happiness, which is the original pattern of all independence” (Levinas 1979, p. 110). “To enjoy without utility, in pure loss, gratuitously, without referring to anything, in pure expenditure (...)” (Levinas 1979, p. 133). Again: “What seems to have escaped Heidegger (...) is that prior to being a system of tools, the world is an ensemble of nourishments. (...) The uttermost finality of eating is contained in food. When one smells a flower, it is the smell that limits the finality of the act. To stroll is to enjoy the fresh air, not for health but for the air” (Levinas 1987, p. 63).

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Acknowledgements

Fabrice Métais and Mario Villalobos want to thank the Instituto de Filosofía y Ciencias de la Complejidad (Santiago, Chile) for generously hosting a significant part of the research process. They also want to thank Glenda Satne, Bernardo Ainbinder and Roberto Rubio for helpful discussions at the occasion of the colloquium “Ethical Experience, Meaning, and Radical Otherness” (Santiago, Chile, 08/24/2018). The research project has also been presented at the Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès (France) on the 28th of May 2019 following the invitation of Isaac Hernandez, and the authors want to express their gratitude to him and to the audience for their fruitful feedbacks. The authors also want to thank John Stewart, Dave Ward, Charles Lenay, Jean-Michel Salanskis and Ezequiel Di-Paolo for their detailed and lucid comments on an earlier version of this paper. Finally, both authors want to thank the anonymous referees for their very constructive observations.

Funding

This work was funded by the Universidad de Tarapaca, grant UTA Mayor 3761-20, and supported by the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (France) CNRS/INSHS“soutien pour la mobilité internationale”.

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Métais, F., Villalobos, M. Embodied ethics: Levinas’ gift for enactivism. Phenom Cogn Sci 20, 169–190 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-020-09692-0

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