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Agreement and Disagreements: Thomas Reid and Emmanuel Lévinas
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
The prospect of meetings provokes a variety of responses: dread, despondency, lethargy, scepticism, cynicism, and, occasionally, hope and the prospect of progress. Much of the natural aversion, it seems to me, centres on the inherent capacity of meetings to engender disagreement. Disagreement, however, so often ignores yet still rests upon a more fundamental agreement among participants, an agreement which very often only comes to the fore, discretely, when the air of the meeting clears and the assembly adjourns for lunch. By reflecting upon Emmanuel Lévinas and Thomas Reid, this paper argues that more attention, and attentiveness, needs to be given to the proto-agreement upon which any subsequent (dis)agreement rests.
Lévinas opens Totality and Infinity by simply stating in the Preface that ‘[e]veryone will readily agree... (on conviendra ais?ment...)' and then proceeds to argue the priority of ethics, with its thought of the infinite, over knowledge understood as a counterpart to ontology’s reductive comprehension of the other to the same. The problem, however, is that not everyone does readily agree with Lévinas, as is evident in Derrida’s criticism of the rationality of Lévinas’ position. In Violence and Metaphysics, Derrida draws attention to ‘the theoretical incoherence of the notions of pure infinity and absolute otherness, or exteriority.’ Like a ‘square circle,’ the concepts of an ‘absolutely other’ or an ‘otherwise than being’ are empty intuitions and are meaningless. Lévinas’ relation with absolute alterity is a thought which one cannot think, a logical contradiction inviting a sceptical response.
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- Copyright © 1997 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Lévinas, E, Totality and lnfinity, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979).p.21CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The opening sentence in full is: ‘Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality.’ (‘On conviendra aisément qu'il importe au plus haut point de savoir si l'on n'est pas le dupe de la morale.’Totalité et Infini, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff; 1974). p. ix).
2 Cf. 1 Derrida, , Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Lévinas, in Writing and Difference, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) p. 126Google Scholar.
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7 C W Reed, Lévinas' Question in Face to Face with Lévinas, pp.73–82
8 Lévinas, in La Signification et Lo Sens, stressing the anteriority of meaning in respect of the cultural situation in which people find themselves, writes that 'before Culture and Aesthetics, signification is found in Ethics, the presupposition of all Culture and all signification. Morality does not belong to Culture: it allows it to be judged, and discovers the dimension of height. Height orders being.
Height introduces meaning (sens) into being. It is already lived throughout human bodily experience. It leads human societies to erect altars. It is not on account of their bodies that human beings have an experience of the vertical which places the human under the sign of height. It is because being orders itself towards height that the human body is placed in a space where the high and the low are distinguished and discovers the sky which, for Tolstoy's Prince Andrew‐without any word of the text evoking colours‐is utter height.'(Lévinas, E, Humanisme de I'autre homme, (Paris: Fata Morgana, p.58)Google Scholar
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10 Thomas Reid, op. cit., p.3
11 ibid., pp.10–11
12 ibid., p. 112. 173‐Me appearance of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature.
13 ibid., p. 10
14 ibid. p. 108
15 ibid., p. 109
16 ibid., p, 109 17. ibid., p. 109
18 ibid., p. 110
19 ibid., p. 111
20 ibid., p. 112
21 ibid., p. 112
22 ibid., pp.4–5
23 ibid., p.5 Reason is to be understood here as discursus mentalis.
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25 Reid, Thomas, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, (London: Charles Griffin and Company, 1865) VI, ii. p.296Google Scholar.
T J Sutton argues the close connection between common sense and ethics, 74 or ‘transacting business’, which is evident, he says, in Reid's warning against the hypotheses of philosophers which ‘lead to conclusions which contradict the principles on which all men of common sense must act in common life.’ (T J Sutton, The Scottish Kant: A Reassessment of Reid's Epistemology, in Dalgamo, M & Matthews, E (eds.). The Philosophy of Thomas Reid, (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989). p. 169Google Scholar. quoting Intellectual Powers of Man, II, xii.
26 E Lévinas, Existence and Existents, p.44.
27 E Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, p.111.
28 E Lévinas, Existence and Existents, p.44.
29 E Lévinas. God and Philosophy, p. 141
30 ibid., p.145.n.24.
31 Cf. E Lévinas, Humanisme de l'autre homme, p.54.
32 Cf. Lévinas, E, Lévinas, E, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, Lingis, Alphonso (tr.). (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), p.148Google Scholar (Original published as Autrement qu'être ou au‐delà de l'essence, (The Hague: M Nijhoff, 1974)Google Scholar.
33 Lévinas, E, Time and the Other, Cohen, R (tr.). (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987). p.58Google Scholar (Originally, Le temps el l'autre, in Wahl, J, Le Choix, Le Monde, L'Existence, Grenoble‐Paris, 1947)Google Scholar.
34 ibid., p. 59
35 ibid., p.60
36 ibid.
By stressing the salvific significance of secularity, Lávinas opposes both Heidegger's understanding of in‐der‐Welt‐Sein, and Husserl's refusal of the natural attitude. Heidegger had interpreted the subject's being‐in‐the‐world as proximally and for the most part‐in its average everydayness (in seiner durchschnittlichen Alltäglichkeit (Being and Time, p.37–38). “Everydayness” is that way of existing in which Dasein maintains itself “every day” (BT. 422), a ‘definite “how” of existence’ (BT, 422) which permeates Dasein ‘as a rule’ for life, even though, existentially, it may have been “surmounted”. Lévinas' objection is that the ontic familiarity of “average everydayness” is not a way of Being which Dasein must surmount in order to possess as its own (eigen) its existence as authentic (eigentilich); rather, the seemingly facile moments of everyday living ‘in and out of time’‐the very buying of a watch‐are the salvific moments of being‐in‐the‐world.
37 Dennis Charles Holy, The Defence of Common Sense in Reid and Moore, in Dalgamo, M & Matthews, E (eds.), The Philosophy of Thomas Reid, (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989).pp.145–146Google Scholar
Reid himself writes, ‘I have only this further to observe, that the province of common sense is more extensive in refutation than in confirmation.’ (lntellectual Powers, VI, ii. p.301).
38 E Lévinas, Totality and lnfinity, p.211.
39 E Lévinas, Existence and Existents, p.44.
40 C W Reed, op. cit., p.78.
41 ibid., p.79.
42 ibid., p.79.
43 Steven Smith, Reason at One for Another, in Face to Face with Lévinas, p.63.
44 ibid., p.62.
45 E Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, p.47.
46 ibid., p.201.
47 ibid., p.204.