Gratton disagrees
September 30, 2009
At the Philosophy in a Time of Error blog:
I don’t know about five years too late, but it’s true that Peter and I have a lot of catching up to do on basic disagreements. It feels like I know him well through philosophy business, but actually he started at DePaul a few months after I left, no overlap at all. What this means is that we’ve really only had a few extended chats at conferences, not the hours of protracted conversation that often arise between classmates or colleagues.
First, I have to ask– Janicaud as a better reader of Heidegger than Levinas? Nothing against Janicaud, about whom I wrote favorably in Guerrilla Metaphysics, but there is a real mismatch of magnitude and even genre here. Janicaud was a solid scholar, but Levinas was one of the handful of the most significant original postwar thinkers. (Granted, one could claim anyway that he got Heidegger wrong and Janicaud got him more right, but still… I don’t think Janicaud as an interpreter of Heidegger goes beyond solid, and on a few points I think he’s really off the mark.)
As for Derrida, my readers already know that I remain relatively unimpressed. Gratton’s not with me there, and that’s fine, but this is perhaps not the time to argue Derrida’s stature.
What I should ask is, in what sense does Levinas give a “political” critique of Heidegger? There are the obvious references to the Holocaust, but after what happened to Levinas’s family in Lithuania and France, I say: let’s cut him some slack there.
When Gratton reads the article, what he will find me saying is that Totality and Infinity criticzes Heidegger from three separate directions:
*In one sense, Heidegger doesn’t go deep enough. He misses the Other. This is the only critique of Heidegger that people usually talk about in Levinas. But it has the added virtue of being true. Levinas is simply right that the “futuricity” of Heidegger is not a future at all, but simply the side of the present that we might call “projection”. On the whole, way too much emphasis is placed on the ethical moment of Levinas, and he is thereby presented as some sort of pious secular rabbi wagging his finger and telling people what to do. Too little attention has been paid to the Bergsonian side of Levinas. Remember, Levinas thought Time and Free Will was one of the five or so greatest books in the history of philosophy. And Bergson is at least as important a root of Levinasian alterity as religion is. Levinas needs to be treated as a philosopher, not just as a pious outsider lecturing philosophy for not being nice enough. So many of the critiques I hear of Levinas, particularly from the Baby Boom generation, have amounted to nothing more than: “Who is he to tell me how to live my life?”
*But if the first Levinasian critique of Heidegger is that he doesn’t go deep enough (by missing the good beyond being), the second critique is that he goes too deep. Heidegger not only misses the Other, he also misses enjoyment or the elemental. Things are not just implements plugged into further implements and so on ad infinitum. We always stand somewhere in particular, enjoying fine things that are a terminus of attention without further reference. This is somewhat recognized by readers of Levinas, but still nowhere near as talked about as the Other, which both suffocates all other Levinasian themes and is read too one-sidedly as an ethical doctrine though it is also a metaphysical one (with neglected Bergsonian roots; in fact, Levinas is the only figure I can think of who in any way brings Heidegger and Bergson in contact).
Interestingly enough, these first two critiques of Heidegger are nicely combined in Levinas’s ambiguous use of the word “sincerity.” Sometimes Levinas uses sincerity to mean the immediate enjoyment of things that does not go beyond them toward a wider system of purposes: I merely enjoy the coffeee or the cigarettes, etc. But at other times sincerity is a word of transcendence for Levinas, and refers to our movement beyond the here and now toward alterity.
*the final critique combines the first two. This is the Levinasian concept of substance, which no one ever talks about at all. The sole exception I know of is Lingis in his 1997 Catholic Philosophical Quarterly article, an obscurely buried and neglected piece that is in fact one of the more important articles ever to emerge from the entire American continental philosophy scene (a scene with which Lingis, who is very much a traditional phenomenologist despite his wild persona, is completely out of synch).
Levinas makes an important critique of Heidegger’s reading of entities as ready-to-hand. Things must first be substances before they are ready-to-hand; the same thing can support multiple usages, for instance. Levinas is perhaps the only philosopher of substance among the post-Heideggerian French.
(Lingis’s argument is especially important to me for biographical reasons… In 1991 I wrote my M.A. paper for Lingis– in typical Lingisian fashion, he was out of town and I had to FedEx my thesis to “Poste Restante, Guatemala City”. His major criticism of my argument was along these same lines, and it changed things for me. I had previously been committed to the idea that “there is no such thing as ‘an’ equipment, entities form one vast holistic system.” Lingis challenged that claim, though in 1991 he was still just expressing it as a hunch, by way of numerous concrete examples. But by 1997 we had his Catholic Philosophical Quarterly article, and around the same time The Imperative, in both of which he argued his point quite clearly. But ever since I first heard him make that point, in the letter responding to my M.A. in November 1991, I realized that he was right, and that the autonomy of individual entities needed to be accounted for more rigorously.)
In general, Levinas looks a lot more impressive if we focus on his critique of Heidegger in the late 1940’s (which is pathbreaking) then if we pull the usual move of taking him as a foil for Derrida. And yes, when the dust clears, I do think Levinas is going to turn out to have been a lot more important than Derrida. There are such serious philosophical instincts at work in Levinas, and ideas that have not yet been properly explored.
As stated in a post the other night (as I was browsing the Table of Contents of The Speculative Turn) phenomenology has not fared especially well in the recent generation. It’s been under assault from several quarters. Most of these criticisms have been accurate. But nevertheless…
Once phenomenology makes its likely comeback in reformed condition (namely, stripped of its undeniable idealism) then Levinas is going to be seen in his full importance, because he’s one of the figures who sets the table for a reformed phenomenology. The critics of phenomenology generally critique its peripheral features, while failing to assimilate the object-oriented insight that makes up its very core.
Object-Oriented Philosophy 