Toward the Dignity and Justice of Being

The way of thinking proposed here does not fail to recognize being or treat it, ridiculously and pretentiously, with disdain, as the fall from a higher order or disorder. On the contrary, it is on the basis of proximity that being takes on its just meaning. In the indirect ways of illeity, in the anarchical provocation which ordains me to the other, is imposed the way which leads to thematization, and to an act of consciousness.


---Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence (trans. A Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Pr., 1981)








The entry into being does not entail a fall into absolute moral indifference, or even corruption. While Levinas could criticize Heidegger for the paucity of morality in Being and Time, no phenomenology of ontological difference necessarily leads, by its very method, to a disregard of the other as completely other. In the passage above, Levinas sets up his case against a philosophy that 'reduces, by an abuse of language, saying to the said and all sense to interest' (Otherwise Than Being, OTB,16). Already in Existents and Existence, Levinas poses the metaphysical problem of just what takes place prior to an existent's insertion into being, the reluctance if not refusal to enter into a cont[r]act with being under the conditions of insomnia, fatigue, indolence. Speculatively, Levinas posits these structures of pre-phenomenality, of pre-consciousness, where passivity holds sway. Taking a stand before being, what Levinas has named hypostasis, provides the liminality encountering an existent, which is always just out of phase with existence (being).


For Levinas, an existent and existence do not coincide precisely; a lag presents itself. A diachrony characterizes the interface of an existent with existence, where the encounter with the other in proximity occurs and seizes what, for the existent, has not yet become a self realized into being. So in this metaphysical frame (which potentially gives being its dignity and justice) the other who holds me hostage and for whom the 'I' takes full responsibility---and the responsibility even of the other's own responsibility---in substitution, provides the locus of ethics. As Levinas summarizes, he has interpreted 'the subject as a hostage and the subjectivity of the subject as a substitution breaking with being's essence' (OTB, 184).


Levinas, whose allegiance to Husserl is palpable, finds limitations in classical phenomenology, and in order to locate transcendence in its proper frame, opens upon a metaphysics, a first philosophy, of ethics. By placing the ethical moment prior even to ontology,  Levinas introduces a 'morality clause' into the contract with being. Because the other and the approach to the other, the encounter with alterity and illeity, is prior to the self of the subject-in-the- making, ethics shapes the posture of the hypostasis, or what I have dubbed the 'hypostatic union' of the existent with existence. Being is therefore extricated from the problematics of Heideggerian phenomenology, ontology and its existentialist demeanor, in which Dasein's being in the world flirts with the Volk, permitting, in the darker corners of Dasein's moods, all kinds of savagery.


Ultimately, though, Levinas never really parts ways with phenomenology, or at least the spirit of phenomenology. He will eventually come to say that what he was doing through OTB, was phenomenology all along. His approach to the problem of ethics could not fit within the scope of the phenomenology of his day, or at least the orthodoxy of its method. His metaphysics of ethics speculates upon the very nature of phenomenality and therefore of givenness. Because such a metaphysics is embedded within consciousness itself, I am comfortable describing it more along the lines of a radical phenomenology, one that is still thinking the given and therefore within the purview of phenomenology itself. A phenomenology of givenness provides the logical step from Levinassian ethics as first philosophy, yet retains the phenomenological posture. I attribute Jean-Luc Marion's debt to Levinas, at least in part, to this tacit acknowledgment.


Marion's argument with Heidegger is not primarily ethical, though its commitment to the given certainly has ethical if not moral implications; and the inadequacy of the reduction to being or ontology compels Marion to explore just how far down the reduction can go, hence his 'third reduction' to givenness. That a radical phenomenology quests for the end of metaphysics by no means spells the end of speculative thinking; the quest simply critiques the limits of any metaphysics bent on determining the validity of all kinds of phenomena. To privilege givenness does not hold being with disdain or in contempt. Rather, the privilege rescues phenomena from the hegemony of metaphysics, of ontology and ontological difference, of any positivism, and in particular from their tendencies to determine what any kind of knowledge can and cannot be.


Nihilism, too often the final face of existentialism and the positivistic stamp on rationality, impugns all of reality and makes something very small of being. Nihilism opposes any dignity and justice of being. The antidote to nihilism is thinking the thing from itself as it gives itself, as the antidote to mere being is life. As Agamben has convincingly shown, bare life, zoe, is already stripped of dignity and justice, and thematized life, bios, is at least poised for them. For Levinas and Marion, there is no state of exception, no state of being (or givenness) unworthy of dignity and justice. It remains part of my project to locate the origins and locations of dignity and justice in this thing called being, and in part, it attempts this move by asking just what is this thing called love.

Now And at the Hour of Our Death

No prayer comes as close as the Ave Maria does in embracing facticity and our being toward death. The one who prays this prayer petitions the mother of God to pray for the petitioner "now and at the hour of [our] death." Interestingly, the Western (Latin) and Eastern (Greek, Slavonic) versions of the prayer are similar, though the Western version adds the final sentence, based presumably on the Tridentine catechism and ultimately on Chalcedon and Ephesus (the Eastern tradition already includes the theotokos in its prayer of pure praise). The Eastern Marian devotion shows little interest in the yesterdays, todays and tomorrows of death; but the Western version insists on an awareness of the now and then.

The gospel of Luke and the conciliar church interest me less here than the prayer's incorporation of quotidian life and the hour that unites human experience. The presence of finality in every moment of living points to the very thrownness and facticity of the human predicament. There is an admirable acceptance of finitude in the prayer, even as it embraces the manner of the Incarnation, whose prayerful celebration entangles every life and every death. In this sense, the prayer does not merely petition, it calls for authenticity: it calls for a life whose being toward death authorizes a 'good life' ordered to its constitutive finitude and the preciousness of time.

The human life chiasmically united to the divine life in the instance of the Incarnation binds the infinite with finitude in the moment of the Christ event. The divine witness to the body and the flesh in Christ sees these human elements in their distinctions of contiguity: the body and the flesh are related not paradigmatically but syntagmatically. Dying belongs to the body; death to the flesh. The dying of the body and the death of the flesh do not therefore establish some kind of absolute dualism, a structural 'either/or' but an relation of contiguity that resists attributing a presence to one but not the other, in a mutually exclusive manner. The affectivity of the self plays out at the juncture of the horizons of the body and the flesh, in the chiasm where they interdigitate but do not mingle.

The body and the flesh unite at the level of the person, at every now and every then, at every instantiation of the self. The very image and likeness of the divine in the human, even in the divine witness of that image and likeness that sees it as 'good' and authentic, sees goodness from its essentiality of love. The hypostatic union par excellence, the Incarnation, mirrors the hypostatic union of the body and the flesh, which, in turn, reflects in distance the Christ event.

The event of death is the potential of the sacralization of space and time. The event of death is always 'my death'; it is a counter-experience of death, of the death of the other, whose death is always imbued with illeity, the death that is the death of the third person. There is not greater love than this: to lay one's life down for a friend---to die for the other; to die in the place of the other's self. But can one be in the hour of death of the other? Levinas's notion of substitution would say no; for the face of the other already saturates the intuition with deontological imperatives toward the face, and the closest one can get to die for the other is 'thou shall not kill.' We may stand for the other against the killing of the body, but we are unable to enter the flesh--- substitution might lean toward a sacrifice of self, but that my-self merely serves my-self when it desires to experience the flesh of the other: I am helpless to make satisfaction for the other, which I may approach asymptotically only, because I can do nothing but satisfy my-self, my own need to embrace the ethic created by relation to the other.

But what if the relation to the other at the hour of the other's death is not a 'hostage situation,' as Levinas (Otherwise Than Being, "Substitution") suggests, but the opposite---kenotic? Does the sacralization of time and space at the hour of death of the other open into empathy, against holding the self's place as a hostage? Perhaps better to pose the matter this way: does the erotic reduction at the hour of death break from the other gripping me as a hostage, and turn me toward a kenotic self-emptying that makes a space for the other in me to experience his self's exposure within his flesh as a saturated phenomenon? And is this not the moment of authenticity brought about in being toward death? The erotic reduction, then, might make a claim upon the givenness of the (face of) other, who, in being seen with a gaze of love, does not hold itself, its illeity as something to be grasped, or hold the gaze/gazer hostage, but also empties itself to receive the gaze. The human other has at least the potential to transform the gaze of the lover, and this might be an instance where the asymmetry in the phenomenal laterality is mitigated by love and the formation of empathy.

The call from the Cross, the centerpiece of the Christ-event, gives voice to its pure call from the very givenness of the divine love that witnesses to the event from the chiasm within the hypostatic union. The Incarnation, celebrated in the prayer to the theotokos that also petitions for the authenticity to embrace the facticity of quotidian life, cuts a space in the fabric of being toward death. This space is the treasury of merit from which the kenotic space opens in the face of the other. That space of empathy has a name: love.