Levinas on suffering and compassion

This paper provides an analysis of suffering and compassion in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas describes compassion as ‘the nexus of human subjectivity’ and the ‘supreme ethical principle’. In his early texts, suffering discloses the burden of being, the limits of the self, and thus the approach of alterity. Levinas’s later phenomenology of suffering as passive, meaningless, and evil, functions as a refutation of rational explanations of suffering. I argue that Levinasian substitution, the traumatic election to an excessive responsibility, is the compassionate suffering that Levinas terms the nexus of human subjectivity. For Levinas, ethics is the compassionate response to the vulnerable, suffering Other.     

Kierkegaard, mysticism, and jest: The story of little Ludvig

Throughout his authorship, Kierkegaard appears remarkably uninterested in the tradition of Christian mysticism. Indeed, in the only two places in the authorship where he broaches the topic directly, the discussion is disclaimed in such a way as to suggest that Kierkegaard really has nothing to say about it at all. However, attending to the successive incarnations of the character(s) named “Ludvig” throughout the authorship – an appellation that harbors an especially self-referential dimension for Kierkegaard – the present paper attempts to elucidate what may, with due reservation, be referred to as the mystical element in Kierkegaard’s thought. The ultimate yield of this endeavor is a vision of “mysticism” that is more act than thought oriented, and a vision of the author “Kierkegaard” that is more delightful than melancholy.     

Cracking the mirror: on Kierkegaard’s concerns about friendship

In this article, I offer a brief account of some of Kierkegaard’s key concerns about friendship: its “preferential” nature and its being a form of self-love. Kierkegaard’s endorsement of the ancient idea of the friend as “second self” involves a common but misguided assumption: that friendship depends largely upon likeness between friends. This focus obscures a vitally important element, highlighted by the so-called “drawing” view of friendship. Once this is emphasized, we can see a significant aspect - though by no means all - of Kierkegaard’s worry as misplaced. However, the “drawing” view also enables us to begin to see what a “Kierkegaardian” friendship might look like.     

Fearful asymmetry: Kierkegaard’s search for the direction of time

The ancient problem of whether our asymmetrical attitudes towards time are justified (or normatively required) remains a live one in contemporary philosophy. Drawing on themes in the work of McTaggart, Parfit, and Heidegger, I argue that this problem is also a key concern of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (1843). Part I of Either/Or presents the “aesthete” as living a temporally volatilized form of life, devoid of temporal location, sequence and direction. Like Parfit’s character “Timeless,” these aesthetes are indifferent to the direction of time and seemingly do not experience McTaggart’s “A-Series” mode of temporality. The “ethical” conception of time that Judge William offers in Part II contains an attempt to normativize the direction of time, by re-orienting the aesthete towards an awareness of time’s finitude. However, the form of life Judge William articulates gives time sequentiality but not necessarily the robust directionality necessary to justify (and make normative) our asymmetrical attitudes to time. Hence while Either/Or raises this problem it remains unanswered until The Concept of Anxiety (1844). Only with the eschatological understanding of time developed in The Concept of Anxiety does Kierkegaard answer the question of why directional and asymmetrical conative and affective attitudes towards time are normative.     

Ethics,Alterity, and Psychotherapy: A Levinasian Perspective

Current psychologies of religion reflect the modernist context in which they are situated. Religion is reduced to what is researchable, generalizable, individual and “thin.” This essay suggests that a psychology of religion which takes seriously the implications of Emmanuel Levinas’s emphasis on ethics and the alterity of the Other would result in a different model of psychotherapy. Levinas’s view of the Other as the trace of the transcendent radically changes our understanding of the client within the therapeutic relationship. Levinas begins with ethics and so healing would be, by implication, an ethical enterprise. In a highly secularized, individualized, objectivized culture, a therapy which recognizes the sacred, which models how to view the Other as transcendent, and which does not presume to know, is a gift to the client.     

Apotheosis of actuality: Kierkegaard’s poetic life

By way of an interaction with Kierkegaard’s Point of View, this paper attempts to show the extent to which Kierkegaard’s Repetition was a poetic repetition of his own life. By comparing several of his published texts with journal entries and letters to friends, this paper traces the extent and degree of Kierkegaard’s poetic reflection and corresponding lack of existential immediacy. At its most extreme, this paper argues that Kierkegaard did not really exist in the typical sense of the term; or, more precisely, that he only existed as a poetic repetition, an apotheosized ideal. Kierkegaard lived only insofar as he wrote himself into poetry.     

Levinas: thinking least about death—contra heidegger

Detailed exposition of the nine layers of signification of human mortality according to Emmanuel Levinas’s phenomenological and ethical account of the meaning and role of death for the embodied human subject and its relations to other persons. Critical contrast to Martin Heidegger’s alternative and hitherto more influential phenomenological-ontological conception, elaborated in Being and Time (1927), of mortality as Dasein’s anxious and revelatory being-toward-death. An earlier version of this paper, relating Levinas to Spinoza rather than to Heidegger, entitled “Levinas: Thinking Least about Death—Contra Spinoza,” was presented on January 19, 2006, at an international centennial conference on Levinas held at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel. The present paper was delivered as a lecture at St. John’s College, Sante Fe, New Mexico, on January 27, 2006.     

Is Mozi a utilitarian philosopher?

In this essay I argue that Mozi’s philosophy is anything but utilitarianism by way of analysing four ethical theories. Utilitarianism is an ethics in which the moral subject is an atomic individual human being, and its concern is how to fulfill the interests of the individual self and the social majority. Confucian ethics is centered on the notion of the family and its basic question is that of priority in the relationship between the small self and the enlarged or collective self. Opposite to these two moral theories is Mozi’s ethics: The interests that Mozi is primarily concerned with are not the interests of my individual self or my collective self, but the interests of the other. The fulfillment of the material needs of the other is my moral obligation. The arguments are centered on the three basic concepts, “the I,” “the we,” and “the other.” The significance of Mozi’s thought in modern or postmodern context lies in its striking resemblance to the philosophy of a contemporary western philosopher, Levinas. In both Mozi and Levinas, there is a suspension of utilitarianism. __________ Translated from Zhongguo Zhexue Shi 中国哲学史 (History of Chinese Philosophy), 2005 (1)     

Loneliness and innocence: A Kierkegaardian reflection on the paradox of self-realization

In this paper, I explore loneliness as a primordial call to find accord with the self that, as Kierkegaard claims, is born of spirit. I put Kierkegaard’s Anti-Climacan formula, “the more consciousness, the more self,” to work by examining lamentation over loss of the innocent days of youth as symptomatic of primordial loneliness. In loneliness, I argue, we confound loss of naivete (a developmental change) with loss of innocence (a spiritual failing). While each person is fated to lose naivete, no person loses innocence by developmental necessity. Each person loses innocence by his or her own hand in freedom.     

海德格尔在《黑格尔的经验概念》中对辩证法的扭曲

This essay reveals five points in which Heidegger misreads Hegel in “Hegel’s Concept of Experience”: (1) By forcedly introducing the concept of “will”, he interprets Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit into Metaphysics of Presence; (2) interprets concepts such as “statement” and “the road of skeptics” as the process of phenomenological reduction; (3) reduces Hegel’s Sein to Seiende; (4) replaces “Contradiction” with “Ambiguity” so the active Dialectics become passive; (5) exaggerates conscious experience and puts it into a real ontology, regardless of the significance of Logic and Encyclopedia of Philosophy. By an analysis of this misreading we can find the internal connection between Heidegger’s thought and that of his philosophical forerunner, Hegel. Translated by Zhang Lin from Zhexue yanjiu 哲学研究 (Philosophical Researches), 2007, (12): 59–66     

Hineni and Transference: The Remembering and Forgetting of the Other

Emmanuel Levinas proposed a philosophical critique that worked to unsettle and decenter generalizing, totalizing, and thematizing attempts to define the self. However, on the other hand, Levinas provides the space for the formation of a configuration of the self that has been conditioned by ethical relation and even points to some of the ingredients for (or shape of) such a self. Throughout Levinas’ work, the concept of hineni (“Here I am”) is used to illustrate the moral event that best characterizes the “psyche.” In the following paper, we consider how to apply the notion of hineni to modern psychological constructs of the human self. In the first section, we flesh out the characteristics of a self lived as hineni. We argue that such a self is “shaped” or oriented morally toward the outside and is radically exposed to the Other (not merely a bearer of moral consciousness or moral attributes). It is a remembering of the preoriginal and primordial ethical relation. In the second section, we use the psychoanalytic concept of transference to illustrate how the moral shape of the self can be forgotten, and how the self enters a state of “mineness” wherein the Other is reduced to one’s own history (Levinas 1990). In this state of forgetfulness, we argue that a “concreteness of egoism” (Levinas 1969) is maintained and a self lived toward the outside remains untenable. Transference, we argue, is an impoverished relation and a forgetting of and violence to the Other. Its proper use, however, in the therapeutic alliance allows for the possibility of a remembering of the Other and a calling beyond oneself.

Wen,Haiming, <Emphasis Type="Italic">Confucian Pragmatism as the Art of Contextualizing Personal Experience and World</Emphasis>

Certain discussions about “relativism” in the philosophy of Zhuangzi turn on the question of the morality of his dao 道. Some commentators, most notably Robert Eno, maintain that there is no ethical value whatsoever to Zhuangzi’s dao as presented in the Cook Ding episode and other “knack passages.” In this essay, it is argued that there is indeed a moral dimension to Cook Ding’s dao. One way to recognize it is to explore the similarity between that dao and John Dewey’s notion of educational method. There are moral traits that Dewey can appeal to in recommending his method. It is argued here that these traits represent the moral features of Cook Ding’s dao as well.     

The question of the other in French phenomenology

I would like to show how with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, we have to do with three different ways of understanding the experience of the other. For Sartre it is a visual experience, the experience of being looked at by the other, so that the experience of the other is understood as a confrontation; for Merleau-Ponty, the experience of the other necessarily implies coexistence and what he calls “intercorporeality,” so that for him the other is never to be found in front, but instead beside me, in reciprocity with me; for Levinas, the experience of the other is the experience of a non-reciprocity, of an assymetrical relation, because the experience of the other is for him an ethical and not an ontological experience, and because this experience of the face of the other is the experience of a speaking and not in the first place corporeal presence. There are consequently three different ways of finding an access to the other : the look for Sartre, intercorporeality for Merleau-Ponty and the face for Levinas.     

Returning (to) the gift of death: violence and history in Derrida and Levinas

The purpose of this paper is to establish a proper context for reading Jacques Derrida’s The Gift of Death, which, I contend, can only be understood fully against the backdrop of “Violence and Metaphysics.” The later work cannot be fully understood unless the reader appreciates the fact that Derrida returns to “a certain Abraham” not only in the name of Kierkegaard but also in the name of Levinas himself. The hypothesis of the reading that follows therefore would be that Derrida writes The Gift of Death not as an attempt to re-present Kierkegaard’s Abraham either rightly or wrongly but as an effort to do with Kierkegaard’s Abraham what is possible with his thought in a broadly Levinasian/Derridean framework. That the reading he provides of the Abraham story would not be recognizable to Kierkegaard is not the principal point of Derrida’s effort; his aim is to demonstrate that Levinas should not have been so hasty to dismiss Kierkegaard but could have recovered his interpretation of Abraham for purposes that Derrida and Levinas both share.     

Response to Commentators of “A Critique of Positive Responsibility”

It has been claimed that (1) computer professionals should be held responsible for an undisclosed list of “undesirable events” associated with their work and (2) most if not all computer disasters can be avoided by truly understanding responsibility. Commentators of “A Critique of Positive Responsibility in Computing” argue that this is not Donald Gotterbarn’s view (Gotterbarn, JSEE 14(2):235–239, 2008) but that a critique of the view nevertheless raises significant moral issues within computing such as the ethical goals of a computing profession, the appropriate ethical stance toward bugs, and the public good with respect to computing (Miller, JSEE 14(2):245–249, 2008). Commentators also argue that “A Critique”’s “profitable misreading” demonstrates the “moral ecology” of organizations “dedicated narrowly to financial success” and that other “moral ecologies” that are customer or quality driven can be shown to be more important or preeminent (Huff, JSEE 14(2):241–244, 2008). It is argued here that (1) the hyper-inflated reading of Gotterbarn’s and Ladd’s views on positive responsibility persists despite Gotterbarn’s explicit rejection of it, and that (2) such a reading of positive responsibility cannot be placed within a single moral ecology, nor can a single moral ecology be shown to be any more important or preeminent than others. Stieb, J. A. (2008). A critique of positive responsibility in computing. Science and Engineering Ethics, 14(2), 219–233.     

Gestures of work: Levinas and Hegel

What is Levinas's relation to Hegel, the thinker who seems to summarize everything which Levinas's philosophy opposes, yet with whom Levinas never enters a sustained philosophical engagement? An answer can be found through an analysis of the concept of work, understood both as activity of labor and product thereof. The concept of work reveals that, despite the apparent (but superficial) sense of opposition, Levinas's philosophy works in a deliberately noncommittal, or, to use a Levinasian expression, ``dis-interested'' mode with respect to Hegel. Such mode of disinterstedness expresses an ethical gesture of joyful hospitality that neither confirms nor refutes the German philosopher but rather opens him up to an eschatological dimension.     

Levinas in Japan: the ethics of alterity and the philosophy of no-self

Does the Buddhist doctrine of no-self imply, simply put, no-other? Does this doctrine necessarily come into conflict with an ethics premised on the alterity of the other? This article explores these questions by situating Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics in the context of contemporary Japanese philosophy. The work of twentieth-century Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō provides a starting point from which to consider the ethics of the self-other relation in light of the Buddhist notion of emptiness. The philosophy of thirteenth-century Zen Master Dōgen casts doubt on Watsuji’s commitment to reciprocal self-other relationality, showing that the idea of self-emptiness disrupts any conventional understanding of reciprocity and promotes instead other-oriented compassion. Despite interesting similarities between the ethics of alterity and Buddhist compassion, a Buddhist-influenced understanding of alterity differs from Levinas on important points, by making possible the claim that all others—human, animal, plant, and mineral—are ethical others.     

Uniting the perspectival subject: Two approaches

Visual forms of episodic memory and anticipatory imagination involve images that, by virtue of their perspectival organization, imply a “notional subject” of experience. But they contain no inbuilt reference to the “actual subject,” the person actually doing the remembering or imagining. This poses the problem of what (if anything) connects these two perspectival subjects and what differentiates cases of genuine memory and anticipation from mere “imagined seeing.” I consider two approaches to this problem. The first, exemplified by Wollheim and Velleman, claims that genuinely reflexive memories and anticipations are phenomenally “unselfconscious,” with the co-identity of the notional and actual subjects secured by a determinate causal history. The second approach posits some distinctive phenomenal property that attaches to genuinely reflexive memories and anticipations and serves to experientially conflate the notional and actual subject. I consider a version of the second approach, derived from Kierkegaard’s discussions of phenomenal “contemporaneity,” and argue that this approach can better account for the possibility of affective alienation from the selves we were and will be: the way in which our sense of self and awareness of our causal history can sometimes come apart.