Levinas and Analytic Philosophy: Second-Person Normativity and the Moral Life (Routledge Research in Phenomenology)

315 Pages·2019·1.368 MB·English

by  Michael Fagenblat (editor), Melis Erdur (editor)

Levinas and Analytic Philosophy
“An innovative collection of essays written by an impressive group of scholars
that demonstrates the important contribution that Levinas’s thought can make to
discussions more commonly associated with the analytic philosophical tradition.”
—Leslie MacAvoy, East Tennessee State University, USA
“With the increasing need to build bridges among the different philosophical
traditions and with the growing interest in Levinas’s work, this book will appeal
to a significant number of scholars working in Levinas studies, moral philosophy,
and philosophy of mind. Fagenblat and Erdur have assembled a first rate group
of scholars whose essays will encourage discussions across intra-disciplinary
boundaries.”
—Claire Katz, Texas A&M University, USA
This volume examines the relevance of Emmanuel Levinas’s work to recent devel-
opments in analytic philosophy. Contemporary analytic philosophers working in
metaethics, the philosophy of mind, and the metaphysic of personal identity have
argued for views similar to those espoused by Levinas. Often pursued in isola-
tion, Levinas’s account of “ethics as first philosophy” affords a way of connecting
these respective enterprises by showing how moral normativity enters into the
structure of rationality and personal identity.
The volume shows how Levinas’s moral phenomenology relates to recent work
on the normativity of rationality and intentionality and how it can illuminate a
wide range of moral concepts including accountability, moral intuition, respect,
conscience, attention, blame, indignity, shame, hatred, gratitude, and guilt. The
volume also tests Levinas’s innovative claim that ethical relations provide a way
of accounting for the irreducibility of personal identity to psychological iden-
tity. The essays here contribute to ongoing discussions about the significance and
sustainability of a naturalistic but nonreductive account of personhood. Finally,
the volume connects Levinas’s second-person standpoint with analogous develop-
ments in moral philosophy.
Michael Fagenblat is Senior Lecturer at the Open University of Israel. He is
the author of “Levinas and Heidegger: The Elemental Confrontation,” Oxford
Handbook of Levinas (2019); A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas’s Philosophy
of Judaism (2010); and other work in phenomenology and the philosophy of
religion.
Melis Erdur received her PhD in philosophy from New York University in 2013.
She has held several postdoctoral fellowships in Israel and published articles in
the area of moral philosophy, including “A Moral Argument Against Moral Real-
ism,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 19 (3), 591–602, 2016, and “Moral
Realism and the Incompletability of Morality,” The Journal of Value Inquiry, 52
(2), 227–237, 2018.
Routledge Research in Phenomenology
Edited by Søren Overgaard
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Komarine Romdenh-Romluc
University of Sheffield, UK
David Cerbone
West Virginia University, USA
Phenomenology, Naturalism and Science
A Hybrid and Heretical Proposal
Jack Reynolds
Imagination adn Social Perspectives
Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology
Edited by Michela Summa, Thomas Fuchs, and Luca Vanzago
Wittgenstein and Phenomenology
Edited by Oskari Kuusela, Mihai Ometiţă, and Timur Uçan
Husserl’s Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity
Historical Interpretations and Contemporary Applications
Edited by Frode Kjosavik, Christian Beyer, and Christel Fricke
Phenomenology of the Broken Body
Edited by Espen Dahl, Cassandra Falke, and Thor Erik Eriksen
Normativity, Meaning, and the Promise of Phenomenology
Edited by Matthew Burch, Jack Marsh, and Irene McMullin
Politcal Phenomenology
Experience, Ontology, Episteme
Edited by Thomas Bedorf and Steffen Herrmann
Levinas and Analytic Philosophy
Second-Person Normativity and the Moral Life
Edited by Michael Fagenblat and Melis Erdur
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/
Routledge-Research-in-Phenomenology/book-series/RRP
Levinas and Analytic
Philosophy
Second-Person Normativity
and the Moral Life
Edited by Michael Fagenblat
and Melis Erdur
First published 2020
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Taylor & Francis
The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the
editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-61594-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-46258-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
Analyzing Levinas vii
MICHAEL FAGENBLAT
PART I
Second-Person Normativity 1
1 Second-Person Reasons: Darwall, Levinas, and the
Phenomenology of Reason 3
STEVEN G. CROWELL
2 The Second Source of Normativity and Its Implications
for Reflective Endorsement: Levinas and Korsgaard 29
MICHAEL BARBER
3 Grounding and Maintaining Answerability 55
MICHAEL FAGENBLAT
4 Buber, Levinas, and the I-Thou Relation 80
PATRICIA MEINDL, FELIPE LEÓN AND DAN ZAHAVI
5 Commanding, Giving, Vulnerable: What Is the
Normative Standing of the Other in Levinas? 101
JAMES H. P. LEWIS AND ROBERT STERN
PART II
Ethical Metaphysics 123
6 The Concept of Truth in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity 125
MICHAEL ROUBACH
vi Contents
7 Levinas and the Second-Personal Structure of Free Will 139
KEVIN HOUSER
8 Personal Knowledge 166
SOPHIE-GRACE CHAPPELL
PART III
Ethics and Moral Philosophy 191
9 Desire for the Good 193
FIONA ELLIS
10 On Sociality and Morality: Reflections on Levinas,
Tomasello, Strawson, Wallace 210
MICHAEL L. MORGAN
11 Rethinking Vulnerability in a Levinasian Context 234
DIANE PERPICH
12 Between Virtue and the Theory of Subjectivity:
Noddings’s Care, Levinas’s Responsibility, and Slote’s
Receptivity 253
GUOPING ZHAO
13 Levinasian “Ethics as First Philosophy”: In Analytic
Moral Philosophy 269
MELIS ERDUR
14 Against a Clear Conscience: A Levinasian Response to
Williams’s Challenge 279
SØREN OVERGAARD
Contributors 292
Index 295
Analyzing Levinas
One would like to think that the “analytic/Continental” divide in phi-
losophy is a thing of the past. Philosophers are increasingly overcom-
ing the entrenched division, and much good work is coming out of this.
Yet there has been almost no commerce between Emmanuel Levinas’s
oh-so-Continental “ethics” and analytic philosophers working in moral
philosophy.1 It would be unfair to ascribe this merely to disciplinary prej-
udice. Heidegger is Levinas’s most important influence, Merleau-Ponty is
his most admired contemporary, and both develop substantive positions
that his work rivals. Their work, however, is exemplary of the ways and
whys of crossing the analytic/Continental divide and have proven to be
immensely valuable in approaching fundamental problems in the phi-
losophies of mind and action. Why then has Levinas’s thought failed to
make the passage from “ethics” to moral philosophy?
Two explanations stand out, one concerning the style of Levinas’s writ-
ings, the other their substance. Dermot Moran suggests that the “impres-
sionistic style of prose with allusions to religious experience” is the reason
why “Levinas’s work is largely ignored among analytic philosophers.”2
Michael Slote, a leading exponent of virtue ethics, concurs. Introducing
his own account of how “the virtue of receptivity, preceding reason and
knowledge” is “a touchstone for other values,” Slote acknowledges, in
a footnote, that the idea is close to Levinas’s—but the French philoso-
pher “does so in a metaphorical, evocative, highly abstract fashion.” Like
Levinas, Slote wants to retrieve moral receptivity from the sway of exces-
sive reasoning in ethics and thus aims “for a general critique of Western
philosophical thinking,” but he wants to do so unlike Levinas: that is, “in
ways that don’t rely on exaggeration or metaphor.”3
When Christine Korsgaard argued that the source of morality is the
reflective endorsement of one’s practical identity, Bernard Williams took
the liberty of recommending that “Korsgaard may want to consider
someone who has tried to work out similar ideas in a different style,
Levinas.”4 But she didn’t. It is not surprising then that when Korsgaard
expanded her notion of “moral identity” in Self-Constitution and offered
a rejoinder to Williams, she overlooked the alternative that Levinas offers
viii Analyzing Levinas
to Williams’s objection. The objection holds that theoretical and practi-
cal reasoning are so thoroughly unlike each other that it is impossible
to derive conclusions about what one ought to do by reflecting on what
one, including oneself, ought to think about the nature of the world.
Korsgaard’s response is to argue that reasoning about what I ought to
do on the basis of my practical identity is “committed to deliberating
together with others” and, since “both kinds of reasons are public,” they
are not so unlike after all. But Levinas emphasizes an alternative Kantian-
ism: it is not that practical reasoning is in the final analysis public but that
theoretical reasoning is in the final analysis moral, and not because it is
public but because it is personal, addressed to some hypothetical other
person.5 Williams himself, however, might have noted that his distinction
between “ethics” and “the peculiar institution of morality” is one that
Levinas’s thought tracks. “The presentation of being in the face does not
have the status of a value,” he writes, thus clearly marking the distinction
between “ethics” and the domain of values. As he says later: “Responsi-
bility is what first enables one to catch sight of and conceive of value.”6
One suspects that it is also Levinas’s style, though it may just be pru-
dence, that confines Stephen Darwall to a footnote indicating the proxim-
ity between his analysis of “the second-person standpoint” and Levinas’s
account of the moral authority of the face. “A similar idea seems at work
in the writings of Emmanuel Levinas about encountering the ‘other,’ ”
Darwall diffidently suggests, before deferring to Hilary Putnam’s account
of how “encountering an other ‘face to face’ involves a second-personal
demand for respect.”7 Darwall’s sustained deployment of the history of
moral philosophy, including outliers who are proximate to Levinas such
as Fichte and Buber, suggests that it is not bias toward “Continental phi-
losophy” that inhibits his engagement with Levinas. A similar reluctance
is displayed by Samuel Scheffler, who makes do, again in a footnote, with
third-hand reports of “related themes” in Levinas’s writings to his idea
that valuing in the present is conceptually dependent on strangers who
will live after one dies.8 Whether because of its style or for some other
reason, Levinas’s thought has been confined to a footnote at the forefront
of contemporary moral philosophy.
The aim of this volume is to explore these and other roads not taken
in order to begin to determine if Levinas’s thought and contemporary
philosophy can engage in reciprocal critical appraisal. One way this is
done, as the titles and abstracts to this volume make clear, is by engag-
ing Levinas’s thought with the work of the thinkers mentioned so far, all
of whom are considered in detail in chapters in this volume, as are the
moral philosophies of others such as Simon Blackburn, Ronald Dworkin,
Martha Fineman, John Gardner, Catriona Mackenzie, John McDowell,
P. F. Strawson, Michael Tomasello, and R. Jay Wallace.
Another approach applied in this volume consists in conceptual analy-
sis of Levinas’s lush language. While its “impressionistic style,” as Moran
Analyzing Levinas ix
called it, has clearly repelled philosophers chary of its “incantatory force”
and “unrestrained metaphorical rhetoric,” there is often a bias in such an
appraisal.9 Consideration of Levinas’s fine attention to etymology, to say
nothing of the substantive reasons for his choice of words, deployment
of metaphor and allusion, and use of a style that emulates a direct first-
person approach to the Other, can justly lead to an appreciation of his
language as “admirable and most often—if not always—beyond rhetori-
cal abuse,” as Derrida deemed it.10 Commendation of style by Derrida will
surely not help the cause of Levinas’s philosophy. But conceptual analysis
of his language can contribute to deciding between the two appraisals.
The challenge of Levinas’s writings is in any case not only a matter
of style. The substance of Levinas’s thought is also “counter-intuitive”
to philosophers specializing in established sub-disciplines. For if it is
clear that Levinas offers something close to but substantively different
from notable positions in contemporary moral philosophy, it is not often
understood that Levinas’s argument extends well beyond the domain of
moral philosophy. Indeed, it is arguable that what Levinas calls “ethics”
does not belong to the field of moral philosophy at all but to a more fun-
damental level of analysis that we might call the metaphysics of meaning.
The complex idea of “ethics as first philosophy” proposes that second-
personal moral normativity is constitutive of the normativity of inten-
tional content in general. It stands in the Kantian tradition according
to which the objective measure of objects is enabled and constrained by
formal conditions for the possibility of experience, modifying that tradi-
tion by locating the transcendental conditions for intelligibility in the
normative claim of an “Other” who makes it possible for me to subject
objects to their various measures. One can therefore distinguish “ethics”
from moral philosophy, even broadly conceived. Levinas is clearly not
addressing himself to first-order moral problems or offering a normative
moral theory. But nor is “ethics” a type of “metaethics,” since metaeth-
ics supposes that the terms of moral experience are legitimate objects
of analysis, whereas “ethics” seeks to show how they become so. On
this view, the normativity demanded by “the Other” is constitutive of all
intentional acts. Levinas’s thought has failed to make the passage from
“ethics” to moral philosophy, then, not because it is moral philosophy à
la mode française but because it is something else entirely, a groundwork
for the metaphysics of meaning, not morals.
If this is right, then the risk of talking at cross-purposes is undeniable,
even considerable. It is also a risk worth taking, however. For Levinas’s
substantive views about “ethics” include innovative contributions to the
philosophy of mind, since he has a distinctive, even unique, conception
of the grounds of meaning and truth, and to the metaphysics of personal
identity, since he has a novel conception of the nature of free will and
selfhood. Accordingly, in addition to relevant positions in moral philoso-
phy, chapters in this volume engage Levinas’s work with philosophies of