Episode 145: Emmanuel Levinas: Why Be Ethical?

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 145 is again something like, what's the place of ethics in existentialism? And we read three selections by Emmanuel Levinas from the Levinas reader. Ethics as first, Philosophy, parts three and four of Time in the other. And there is existence without existence. You can join the discussion, get the texts and lots More information@PartiallyExaminedLife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in the space that keeps us away from ourselves.

0:42 Seth: In Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin, passively awaiting to be overcome by the future.

0:47 Wes: In Austin, Texas, this is Wes Alwan, not literally face to face with my fellow podcasters, but face to face nonetheless, in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:57 Mark: Welcome back, Seth.

0:58 Seth: Hey, how's it going, guys?

1:00 Wes: Good.

1:01 Mark: And the audience answers. I thought you were talking to the audience.

1:04 Seth: I could be talking to the audience. I could be talking to you. You're all pure alterity to me.

1:09 Mark: We are all pleased as punch. Even though you could never know that.

1:13 Seth: I wouldn't want to know it.

1:14 Mark: Yes, knowledge is possessing knowledge is too, too violent. Seems like we should give some ground rules. We haven't done that in a while. I bet Seth has forgotten them.

1:23 Seth: Well, that's a great question. Let's see. We don't assume that our readers have actually done the reading.

1:29 Mark: Yes.

1:29 Seth: No name dropping, for instance. You can't just say, if you had only read Levi-Bruhl's the Sacred and the Profane on the Lower east side of Manhattan, you would understand what I was saying.

1:41 Mark: And Levinas breaks that rule himself.

1:44 Seth: Yes, he does. He's not too bad as a name dropper. And finally, be rigorous and exact in everything that we say, unless doing otherwise would be more amusing.

1:53 Mark: Very nice. Is that close? That is very close. So you picked this Seth, though that has long been on our list.

1:58 Seth: Yes, that's true.

1:59 Mark: Tell us about it.

2:00 Seth: All right. I actually was planning on doing my dissertation on Heidegger and Levinas, and I managed to learn German and to study Heidegger with a Heidegger scholar in Freiburg back in. I think this was 1994 or so, and Levinas at the time was alive. He actually died, I think, in 1995, but I never managed to learn French well enough to read Levinas in the French, and he was not at that time translated into English. And I kind of felt overwhelmed by the whole product. So there's a sense in Which Levinas is the guy who made me quit graduate school.

I just didn't feel like I could pivot, so to speak. So he's played an important role in my philosophical and intellectual development. But I've also simultaneously been intimidated. Levinas is one of those few thinkers who sits at the intersection of Jewish thought as well as traditional Western philosophy, like Maimonides. He's in a certain sense, kind of a role model also in some respect for me, but was also very conservative in his Judaism. So I've been afraid to revisit him and have been awaiting the opportunity when I had reached a certain equilibrium in my life and a certain maturity of my own intellectual thought and with the confidence that I would be doing so with my partially examined Life colleagues for assistance and support.

It seemed like now was the perfect time. And I have to say that I was very pleased that we found the space to do it now, because I feel very different approaching him now than I did 20 years ago as a graduate student.

3:42 Mark: Well, I feel probably different approaching him now than I would have five years ago if we had done him right after Heidegger, as he probably deserves, although we never actually did the second half of Being in Time, where he talks about being unto death and things like that. His version of existentialism, proto existentialism, though he denied that label because, yeah, Levinas is responding pretty directly to that stuff, so we can say a little about that. He also, folks that want to look back at other episodes of ours, he's very much influenced by Bergson, the most popular philosopher in France.

France at the time, who had been a few decades earlier. For the most part, he's a contemporary of Sartre. He had some back and forth with Simone de Beauvoir, who criticized some of the things he had to say in here as being sexist, considering the other is the feminine. Yes, exactly. Started as a Husserl follower and wrote his first few things on that. Also very much a Heidegger follower. But then when Heidegger joined the Nazi Party, then according to various things I read, Levinas sort of made it his life's work to give responses to, sort of show that even though Heidegger was very insightful in some ways, he fundamentally got it wrong in certain ways.

And the main way is seeing human authenticity as too solitary, as something that for Heidegger, you kind of achieve it on your own by reaching some sort of balance in your view of the universe, of your view of life. Whereas for Levinas, no, it has to involve other people. And that is in fact, right, we're going to talk about ethics as first philosophy. That is the first thing ethics really ends up coming before ontology, before the study of being.

5:21 Wes: Well, not just that. I mean first philosophy in the sense that it's not founded on a metaphysics, which is what we mean by first philosophy. It is the sort of underlying metaphysics of things. So you don't analyze subject and object and then derive ethics from it. The ethical comes first ontologically, not just in priority.

5:39 Mark: And it was just a coincidence that we happened to do Simone de Beauvoir recently, who was arguing a similar kind of thing. Although for Simone de Beauvoir, it's, well, as soon as you start to act, as soon as you exert your will, borrowing from Kant, that it's a matter of willing. Whereas with Levinas, it's actually even prior to will. It's sort of the first experiences you have chronologically and ontologically. Slash logically the first things, the foundations, as Wes was saying, are the gaze of the other. And he also had a lot to say about Boober. So I, you know, I know when we did our Boober episode, we were thinking, oh, yeah, Levinas will be just the sequel to Buber. And there is an essay in here where he specifically talks about Boober and how he relates to that. I did read that today, but it's not one that we're officially talking about

6:25 Wes: because Seth and I are probably not prepared to.

6:28 Mark: That's okay.

6:28 Seth: Yeah.

6:29 Mark: I'm not going to go into it.

6:30 Seth: I don't want to talk about Buber tonight.

6:32 Mark: But, yeah, otherwise, when we lay out this all out, it might sound like, didn't you just all give that all with Buber? But his language is not similar to Buber's at all from what I recall. So let's get into Levinas face to

6:43 Wes: face with him, so to speak. Sorry.

6:47 Mark: So could you figure out when this Ethics's first philosophy paper, this is going to be our main one. It said it was published in 1984, but it was unclear to me whether it was post his big book, Totality and Infinity, which is 1961, or whether it was in the mid to late 40s like the other two that we're reading.

7:04 Seth: Good question. I'm not sure.

7:06 Mark: Right. When you try to look up this title, it's often just taken as the description of his philosophy as a whole, not the name of an essay in particular. It's just. Yeah, that's what he writes about, I think, his first philosophy. So.

7:17 Wes: Well, it's published in Justifications, the. Yeah. Well, I guess if we Google, I

7:23 Seth: think it has to have been written much, many years before 1984. And it's not just some sort of retrospective summary.

7:30 Wes: Right. Even though that book. Yeah. And it could have been, but probably not.

7:33 Mark: Yeah. From what I was reading about, his thought is he's remarkably consistent throughout his career. Each new book kind of adds an extra piece to the story and makes it a little more radical, so it almost doesn't matter what era of him you read. It's just interesting to look at the development. But the basic story is all there, which can we say at a high level before we start reading the individual things, what the basic story is, or is it too hard? Other than ethics is first philosophy, and that's the conclusion. But how is this actually grounded?

8:05 Seth: Well, I don't know if we can summarize it easily, but in the essay, Levinas says that you know from the very beginning of philosophy that knowledge, or comprehension of meaning, which is really knowledge as an essence exercise of our being. So you have consciousness. And this. The terms we use now would be intentional. This intentional consciousness reaches out to being, which is to say things in the world or ourself, and grasps them through knowing. And that's how we create meaning. And that's our primordial relation or our first relationship with the world is through comprehension and knowledge.

And that this movement of knowledge is a movement that. That is where difference is overcome. So there's me as the subject, and there are objects which are somehow external to me. And through knowledge, I grasp those objects and I internalize them, which is to say, I make them identical with myself, so they become objects for me. It becomes knowledge that I have. I have ownership. He kind of points out how knowledge metaphors are always about seeing in the light and grasping and owning and having and this sort of thing. So this is what we traditionally take as first philosophy.

9:22 Mark: And although that's his kind of critical spin on it. Right. He thinks that knowledge is primary and he thinks he's getting that from Plato and Aristotle. But Plato and Aristotle would not agree with his, considering that as acquisition for Plato. Right. Being in touch with truth doesn't seem at all like that. In fact, if anything, it's maybe submitting yourself in some way to truth and beauty and all that. It's not taking hold of it. It's not a violent thing.

9:49 Seth: That's a good point. I mean, he does seem to think that this is a theme that has been consistent, starting with Plato and going all the way through Descartes and even the phenomenologist Husserl and Heidegger. So for him, it's the consistent theme of philosophy.

10:05 Mark: I think maybe one of the reasons he thinks that is because he finds it a logical consequence, if you really consider these early philosophers, that you get to something like Kantianism, and with Kant explicitly, it's a form of idealism that if you know something, if you perceive something, then it is in some sense being generated out of yourself. It's within your mind, it's gotten in you. And so you are almost by definition can only be in touch with something that is a part of you. Right? It's in your mind.

10:34 Wes: So regardless of whether he's sort of getting this characterization of knowing is grasping right. For the ancients or whether he's sort of conflating them with Kant, I think the contrast is going to be to our relationship to other consciousnesses. Right. We begin with this idea of grasping objects, that being knowledge. But there's this critical difference when we get to what he calls knowledge of other or a relation to the and other of consciousness, which is also a kind of knowledge. So, and I think, you know, it's reminiscent of ultimately we'll be talking about to some extent how the self is constituted and some of the other essays and you one of Hegel's critiques of Kant.

So for Kant, sort of knowing the objects in the world is part of what makes us a self, right? We don't have a self except as a constitutor of these objects. And for Hegel, the reply is no, we don't have a self except in relation to these other consciousnesses. We have to internalize a another's consciousness in order to be self conscious. So I think there's a parallel there. And that sort of sets us up for section two, if we're still summarizing. So, Seth, we kind of interrupted you when you were talking about knowledge as grasping and then which is kind of the first section, right.

11:42 Seth: So the problem statement that he introduces in the second part of this essay is he wants to ask whether there's another mode of thought, another way of being in the world that is not knowledge. Is there a way that we could conceivably interact with the world and with others? That was not knowledge. And so he then spent some more time characterizing what knowledge is, post Husserl. So he talks about intentionality, that knowledge is really a relation between consciousness and the object of consciousness, which is other than it. So we have this intentional act and that the active Knowledge is active. So consciousness has to reach out to its object and grasp it, which is an activity. And so hold on to this idea because it's going to come back later. The idea of consciousness being active and that it having activity as opposed to being passive. So without going into bad conscience.

12:42 Mark: Well, the, the detail, it seems like you're asking, is there another way of relating to the world that's not this focused intentional consciousness? And one of the things, if folks listen to our Sartre episode on the Self is that Sartre thought we always have a non positional consciousness of ourselves whenever we're conscious of anything. So that you're kind of aware in the back of your mind that it's you being conscious of that thing. Not, you know, if you're looking at a book, the book is filling your consciousness, but you're not completely absorbed in the book.

So just the idea he's using that yes, there's always stuff in the background. And I think he generalizes from that and just talks about. I think the way Husserl puts it is there's the horizon to any set of experiences, any particular conscious experience we have. So that's even the fact that there's a notion of ourselves that's pre reflective. Well, what about our pre reflective relationship to the world? That seems like a good option for another type of way of relating to things. And you mentioned bad conscience. That's actually the thing. Even if we think that the whole point of philosophy is to enter into explicit relations of knowledge to things, there's always this feeling that he thinks we have underlying that there's things that escape things that as soon as you look at them, they run away.

Because the very nature of the phenomena is it's the thing that you're not directly looking at.

14:01 Seth: Yeah, well, that pre reflective consciousness that you mentioned, Mark, the way that I thought about this when I was reading it, Wes has already mentioned Hegel. So I was thinking about how when we did our Hegel episode on Phenomenology of Spirit, we were not sure whether the description of the emergence of self consciousness via the dialectic was intended to be somehow descriptive of a kind of development. Like was it developmental? Is this how we actually go from some sort of pure pre reflective consciousness into self consciousness? Or is this some sort of an abstract description of, of a movement that doesn't actually take place in our development.

But thinking about it from the developmental aspect really helped me because it's easier for me to get at what he's talking about when he talks about a Pre reflective passive consciousness which just receives, I guess what you could call the stimulus of the world. Right? Or of being. It can't truly be said to be experiencing because the way we think of experience, we don't have any other way to describe it, but you know, experience. Post Kant, it's an active activity. So he's describing something where there's a pre reflective consciousness which is purely passive in receiving, for lack of a better word, I'll say stimulus.

But just think of it as the thing that is you or the thing that would be there prior to the movement of self reflection, prior to the development of an awareness of self where that consciousness becomes reflective on itself and becomes self conscious. And that's what he's driving at. And even he admits when he's writing, he says the words sort of fail us here, but he does a pretty good job of circumscribing and saying that this is what he intends.

15:49 Mark: See, I guess I didn't read it like that because he's specifically talking about pre reflective self consciousness. This is right at the beginning of three. Does the knowledge of pre reflective self consciousness really know is a quote that I have.

16:01 Wes: Yeah, that's how the section begins. But I just think the section as a whole, he's usually using just the

16:06 Mark: word consciousness and not talking about specifically consciousness of self.

16:11 Wes: Well, that's a good question.

16:12 Seth: What's your question there, Mark? Rephrase your question for me.

16:14 Mark: All right, So I didn't think we were giving a developmental thing like Hegel does at all. I thought we were talking about phenomenology as actually examining our experience now, so. Actually examining our experience now? Yes, we can talk about times where we're not thinking about the self, but we can't talk about things in some developmental sense before we're thinking about the self. Like that's not really on the table as far as things that we can talk about phenomenologically. So I thought he was focusing on. Look at your experience right now.

You know, every time you focus on experience, it's always focusing on the object. And so even if you're only thinking of the object, you're not thinking of yourself at all. Explicitly thinking of yourself at all. That's still not what an animal does. Perhaps. Who knows what an animal's sense of self is, but you can't imagine it as a more primitive type. But he thought that experience, at least I read him, is picking out the same thing Sartre is picking out, which is not even something I necessarily fully agree with. But that there's always a non positional consciousness of self whenever you have an explicit consciousness of something else.

And so just the fact that there is something on the edge, there's something that you didn't realize when you were just considering it. You thought you were only thinking about looking at the book, but really if you look at it closely, you realize that a second ago you were also having an implicit experience of yourself as an ego. And I'm not sure how to even judge whether that's true, but certainly you knew that it was you thinking about it. You know, the fact that I ask you now, was it you thinking of the book? Well, yeah. Okay. Does it fall from that that while you were experiencing the book, you were in fact having a non positional consciousness of self?

If that's a correct reading of him, which is, you know, certainly what Sartre said explicitly, then let's just take him at his word. And it's just really supposed to give a hint of again a non aggressive, non explicit way of taking things on a non active. And I'm not sure maybe you can find a quote, but I'm not sure that this active nature of it does that come because we have a self and because you know explicitly, when I gain knowledge of this book, I'm taking it in explicitly to my ego. And if I was the type of animal that was simple enough, or a baby that was simple enough and hadn't had the development of ego, that somehow it would be less active, more passive, more innocent in some way.

And it's that kind of innocence that he wants to put back on the table as something we should consider.

18:42 Seth: Okay, so I think you are right. I don't think we're disagreeing. I think what I was trying to do was say this is how I was able to make sense of this. When I read this, I was thinking in terms of Hegel because it helped me understand a non positional passive, if you will, consciousness versus what we got out of that reading when we did Sartre. So I think he has to believe that there's some access to this via some sort of phenomenological analysis in order for there to be any way you can make use of it to talk about ethics as first philosophy and talk about it. It's not strictly developmental and that now somehow we've evolved beyond that. I was just saying in order to try to give a sense of like what might he be talking about? Well, we can talk about the pre reflective self that is the object for self consciousness.

19:35 Mark: Although it's not an object. Right. Isn't that the point is that it's kind of some other relation that's not objectivizing?

19:41 Seth: Well, when you consider yourself as an object, when you reflect upon your own self, yes, it's not an object. The same way that like a book is an object. But whatever that is, whatever that relation is and whatever that pre reflective self is, that's what he's trying to bring out. I think it's not as easy to get at this idea of the pre reflective consciousness.

20:04 Mark: So I think what we're trying to get at is getting an idea of a relationship to something that is somehow within consciousness, but yet is not an object of consciousness, which I think is pretty easy. It's anything you're not focusing on as an object at the time, but yet is sort of at the fringe.

20:19 Wes: So yeah, I mean we're totally interpreting him in terms of Sartre at this point. I don't know. I think part of the problem here is we were going to do a summary, but we lapsed into a conversation in the middle of the whole reading.

20:33 Seth: Okay, I thought I was just trying to get clear on this idea.

20:36 Wes: Your fault's fault, Levinas's fault. But I mean, you know, he does in section 3 refer to this consciousness as not so much a knowledge of oneself, but as something that effaces presence or makes it discrete.

20:53 Mark: Discrete being discrete. Eet like discrete as in hidden, not discrete as in ete picked out. That would be the opposite.

21:02 Wes: Foreshadowing his modesty stuff later on.

21:04 Mark: Well, so let's call the end of the summary that once he has this idea that there's some way to deal with things that's not objectivizing it, then people end up being that thing that the relationship toward other people ideally should not be objectivizing them and thinking that the fact that I'm looking at you, that I'm kind of eating you and you're now in my mind like. No. A properly ethical approach to people is recognizing their otherness as something in fact that I could never really get a hold of. So just to point out why this is important historically is because using other with a capital O becomes a nearly ubiquitous thing in a certain strand of continental philosophy after this. If you're talking about cultural imperialism and

21:49 Wes: things like that, it is now something that every 17 year old political activist can competently do.

21:56 Seth: Yeah, you know what I want? I want to read just a couple of sentences because I feel like the listeners might think that we are just not recognizing how much work we've Put into trying to untangle this. So this is from page 79. But this reduced consciousness, which in reflecting upon itself, rediscovers and masters its own acts of perception and science as objects in the world, thereby affirming itself as self consciousness and absolute being, also remains a non intentional consciousness of itself, as though it were a surplus somehow devoid of any willful aim. A non intentional consciousness operating, if one may put it like this, unknowingly as knowledge, as a non objectivizing knowledge.

22:44 Mark: And we just need to remind folks, we brought up intentionality many times. Again, that means directedness. When you say non intentional consciousness, it doesn't mean a consciousness consciousness that doesn't mean to do anything in particular. It means a consciousness that is not focused on some content.

22:59 Seth: Correct.

23:00 Wes: Okay, well, it's not taking something as an object. It's not reaching out.

23:04 Mark: Yep.

23:05 Seth: It's not consciousness of there you go. Or consciousness that. It's aimless in that respect.

23:12 Wes: So did we want to start from the beginning or what are we gonna.

23:17 Mark: Well, I think Seth has already laid out what the first couple pages have to say. I mean, we can read, well, sentences of it.

23:23 Seth: There's two pieces to this. One is establishing the difference between consciousness that we prioritize in the history of philosophy, which is this intentional consciousness that acts and whose primary mode of working is knowledge, and the subject. And Wes, I was looking to, kind of hoping you could help clarify some of this, but subject, self ego, like when we use these terms, it's complicated, it's hard for me. But the knowing subject is the philosophical subject par excellence. It's the one that we always think of when we think about. And what he's saying is that subject, that subject which is at once intentional but also able to be self conscious, has historically been considered first where we build up our ontology.

And there's a lot that goes along with taking that as your primary philosophical function. If knowledge is the prioritized mode of interacting with the world, then there's a lot of stuff that comes along with it. Part of which is solitude, as he describes it in one of the other essays, which is to say the act of knowledge is the act of trying to make everything that is different than you identical to you.

24:40 Wes: It's sort of an independence making act. So it sort of constitutes you as a subject and it frees you up from the world. So there's this kind of theme throughout this first section of. Well, he starts with this idea of disinterested philosophical contemplation and so on. And then when he uses this phrase good conscience on page 77. Thought is an activity where something is appropriated by a knowledge that is independent of course, of any finality exterior to it. An activity which is disinterested and self sufficient and whose self sufficiency, sovereignty, good conscience and happy solitude are asserted by Aristotle.

So the importance of talking about this kind of knowledge is talking about this sort of good conscience that gives us a certain amount of autonomy and it's sort of the ideal. Right. So for Aristotle, the best thing you can do with your life is basically to be in a state of contemplation, philosophical contemplation. That is the most ethical activity there is.

25:42 Mark: And he doesn't say right here, but of course you could be a contemplating monster. That's not his way to get to ethics. It's like a long time before he gets to ethics here. But he could have just said that.

25:54 Wes: Well, not if you're truly contemplating a monster. That's about, for Aristotle, that's about character or what we would say, dispositions to certain kinds of behavior. And if you're disposed to contemplation, you have less time, let's say, to be evil. I don't know.

26:10 Mark: But is it the idea though part of it, that if you say first philosophy, which Aristotle doesn't talk about. Well, I don't know what he says first philosophy is. Maybe logic is first philosophy.

26:18 Wes: No, first philosophy is metaphysics, which for Aristotle is the same thing as theology. You end up talking about the unmoved mover or God. You establish the being of things, then you derive ethics from that.

26:31 Mark: And in any case, even back to Socrates, you get wisdom, you get ethical behavior out of knowledge.

26:40 Wes: Exactly.

26:40 Mark: If you just happen to have a good disposition such that you're nice to people, that's not going to be a very trustworthy way to stay wise. Like maybe you can get influenced by some wicked person that will then pervert all of your kind intentions and convert you to, you know. But if you actually have a hold of philosophy according to Socrates and Plato, then that's going to actually found ethics. So that's what you need is to start with whatever the first philosophy is and you get to ethics. But according to Levinas, we're going to end up getting ethics somehow first just by our experience of other people.

27:16 Wes: Yeah, so you get this equation, you know, as Levinas puts it with the ancients, between wisdom and freedom. Right. With both Plato and Aristotle, to be virtuous requires knowing virtue in the sense of a kind of wisdom, where, you know, I'M substituting being virtuous for being free. But the two are obviously related.

27:34 Mark: Seth, you want to guess back on track? We're around 78, 79, somewhere in there.

27:39 Wes: So I was on 77 still. Yeah, all right.

27:42 Seth: So I was trying to abstract from a lot of the details, but I don't know how we're going to ultimately do that. So if his goal is to try to come up with another way of interacting with the world, another mode of thought, as he calls it, then the strategy is to identify a different self that's doing the interacting. So that subject, that is the subject that we know, the transcendental ego, or the knowing subject which takes objects, he needs to have a different subject, since that subject cannot encounter the world any other way than through knowledge.

And so, just as Mark just pointed out and Wes elaborated once, that's your primary way of interacting the world. You have to find a way to derive or get ethics out of that relationship of knowledge. And Levinas move is to say we are not going to recognize the priority of knowledge. We are going to posit a different mode of thought which will give us the opportunity for ethics. But to do that, I have to have a different type of subject because the knowing subject is caught up in the whole structure of knowledge, which is that whole mode of thought.

There's no way for that subject to somehow say, I, as a knowing subject, am I going to have a non intentional relationship with the world? And that that's going to be a very different way of interacting. And so that's where he turns to this pre reflective consciousness.

29:15 Wes: So just looking at 77, 78, he tells the story. I think it's relevant to what you were saying, Seth. So he says, you know, modernity will subsequently be distinguished by the attempt to develop from the identification and appropriation of being by knowledge, toward the identification of being and knowledge. That's the German idealists, right? Ultimately you identify objects of knowledge with the knowing, right? We construct these objects. They are in some sense part of our mind. There's this kind of collapse between the idea and the object, or objects become ideas, something like that.

I thought that was an important step here. So the passage from the cogito to the sum leads to the point where the free activity of knowledge, an activity alien to an external goal, will also find itself on the side of what is known. So that's the end of section one, getting us to that kind of Hegelian point with knowledge. So we start out grasping these other alien objects and we get to the point where we're. The object is knowledge. In a way.

30:18 Mark: I like what you've said so far, Wes, about that section. However, if I wasn't familiar with this stuff, I wouldn't find it convincing at all, because it sounds like idealism. Well, that's Berkeley. That's one little step. That is all before what he's calling modernity pre Kant. And in fact, when you get to Hegel and his followers, Husserl, it's funny that one of the things he's directly reacting to is Husserl even calls his project an egology. You know, that we're actually studying the structures of the ego. But at the same time, the whole point of bringing up intentionality by saying there is actually an object.

The way that Husserl and the way that Hegel talk about connection to things is very much like Searle on just the interview we had with him is no, the mind is actually put in touch with things that are external. It's just that. What does external mean? Well, it means like the life world or something like that.

31:14 Wes: So Husserl is. And phenomenology is working within the tradition of German idealism. And that's the way I thought Levinas treated him. So section two, the equivalence of thought and knowledge in relation to being, is here formulated by Husserl in the most direct manner. That whole closeout of section one, where we get idealism, is just a setup for talking about phenomenology.

31:35 Mark: All right, what about section two here? Wisdom as opposed to knowledge was one of the first point I had in number two.

31:42 Seth: Tell me what you were thinking there.

31:43 Wes: So that's the first sentence in this essay. We wish to ask whether thought understood as knowledge, since the ontology of the first philosophy has exhausted the possible modes of meaning for thought and whether beyond knowledge and its hold on being, a more urgent form does not emerge, that of wisdom.

32:00 Seth: Keep reading. We propose to begin with the notion of intentionality as it figures in Husserlian phenomenology, which is one of the culminating points in Western philosophy. Wes has already read the next sentence. Now, within consciousness, which is consciousness of something, knowledge is by the same token a relation to an other of consciousness, and almost the aim or the will of that other, which is an object that's just straight up intentionality. Right. Okay. And then this is where he brings up Merleau Ponty.

32:32 Mark: Well, here's the fourth line here. Before Merleau Ponty. This is where it gets weird. He's still supposed to be talking about Husserl. At the same time Knowledge within the intuition of truth is described as a filling out that gratifies a longing for the being as object. Given and received in the original present in a representation is a whole on being which equals a constitution of that being. So a longing this is typical of

32:57 Wes: it gratifies a longing.

32:59 Mark: I mean, we haven't talked about Levinas poetic tinge here, but this is the first time that I feel like it comes up that I had never thought about talking about intentionality as it gratifies the longing for the being as object.

33:13 Wes: Well, I think the idea is that we have a desire to objectify, to make certain, to have a kind of knowledge over the world, which is a power over the world. So even, you know, like think of pragmatism where you're trying to talk about knowing or truth in terms of gratification. Or just the Aristotelian dictum, men by nature desire to know.

33:34 Mark: Okay, yes. This Aristotelian disinterested contemplation is the goal. Seems exactly the kind of thing that the pragmatists were rebelling against. So you can't both say that the goal is disinterested contemplation. But also disinterested contemplation underlyingly is an exertion of will to power and wanting to master all that we think about and perceive. Yeah.

33:55 Wes: I don't think he's endorsing Aristotle though. He's kind of giving a little history philosophy here.

34:00 Mark: Right. So it sets up. If he's going to rebel against this, you have to kind of look at this. Do you like this as the picture of the history? I don't want to get hung up on it, but.

34:09 Wes: Well, it doesn't seem right to you that a longing for the being as object. So he's saying it gratifies the need for a certain kind of knowing. And within the larger theme of his philosophy, this is the kind of objectifying knowing. Right. That'll turn out, which is kind of the question of this second section. There will be different kinds of knowing. Now their relationship to gratification, I don't know. But clearly the kind of knowing that gives us objects. I think there is something gratifying. We go out into the world and knowledge serves the purpose of mastery of things. Getting us what we want, getting us what we need, that sort of thing.

34:45 Seth: Yeah, and it's not just that mastery. It's also the case that. Remember we've talked about consciousness as being this unceasing movement, that it's constant activity, it's constant motion. The brain doesn't shut off, right. It's always having to be thinking. And in the structure where it's thinking of, it's a constant, never ending attempt to reach out and grasp things, you know, as knowledge. That that's the longing. It's just this constant need. We've talked about it when we were talking about Buddhism. This idea of desire, this desire to know, this unceasing mental movement of thought, to constantly be reaching out. That's how I read that.

35:26 Wes: And here's the way Levinas puts the mastery part of this right before the Merleau Ponty set that you wanted to read. As a result, it leads, or ought to lead to full self consciousness, affirming itself as absolute being Hegel, and confirming itself as an eye that through all possible differences is identified as a master of its own nature as well as of the universe and able to illuminate the darkest recesses of resistance to its powers. So you have the sort of consciousnesses through in Hegel, you know, this march to world domination at a spiritual level.

36:01 Mark: Well, just to add another quote, self

36:03 Wes: domination, which is pure self knowledge.

36:05 Mark: Just to add another quote, actually this is from a little earlier in the end of Section 1. Since Hegel, any gold considered alien to the disinterested acquisition of knowledge has been subordinated to the freedom of knowledge as a science. And within this freedom, being itself is from that point understood as the active affirming of that same being, as the strength and strain of being. Modern man persists in his being as a sovereign who is merely concerned to maintain the powers of his sovereignty. So it's not even just wanting to know, it is using philosophy underlyingly as a tool really. It's to kind of feel better about ourselves. It's to feel comfortable that we are masters, that there is no fundamental mystery, that there's nothing that should intellectually unsettle us.

36:48 Wes: Yeah, and so this gives us this pivot to non intentional consciousness. So he says, you know, even in this affirmation of self consciousness as absolute being, you get this little remainder of non intentional self consciousness. And that is where we begin to get non objectivizing knowledge, kind of non objectivizing knowledge that accompanies even these most objectifying of activities. He says it accompanies all the intentional processes of consciousness and of the ego.

37:18 Mark: Well, and he actually brings together the two senses of intentional that I was trying to be so careful to distinguish consciousness of consciousness indirect, implicit and aimless, without any initiative that might refer back to an ego passive like time passing and aging Me without my intervening. A non intentional consciousness to be distinguished from philosophical reflection. So it's not only the fact that while we're thinking of the book, you're not explicitly thinking of yourself, so you're not objectifying yourself. But also that part of it is non intentional in the sense of aimless, in the sense of passive, not for

37:52 Wes: the sake of mastery.

37:53 Mark: Yeah, yeah. It's not only not objectifying, but it's not done with a purpose in mind. Right, so he likes to, you know, he's being poetic here.

38:00 Wes: Well, it's a double entendre because, you know, in the phenomenological sense, to be non intentional means not to have an object. In the other sense here, to be non intentional means to not be doing this for the sake of mastery of an object.

38:13 Mark: Yep, exactly.

38:15 Seth: So the problem posed then is, you know, he says in philosophy, you're tempted to regard that aimless non intentional consciousness as something that needs to be clarified, that needs to be brought into this totalizing, absolute mastery that you're trying to get to. But he says, one may ask, however, whether beneath the gaze of reflected consciousness, taken as self consciousness, the non intentional experienced as the counterpoint to the intentional, does not conserve and free its true meaning. The critique of introspection as traditionally practiced has always been suspicious of a modification that a supposedly spontaneous consciousness might undergo beneath the scrutinizing, thematizing, objectivizing and indiscreet gaze of reflection, and has seen this as a violation or distortion of some sort of secret.

The question is, what exactly happens then in this non reflective consciousness, considered merely to be pre reflective and the implicit partner of an intentional consciousness?

39:15 Mark: Yeah, he brings in at the end of this, the notion of potentiality and horizon. Might there not be grounds for distinguishing between the envelopment of the particular and the conceptual, the implicit? Which sounds like as soon as you take something as knowledge, you're not taking it as a particular anymore, you're reducing it to a concept. The implicit understanding of the presupposition in a notion. The potentiality of what is considered possible within the horizon on the one hand. And on the other hand, the intimacy of the non intentional within what is known as pre reflective consciousness, and which is duration itself. So that should ring bells about Bergson there.

39:52 Wes: So we should keep in mind when we're talking about these potentialities and horizons, we're thinking of the sense in which the object transcends. So when we say the table is an object, we mean all these different potentials for interaction. You can walk around the table, you can see it from different perspectives. There's a non immediacy, there's a transcending aspect to what we call an object. It's not simply the raw data of a particular experience. So that's the intentional object. By contrast, there's what he calls the intimacy of the non intentional within what is known as pre reflective consciousness, which is duration itself. I mean, I think this is going to have a lot to do with temporality per se, right? Just time, this intimate thing that we have that's non intentional. It's our kind of immediate relationship with temporality.

40:41 Mark: But the way you just put that about the transcendence of everyday objects, right. I encounter a book, it presents itself as having a horizon. This is all just refreshing our Husserl episode here. And he says that it is transcendent. So why insist, as Levinas does, that on Husserl's view, on the views following Husserl, that the book is part of my ego? Because he's even defining the intentional object as something that transcends it is outside it is other than the ego. It's right there, the word transcend, because

41:14 Wes: he's working in the Kantian kind of tradition where we're still doing the constructing. Kant called this the synthesis of the imagination. We have to do the work of putting together all these. The manifold, let's say, all these momentary experiences. And not just that, you know, the phenomenologists sort of emphasize the future stuff, the sense in which our knowledge of an object is anticipatory. It's about all the possibilities for our different interactions with the object. But it's still this kind of spontaneous constructing activity that's done by the mind. It's not just the Sirlian here's the object. I'm in direct contact with it. It's an object that my mind has to work very hard to create.

41:52 Mark: Well, I think that maybe the advance from Kant to Husserl there is again the epoch. Husserl's big thing is I don't know whether the objects are really there or not. So he can't actually tell the story that says my mind puts these things together. But he can and does still use the word transcendental. Right. Transcendental was the word Kant used to say what the mind is doing behind the scenes in order to create objects. The transcendental is something that we don't.

42:16 Wes: The conditions for the possibility of experience. That's what transcendental refers to.

42:20 Mark: Exactly. Right. We can derive from experience what these conditions must be, which is really what the structure of the ego is, what the structure of our relation to the world is. You know, in broad strokes, we don't know specifically what is out there. But it still sounds, when you talk about Kant, like it's causal language. The mind is working. Like you said, it takes a lot of work to put together all this stuff. Whereas I think Husserl cannot and does not want to say that, but he can say these are the transcendental structures of experience.

So even though he can't say, it's the mind that projects all these possibilities onto the book of, you know, what might happen when you turn the book over and all this stuff. But somehow in the perception of the book, yes, it is transcendent of this particular experience. But in some ways that field of possibilities is all given right there in my perception of the book. So it's a structure of experience. It is in that sense within experience. It is within the realm of experience. You might say nothing truly surprising can happen. Even though you might open the book and there's actually somebody has carved out a place for, you know, a gun to be put inside it and most of the pages are missing.

It was not, it was not actually even a book. But even that would not. That's sort of within the possibility that is given.

43:30 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point.

43:32 Mark: Well, and you were just reflecting that the other thing that the phenomenologists are adding is temporal, that once you start thinking about the possibilities, it's not just in general what is going to happen. If I look at the other side of the book or whatever, it's just in general about the future. And that somehow the future is contained in the present, right, as its horizon of possibilities. And this is something that Levinas is specifically going to say. You would never get that. You would never get a notion of the future. Just reflecting on your own experience as an isolated individual looking at the possibilities of what might happen, that this is going to be the key. Talking about time is going to be the key to insisting yes, on the priority of the other.

44:12 Wes: We do not get time until we get our face to face time with the other. Yes, the other consciousness, which is history.

44:19 Mark: And that is again running ahead. But let's. Now we're out. Now we're actually on section three.

44:24 Wes: Seth.

44:25 Seth: Okay, this one, I think bears a little bit of initial reading. Paige Heide, does the knowledge of pre reflective self consciousness really know as a confused implicit consciousness preceding all intentions or as duration freed of all intentions? It is less an act than a pure passivity. This is not only due to its being without having chosen to be, or its fall into a confused world of possibilities already realized even before any choice might be made, as in Heidegger's Geworfenheit, so commonly translated as thrown ness. It's the being thrown into your situation in the world.

45:08 Mark: And this we've just hit recently when we were talking about de Beauvoir channeling Sartre. That's, you know, why you could be somehow responsible for your facticity, responsible for your life as it is now, because the thrown ness involves some fundamental choice. Right? Every time you move, you do anything, you're making a choice.

45:24 Wes: We can make what she calls the assumption which Levinas is actually going to use that word as well. Assume in some of what we read. I think we can retroactively take responsibility even for the determining forces that have made us who we are.

45:39 Mark: Well, and it's going to be even weirder with Levinas because as soon as we have our face to face, we assume responsibility for that other person.

45:46 Seth: Yeah, so there's this sentence, it's, I think in one of the other essays. Let me reread this one sentence. This is not only due to its being without having chosen to be, or its fall into a confused world of possibilities already realized even before any choice might be made, as in Heidegger's Geworfenheit. So the Heideggerian notion of thrown ness is you are thrown into a world of possibilities. And so when you're born, you don't get to choose who your parents are, when in history you're born, what your gender is, what your socioeconomic status, any of this stuff, you're thrown into the world.

And that thrown ness in essence dictates what your horizon of possibility is. So given where you are and when you are and all these things, that sets the parameter for your possibilities, which is the language that Heidegger speaks in, it's all about possibility. So you are projecting into the future, into your possibilities which are in large part determined by your thrown ness. Levinas makes a point here. He says this is not just about the confused possibilities that are realized when you're thrown. It's that you don't even get to choose that you get thrown being without having chosen to be.

47:01 Wes: But also, you know, in this remaining part of the paragraph, it's this idea that we're not just thrown into the world, we are thrown into temporality per se. We are thrown into duration. So this duration remains free from the sway of the will absolutely outside of all activity of the ego. And exactly like the aging process, which is probably the perfect model of passive synthesis, a lapse of time, no act of remembrance, reconstructing the past could possibly reverse. So there's something, something about temporality itself that makes us passive.

Right. So being thrown into the world is a way of talking about our passivity. But you can go deeper is what Levinas is saying here. You can just talk about the passivity in the face of mere temporality. And I hope I'm doing justice to duration when I say temporality. But he also pivots the word temporality as well. Does not the temporality of implicit time, like the implication of the implicit here, signify otherwise than as knowledge taken on the run? Anyway, duration is pure duration. Being that dare not speak its name. I like that.

48:00 Mark: Right. Being that dare not be the agency of the instant without the insistence of the ego, which is already elapsed in time, which is over before it's begun. I mean, it seems like here he is just this whole talk of duration is getting at his Bergson influence, I believe, where what is basic, even metaphysically and certainly basic phenomenologically. Bergson didn't really have the notion of phenomenology at his fingertips. He was slightly before that was developed. And it was something brought up in opposition to the idea of an instant, like a mathematical point that. No, the basic thing is a flow over time and that's what we are thrown into and it doesn't require. So Levinas addition to here is to say if you're going to really take that as basic as first philosophy, the equivalent of the Cartesian starting point, you're saying that in fact the mind is fundamentally passive.

48:54 Wes: Good way to put it.

48:55 Seth: I wonder here if there's not some callback to Bergson on memory.

48:59 Wes: Well, duration definitely.

49:00 Seth: Yeah, yeah. There's one of Levinas points which we haven't really made too much of and honestly I can't remember which essay it comes up in, but he talks about how the mode of knowledge is that you represent the object, right. You re present it. And he goes off and he spins on this idea of presence and how knowledge and consciousness, its modality in time is the present. It's not just that this passive pre reflective consciousness is duration itself. It essentially is what makes possible the notion of time, because it makes possible the notion of time or us having any notion of time.

Because consciousness in the modality of knowledge is strictly in the present. You can't represent the future. You can project into the future, into Possibility, but you can't actually present that to yourself in the same way that you can present an object, right, Your immediate experience. And so this is significant because he's trying to say our whole notion of time, our whole ability to experience things in time, the sense in which we can think about having any kind of a future, comes through this pre reflective consciousness. We might think the way we treat it as an object, or we try to thematize it somehow in the way that we conceptualize it.

We create some more structured notion of time out of that. But if we were just looking at thought as knowledge and self consciousness like that, that you would be frozen in time in a certain sense, you'd be stuck in the present.

50:29 Wes: One other way to look at it is that. So we're talking about this non intentional consciousness, which is, you know, what he calls bad. We translate bad conscience or bad consciousness. I think bad consciousness, right? Or unhappy. Sorry, unhappy.

50:41 Mark: I thought it was conscience. It's the same phrase that Nietzsche uses that is basically the equivalent of guilt.

50:46 Wes: So the good conscience we were talking about before is happy in the sense that it involves mastery and a kind of optimism in relation to the world.

50:55 Mark: So kind of self satisfaction, I think.

50:57 Wes: So intentional consciousness you can see as a kind of rebellion against time. You know, Kant talks about object related consciousness because, you know, a lot of what Kant is talking about is synthesis. He's talking about how do we take all these little momentary nows, all these moments, and bind them together into something that really is an experience. Because these little unbound temporary moments don't in themselves amount to anything and couldn't really rise to the level of an experience. So intentional consciousness rebels against time and does all sort of time transcending things. But if there is this non intentional consciousness, it is precisely the kind of consciousness that has no recourse against time. It doesn't engage in all that happy object creating time transcending stuff. It's helpless in the face of time.

51:45 Mark: Well, and you're bringing in this emotional language again, and it's all in this paragraph here. The implication of the non intentional is a form of bad conscience. It has no intentions or aims and cannot avail itself of the protective mask of a character contemplating in the mirror of the world, a reassured and self positing portrait. It has no name, no situation, no status. It has a presence afraid of presence, afraid of the insistence of the identical ego stripped of all qualities in its non intentionality not yet at the stage of willing and prior to any fault, in its non intentional identification, identity recoils before its affirmation.

So this is again talking about what is the status of what was eventually called the transcendental ego. Is it really something that's originary or is it something that is created? We have these experiences and then through, you know, at least on Kant's interpretation, we connect together the experiences and we kind of conclude, although it's not obviously a conscious form of reasoning, oh, there must be I that is unifying all these things. But he's saying really at the heart of our experience, there's part of us that doesn't feel like that. I guess before you explicitly make that move, you still have some notion of continuity in your perceptions.

Of course you do. You know, even animals that probably never think I at all, at least some kinds of animals certainly don't get confused and think that the perceptions they have at one moment and the perception that they have at another moment might have been a different animal. I would call that a plenty self satisfied way of being. But he's saying that's a presence afraid of presence afraid of the insistence of the identical ego stripped of all qualities. It recoils before its affirmation. So that's interesting to put that emotional spin on it.

It seems a little groundless to me.

53:25 Seth: Huh.

53:26 Mark: It dreads the insistence in the return to self that is a necessary part of identification.

53:31 Wes: Yeah, well, you have to be also a self conscious being in order for this to be the case. Right? If you are just a low level. If I'm just a shrimp, yeah, I'm not worried about it. I can just be pre reflective all I want. And there's no cost.

53:46 Seth: Well, no, it's interesting because there's a couple sentences there that you didn't read Mark, which I think beautifully show how he crosses over into the more biblical stuff. So right after your sentence about the dread of insistence. This is either mobes conscious or timidity. It is not guilty but accused and responsible for its very presence. It has not yet been invested with any attributes or justified in any way. This creates the reserve of the stranger or sojourner on earth, as it says in the Psalms, the countryless or the homeless person who dare not enter in.

So remember that when we go back to his notion of how self consciousness is an act of self justification, that the coming to self consciousness and attempting to understand the world is a movement towards the absolute right, absolute self, absolute knowledge. But it also is the way in which you justify your existence. Because we go back to the cogito, right, you say I am a thing that Thinks I am and then fill in the blank is a movement towards justification. As soon as you can say I, then you begin to establish your reason for being and your justification for existence.

He's saying that before that move, or underneath that move, I guess we should say before, if you're talking developmental like I am, or prior to that move, is this duration, this thing that is you, the you that persists. And this you that persists has no justification for its existence at this point without that self consciousness.

55:34 Mark: And does it need justification? Because it seems like in one place it says it is accused, so it's sort of. It should have justification, but it has not yet been invested it with attributes that are justified in any ways. But then a couple sentences later he says one comes not into the world but into question.

55:51 Seth: Yes.

55:51 Mark: Yeah, so it's like not until you say the I that then a justification is even demanded.

55:57 Seth: I think the answer for why it needs justification comes up in the time in the other essay. Do we want to bring that in per your.

56:06 Mark: Yes. Well, okay, so the way that we people can tell the space at which we're going through this ethics as first philosophy thing, there's no way we're getting through three essays here. But we said we just bring in points from the other two essays as relevant here. So. Yes, please.

56:21 Seth: The relevant point is that my very existence could very well mean the annihilation of another. My very fact of being, my taking up space, my needing to consume resources or to demand things to. To continue to exist could very well mean that I am oppressing or crowding out or annihilating or hurting an other. So to that extent, my very existence prior to any of my possibilities is that I have this unknown horizon where I may very well be impinging upon somebody else's freedom, so to speak. But really more importantly, I may very well not just be impinging upon their freedom, but possibly impacting their existence, possibly annihilating them or removing them from existence. And so without any kind of recognition of whether that's true or not, I immediately am thrown into the world, so to speak in question.

57:26 Mark: Well, it's literally biologically true. The fact that that sperm made it means all the other possible people.

57:32 Seth: That's a really good point.

57:33 Mark: Involved in the other sperm, you crowded them out.

57:36 Wes: You are a winner from the very beginning. He says this justification is like an act of self assertion. Perhaps the interiority of the mental was originally an insufficient courage to assert oneself in one's being or in one in body or flesh, but is at A psychological level. Right, With Hegel and master and slave. If you depend for your self consciousness on the. On the recognition of another, then there's a tendency towards domination, at least in fantasy, of their state of mind. And this is. We sort of saw some of this in Nussbaum or in Strawson.

We make these demands on the minds of others to some extent. We want to control their thoughts and feelings in order to get our bit of recognition out of them. Our self consciousness is already an ethical question because it already brings up this kind of whether or not we can do that without in a way oppressing other consciousnesses to get what we need, recognition wise out of them.

58:33 Mark: So have we moved to section four here or are we still finishing off three?

58:38 Wes: I think we want to finish off three. We get this image of pre reflective, non intentional consciousness as this passivity that's dominated by the other side by intentional consciousness, which is again reminiscent of the Hegelian master slave dynamic. And then we get the kind of what follows from that. This bad conscience is not the finitude of existence signaled by anguish. My death, which is always going to be premature, does perhaps put a check on being, which qua being perseveres in being, but in anguish. This scandal fails to shake the good conscience of being or the morality founded upon the inalienable right of the conatus, which is always the right and the good conscience of freedom.

59:19 Mark: Say what the conatus is.

59:21 Wes: That's the Spinozan way of putting it.

59:23 Mark: It's the self motivation, self willing. It's sort of the energy, the propulsion.

59:28 Wes: You sort of get this objectifying willing part which dominates this passive pre reflective part.

59:36 Mark: However, it is in the passivity of the non intentional in the way that it is spontaneous and precedes the formulation of any metaphysical ideas on the subject that the very justice of the position within being is questioned. A position which asserts itself with intentional thought, knowledge and a grasp of the here and now. In other words, the position is when we're exerting ourselves as conscious beings with egos and really making any claim at all, even if it's just this book is in front of me. Well, there's the me that's there and it's me being in front of the book, I'm sort of dominating the landscape.

I'm the subject of the sentence. And he says even. Is my position as the perceiver of the book justified? Why is that even a question? Well, it says it's actually part of the experience. Still, there's always a non intentional. Really, it's the perception it's of the horizon, which is not a perception at all. That's a misleading way of putting it. It's the stuff that's not part of the. How do you put this? That's not part of the intentional content that if you say it's the horizon that's part of the perception, that still sounds like you're asserting yourself aggressively.

1:00:44 Wes: I'm not sure what you're asking exactly.

1:00:47 Mark: The passivity of the non intentional, the way that is spontaneous and precedes the formulation of any metaphysical ideas when we're actually looking at our experiences. Is it that some of our experiences involve this passivity and some of them are active assertions of self? Or is it that even in an active assertion of self there's an element of passivity that's sort of there as a background feature, so it's always there to refer to? That's what I'm trying to figure out. Does it matter?

1:01:13 Wes: I don't know.

1:01:14 Seth: No, I think it does matter. Let me edit that sentence you were reading. It is in the passivity of the non intentional that the very justice of the position within being is questioned. A position which asserts itself with intentional thought, knowledge and a grasp of the here and now. I think what he's trying to get at is passivity is an invitation. It does not assert, it does not strive. It does not exert its right to be. It's the bunny right. It's the bunny in the field. And the invitation is to make a judgment about whether you want to. Whether you think that thing has a right to exist or whether you want to treat it a certain way. It doesn't act to provoke any kind of response. It's simply the fact of its existence, the fact of its duration that invites you to make a judgment about that.

1:02:18 Wes: Well, here's another way of putting it, is that the fact that non intentional consciousness sort of lives alongside intentional consciousness leads us to question the justice of intentional consciousness.

1:02:30 Mark: I was just trying to get at what the alongside means, but it sounds like from what Seth was just saying, that it is a part of the very same experience. Just the fact that there's temporality at all. Temporality is always passive on our part. We're being subjected.

1:02:45 Wes: But why does it call it into question? I think it calls it into question because the illusion of good conscience is that all we are is this positive part. All we are is this objectifying masters of nature, and so on and so forth. But if this persists even in. In our intentional thought, that has to Be an illusion. It can't be entirely right.

1:03:09 Mark: So you might say bad conscience in the way he's using it is a reminder of bad faith in Sartre's sense.

1:03:14 Wes: I thought of the sophist a lot in this because it's a reminder that the things that we think we know and the things that seem to be knowledge, that are almost most compelling as knowledge, are, in a way, most open to question. For Plato, it was knowingness. It was sort of the conceit of knowing things that you don't really know. There's always a sense of that kind of overreach in knowledge, Right. So we think of the Socratic dictum, I know only that I don't know. Do the sorts of things that involve us in mastery of the world. Is that knowledge in the true sense that we mean knowledge? Well, it's certainly not ethical knowledge. I think maybe there's a hint that ethical knowledge can't be modeled on that type of knowledge. We have to look to this passive part.

1:03:58 Mark: Well, I like the way you put that, because then even the idea, like I was talking about before, where if you perceive a book, then you transcendently perceive. You perceive it as transcendent, as possessed of all these possibilities. But in a sense, it seems like it's a finite set of possibilities. And so there's the illusion whenever you have a concrete perception that you are kind of master of the possibilities and master of the future. Right. That nothing fundamentally surprising could happen. And that's an illusion. That's thinking that you know something that you really don't.

1:04:30 Wes: The illusion might be sort of discounting the sense in which we are active participants instead of, you know. And again, I think of De Beauvoir here. We transform things into the serious. So this kind of gets us at the ethical level. We take those things as sort of objects to be known in nature as opposed to be things that we assert with our freedom. But I don't know if that's actually relevant because he's associating freedom with good conscience. In a way, this is a challenge to the typical existentialist reliance on freedom, I think, for its ethical bearings. We go deeper in that, into this

1:05:04 Mark: passive part, in that we feel like when we're asserting the traditional aggressive notions of knowledge, that we feel that we're being free there, but we're actually ignoring the passive element, which is really going to come to be a call to responsibility. So we think we have this freedom, that we're just Nietzsche, Übermenschen. But no, we're actually subject to very strict ethical. Well, maybe not specific ethical laws, but like a definite call that we definitely not laws.

1:05:39 Wes: So yeah, we're for Sartre and de Beauvoir. Our ethical comportment to others in a way is a matter of our own freedom. It comes from us. I think for Levinas, it's going to come from the Other. It's going to be this fundamental demand made by the Other that we are passive before, that we have no choice. In a way. Obviously we have a choice because we can be unethical. But at some more fundamental level we are just subject to it, to that demand.

1:06:07 Seth: There's a section in one of the other essays about freedom where he suggests that if you look for freedom in the Other. I'm trying to think of how he phrased it. Something to the effect of freedom will create a struggle for domination.

1:06:21 Wes: That's in the Eros section of the of Time in the Other, which is a great, great, great section. I think the point there is our confrontation with the Other is not, as in Hegel, it's not a positing of the Other as a freedom because then you get the master slave struggle. They're both free entities in the struggle. It's a positing of the Other as mystery, which he identifies with the feminine and modesty.

1:06:45 Seth: Okay, yeah, I found the part. So if we need to go back to that, I can.

1:06:47 Mark: Okay, so now we're in section four. One has to respond to one's right to be not by referring to some abstract and anonymous law or judicial entity, but because of one's fear for the other. My being in the world or my place in the sun, my being at home. Have these not also been usurpation of spaces belonging to the other man whom I have already oppressed or starved or driven out into a third world? Are they not acts, repulsing, excluding, exiling, stripping, killing? Pascal's. My place in the sun marks the beginning of the image of the usurpation of the whole earth.

A fear for all the violence and murder my existing might generate in spite of its conscious and intentional innocence. So there you go. So why is this not just alarmist? How does this in any way follow from the fact that we have non positional self consciousness? The fact that we are passively subject to time? I think maybe it doesn't follow from those things. I think those are supposed to be just comparisons to oh, we're passive in those respects. We're also passive with regard to the Other that we just. Phenomenologically, he thinks hey, look at your experience.

You will see it's how phenomenology has to work. Right. You look at your experience, honestly, you will see that you have an immense fear for the other as like a fundamental thing.

1:08:05 Wes: Yep. And fear of what our being could do to the other in the kind of nasty, brutish and short Hobbesian version of things, which is where it all starts. So, yeah, I think that's a legitimate fear, but it's a way of getting us to this idea that at a very, very low level, you know, and if we are thinking of this developmentally kind of morality is built at this very low level into the structure of consciousness because I am constituted through other consciousnesses. And that already is an ethical problem.

1:08:40 Mark: I'm just not sure how to confirm or deny this intuition. It seems, in fact, that it's a rather sophisticated thought that my very being could be racing or impinging on the being of someone else. It seems like that's not something, for instance, that little children worry about. It might be that, yes, we are built in such that if somebody gets injured in front of us, we'll go, oh my gosh, we'll have some sort of. Whether it's a sympathetic or. He wants to say it's not sympathetic because in fact the other is remaining other. It's not that we're by be sympathetic.

That sounds like I'm putting myself in their shoes. And he specifically says that's not what this is. But you could say that we primordially react. Other people kind of look at us and expect things. And that is a primary driver of motivation beyond just about anything else. It's even more so than food and other sort of internal things.

1:09:32 Wes: Right. We are instinctual beings. And at some point developmentally, we put the brakes on those instincts. We don't just act on them. Can't just do everything we want. We're a toddler. We might try and punch someone every time we get frustrated, but that gets curtailed. And in a. It's internalized. It's not just because you're not going to get a cookie. So we recognize this demand that's made by the. By the other. You know, I intuitively understand what Levinas is saying. Would someone like Sartre deny this psychological development mental level? Isn't it consistent with his philosophy? I'd have to think more about that. What does this mean ontologically? It's kind of clear what it means psychologically, but what could it mean on this if ontology is the right word, but we are Using it is first philosophy here, according to Levinas.

1:10:19 Mark: He's saying it's a fear, it's a real fear. It reaches back past my so called self consciousness in spite of whatever moves are made towards a good conscience by a pure perseverance in being. It is the fear of occupying someone else's place within the D.A. of my Dasein. In other words, the there of my there being. It is the inability to occupy a

1:10:40 Wes: place, a profound utopia, because utopia is literally no place utopia.

1:10:47 Mark: So what do you think, Seth? Is this a fundamental fear that you have? Or how could you even figure out whether you have such a fear?

1:10:53 Seth: Well, let me say two things. One is, I think the term fear here, we want to interpret it psychologically. But if we're going to take seriously, where he says we don't appeal to abstract anonymous law or some sort of third party. But he's trying to say fear, he means that it comes from within. It's not an appeal to something external that we have to conceptualize or rationalize. I think what he's trying to say is the very fact of this being called to account for your existence generates a response which is not itself a rational response. And so that's what you're supposed to.

And I think in one of the other essays he uses the term imminent talks about imminence versus transcendence. So I think that's one thing to consider. The other thing to consider is think about fair trade. You guys ever had fair trade coffee, right? Sure. And have you ever seen Zizek's criticism of this notion of fair trade? Right.

1:11:54 Wes: I can start to imagine it.

1:11:57 Seth: You can't imagine it. Right. It's conscious consumerism without guilt. So there's the sense in which we recognize that as consumers we are causing the deforestation of the third world. And oh, now coconut oil is hot, Right? So instead of diversity of crops, these farmers in these far flung regions are going to be encouraged others. So we assuage our bad conscience about being consumers by coming up with this story that somehow, oh well, you know, the farmers that I buy my local Austin Rudimaya coffee and the farmers that they buy beans from are being paid a fair wage, they're not being exploited by some giant corporation and they're doing the roasting here, which means they're employing people here and stimulating the local economy.

Right. All of which is to say that it's a maneuver to try to make me feel better about the fact that I still just want my coffee and I want to feel good about the Fact that I know that I'm a consumer, you know, underneath that is this notion that I recognize that resources are limited and that my very existence in the first world in the United States, with all the energy that I use and the water that I consume and all of this is really an imposition on somebody else in the world. I should say my very existence as a consumer is somehow implicated in Bangladeshi textile factories and these kinds of things.

And so I think there is a very real and practical sense of this notion of guilt for my existence. But to me it only. It makes sense much more in this consumer or in the capitalist framework than it does just kind of generally like he brings up. Now, this resonates with me personally, but I think that has more to do with the pathology of my own psychological makeup based on how I was raised, than anything else. I'm probably much more non intentional and passive than I am intentional and rational. But I get Mark's criticism that he has no phenomenological access to this experience, which is what I take you to be saying.

1:14:05 Wes: Well, let's get into the face stuff, because that's sort of the phenomenology, right?

1:14:10 Mark: Yep.

1:14:11 Wes: Not that it's going to make it even more intuitively plausible, but might explain some things.

1:14:17 Mark: The proximity of the other is the face's meaning. And it means from the very start, in a way that goes beyond those plastic forms which forever try to cover the face like a mask of their presence to perception. But always the face shows through these forms prior to any particular expression. And beneath all particular expressions which cover over and protect with an immediately adopted face or countenance, there is the nakedness and destitution of the expression as such. That is to say, extreme exposure, defenceless vulnerability.

1:14:47 Wes: So in other words, all the different masks he's talking about, the particular expressions smiling, any other effective expression on the face, there's something underneath all that which is the expression of old vulnerability, which apparently. So that's sort of like the pre reflective element that's always there in the face. So the layer, you may have the layers of effective expression, but at the very bottom it's vulnerability. And that's what we confront in the other.

1:15:13 Mark: And right here we get a point of contrast with boober, where the I thou experience has to be some kind of mutual gazing into each other's eyes. And it seems like you have to both be in a certain mindset to really appreciate each other as people, as opposed to treating each other like objects having the I it relationship. But here it doesn't matter what kind of ornery son of a bitch the other person is, they don't have to be looking at you with sympathy, with a desire to connect any expression, even a hard ass expression, even a nauseous expression. You can see the vulnerability in that. And that is enough to get you ethically obligated toward them.

1:15:54 Wes: Yeah. Even though we often block that out, right?

1:15:57 Mark: Yeah.

1:15:57 Wes: If we're thinking of this psychologically and then there's also through that there's this consciousness of our. Well, of mortality in general, I guess. So at the end of that paragraph from the beginning, there is a face to face steadfast in its exposure to invisible death, to a mysterious forsakenness beyond the visibility of whatever is unveiled and prior to any knowledge about death. Mortality lies in the other. So this experience of the other's vulnerability is our first experience of mortality.

1:16:27 Mark: So as soon as a baby encounters its mother's face, then it gets the idea, no, no. That the mom's gonna die?

1:16:35 Wes: I don't think so. I mean, he's not necessarily.

1:16:37 Mark: Okay.

1:16:38 Wes: We don't have to pinpoint him at any stage of development. You know, it's just on the way to self, it has to occur somewhere on the way to self consciousness.

1:16:46 Mark: Okay. You get ethics. So the baby doesn't necessarily have the ethics.

1:16:49 Wes: They definitely.

1:16:50 Seth: As soon as you get.

1:16:52 Mark: As soon as you get sophisticated enough to really have a sense of self, then you get the ethics in the process.

1:16:59 Wes: Yeah. By the age of three, they're struggling. They're trying to rein in their monstrousness before they get big and strong enough to hurt people with it.

1:17:06 Mark: And the fact that I said you get the ethics, it doesn't mean you have an understanding of ethical rules or that you have an ethical code or something. It's that there is a call to you that you can ignore, of course. But you have the ethics in that sense that you hear the call.

1:17:22 Wes: Yeah. It's similar to a virtue ethicist saying that you have that telos, or to a Kantian saying, well, that's what you will rationally, even if you deviate from it. Right. Or that's the law that you've laid down for yourself, even if you actually deviate from it. So there's something in us that sets us up with the ethical code or something like that, regardless of whether we follow through. But in this case we get this psychological sounding phenomenology to it.

1:17:48 Mark: Yeah. I would put this more in the. In the case like where people justify. You've heard the call of Jesus you can choose to ignore it, but you've all heard it like it's about as epistemically dubious as that, in my opinion. But Seth, do you want to react to, hmm.

1:18:05 Seth: The key words that came up during what you just read, Vulnerability and mortality. He's trying to make the point of saying, and this shows up again in the other essay, trying to tie it back, that for Heidegger, the experience of death is something that you take on from that position as subject. Granted, these are not Heideggerian terms. He wouldn't use the term subject, consciousness, all that stuff. But the idea is, is that you encounter death from the position of this self consciousness. And it's a recognition of the possibility of the end, the impossibility of possibility, the point at which this thing that you are projecting out into the future will cease to be.

And that movement is something that you take on conceptually through your understanding, and it's what allows you to have an authentic existence. Now, there's nothing moral about this movement in Heidegger. It's authenticity here means being elevated out of the they, the commonality, the masses. What I think Levinas is trying to do here is to say the experience of mortality, the notion of death doesn't come post facto in the understanding where you come to a rational understanding of death. It comes in this vulnerable exchange with the other, in the face to face, where that vulnerability is somehow a recognition, right, it's responsibility of my existence vis a vis the other's existence.

But it's a recognition that others existence could potentially end and so could mine. And so he's trying to tie the relationship, the recognition of mortality, my own mortality, to the mortality of the other. Whereas with Heidegger, the notion of death and this anxiety that you have being towards death is completely in the understanding. And so it's part of, wrapped up in that solitude. Levinas, it's important to him to tie it to the other because he's trying to get outside of that solipsistic understanding.

1:20:14 Wes: Yeah, he says it's as if I had to answer for the other's death even before being. And then he talks of a guiltless responsibility and a responsibility stemming from a time before my freedom. So again, this sort of gets us to an ethics that is not tied in the typical existentialist way to freedom and is grounded before that. But it might help, I don't know. There's this paragraph where he talks about mortality I think might be worth reading. It's not relevant, but in its expression, in its mortality, the Face before me summons me, calls for me, begs for me, as if the invisible death that must be faced by the other, pure otherness, separated in some way from any whole, were my business.

It is as if that invisible death, ignored by the other, whom already it concerns by the nakedness of its face, were already regarding me prior to confronting me and becoming the death that stares me in the face. Skipping down a little bit, the other becomes my neighbor precisely through the way the face summons me, calls for me, begs for me, and in doing so, recalls my responsibility and calls me into question. And then in the following paragraphs, we get this whole idea of a kind of being responsible before we are even beings. In a way, we're constituted by this guiltless responsibility.

It's not that we become beings with freedom, and then we get our ethical obligations. It's they constitute us, in a sense, as beings. So responsibility for my neighbor dates from before my freedom, in an immemorial past, an unrepresentable past that was never present and is more ancient than consciousness of a responsibility for my neighbor.

1:21:54 Mark: Yeah. And so I suppose, even though this is how genetically it happens, if we were to encounter an alien race that has intelligence and compassion and all these things, but they don't happen to have faces.

1:22:08 Wes: I knew this objection was going to

1:22:09 Mark: come, that for Kant, as long as it's a rational being, then you have to respect it and treat it. But if he's really. If we're really going to take him seriously, that it's the other is the neighborhood. Precisely through the way the face summons me. I mean, should we really. It seems like Levinas likes us to take him literally.

1:22:27 Seth: Yeah. Well, I think he does in some sense want you to take him literally, although his prose is so difficult to comprehend. But let me say this. This right now is a theme about particularity which is particularly Judaic. We've talked about this before, probably years ago. But the priority of the particular over the universal or the individual over the abstracted concept, and this is definitely part of what's going on here, is that he doesn't mean the face in an abstract sense. We do have the capital O other. But he is talking about a particular experience, the experience of actually looking another individual in the face. This is not just a metaphor, and that. That's a really important point.

1:23:19 Wes: Well, if we were thinking about this psychologically and developmentally, obviously we know that you don't need faces and you don't need eyesight to develop moral sentiments. So in a way, I want to not take it literally.

1:23:31 Seth: Right, okay. How about this? He's talking about a specific encounter with a particular individual. You can use the term face and eyes and whatever. This is just my opinion.

1:23:41 Wes: Oh, yeah, I agree with you. Yeah.

1:23:42 Seth: That he wants you to consider a particular individual in front of you.

1:23:46 Wes: Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah. Just. Yeah. If they didn't have a face or I couldn't see, I didn't have eyes,

1:23:53 Mark: I think we'd be people over the Internet.

1:23:55 Wes: We'd still be fine. All the face stuff would still happen. Internal, psychologically. But yeah.

1:23:59 Seth: Have you guys seen this documentary called the Artist Is Present? Marina Abramović.

1:24:05 Wes: Why'd that name sound so familiar?

1:24:07 Seth: She's a performance artist and she did a. I want to say it was in New York at MoMA or one of the museums in New York where she just sat in a chair. And people who. Visiting the museum could come and sit across from her in a chair, and they had to look her in the. In the eyes and she just stared. And they made a documentary about this. And it's amazing how difficult it is for people to engage with her, like, literally face to face and how it's a heroic personal act on her part to be present like that for all these different people as they filtered through for like, hours at a time. And it's what I was put in mind of as we hit this section, and I'd recommend you guys take a look at it and our listeners.

1:24:56 Mark: Danto wrote an article on that. I remember reading at the time that she was doing that kind of relatedly, some of this made me think of a service or a hookup spot or something, you know, that it's like an Ashley Madison or something. But not for sex, just for, like, just gazing into each other's eyes. Like, that's the. That's the whole benefit. I wonder if there's a market for that.

1:25:17 Wes: Well, this is one of the reasons why psychoanalysts actually prefer their patients to lie on the couch.

1:25:25 Seth: They don't want to look him in the face.

1:25:26 Wes: It's exhausting. I have a lot of therapist friends, and it's. It makes your job. If you're sitting with patients for eight hours a day, it's a lot more work because you have to do all the things that you do. You know, when you're face to face with someone, you have to make all those expressions and in response to their expressions. And it's harder to simply concentrate on what they're saying. And it's harder for the patient simply to free associate because they are monitoring you for approval or disapproval or things like that.

1:25:49 Mark: One of the reasons why we don't use video.

1:25:52 Seth: Well, that. And I don't want you guys to see me and all the faces.

1:25:55 Wes: Well, I don't have a face.

1:25:59 Mark: I find when we do have the video on that I more or less ignore it. That I will look at it occasionally, but I do not. It's not the same as, like, having a person in the room with you and feeling the need. It'd be similar if we just. We're all in the same room together, but we still, like, just have the convention that we're looking at our notes and, you know, occasionally looking at the other people. It's. The fact that I'm not looking at you doesn't mean that I'm not listening and doesn't mean that I don't care what you're saying. You know, you'd have to have some settled things. Do not have to.

1:26:25 Seth: Okay.

1:26:26 Mark: I don't know if as a shrink, you can just say we're going to be in a chair where I'm looking at you, but you just got to get used to the fact that I'm going to just be kind of staring off into space and looking at my notebook. And that's got to be okay with me.

1:26:37 Wes: It's not going to work if it

1:26:40 Mark: looks like I'm asleep. That's just my way of deep listening. That's what I say to people who are cutting my hair or doing my teeth.

1:26:49 Wes: Shrinks do fall asleep.

1:26:50 Seth: I have a friend who's a therapist, but he works with the va, so he sees a lot of. Of current and ex military people who. He specializes in ptsd. And I have many a times had dinner with him after a day and he's rung out. It's incredibly exhausting to do that kind of work and to be present for an individual like that for like eight hours, you know, because the VA puts him through the grinder. Right. They have this minimum number of cases, and it's brutal. Yeah.

1:27:20 Wes: I have a friend up here who specialized in that same thing. Wartime.

1:27:23 Seth: Yeah.

1:27:24 Wes: Ptsd. And. Yeah, it's very hard to do that, you know, only that for full time. Section five.

1:27:33 Mark: Yeah. And we've already covered the first couple paragraphs of that. The third paragraph seems the first new thing. Fear for the other man's death is my fear, but it is in no way an individual's taking fright. It thus stands out against the admirable phenomenological. Blah, blah, blah, blah.

1:27:49 Wes: Well, the point here is. And he goes on to say, all affectivity, therefore has repercussions for my being for death. So it's what Seth was saying about this more solipsistic approach to being thrown into the world. Right. And on all those conditions here, what you're thrown into is the face to face. And so my being for death, which I, in my very simple layperson's view, take as having something to do with defining the way you live in terms of your consciousness that you're going to die. And that's the ultimate end possibility by which I have to define all my possibilities that I call my projects. So that changes if I'm thinking now about. So he's saying all affectivity, the emotional expressions of others become part of what determines that for me, that is part of what I'm thrown into. Other people's bad moods.

1:28:37 Mark: No, well, really it's not other people's bad moods because it's the mood they have that's kind of like their face. It's kind of like the various faces they put on their masks, but it's their very existence. There was a quote in one of the other, in the time, in the other. That's something that's like sociality is time itself. And that doesn't sound relevant because we haven't filled in the gap that. Well, we referred to it in an offhand way, but that at the same time we need the notion of other people to have the notion of time at all. So this passivity is kind of, you know, we were talking about the passivity with regard to time. Regard to time and with regard to the other really amount to the same.

1:29:13 Wes: Yeah, that's because we don't get the future. To get an idea of the future, we need the other.

1:29:18 Seth: Yep.

1:29:18 Mark: It's so primal, this reaction to the other. It's not that the fact that the other looks at us in a certain way that makes us react this way. It's the fact that the other kind of exists at all and we have this face to face recognition of the other, that that's enough to get us everything, to get us the notion of temporality, to get us the notion of death, to get us the notion of morality. The other doesn't have to do anything in particular.

1:29:41 Wes: They just have to sit there and look nice.

1:29:43 Mark: Not even that. But did we cover why? It's in no way an individual is taking fright. It's not an individual because it's not a subjective thing that we are doing.

1:29:53 Wes: It's this is before we've become Individual. So it's my fear, but not an individual's fear in the sense of someone who's a subject.

1:30:01 Mark: Would it be correct to say that it is a function of. So the way we talked in the Buber episode, which I just freshly re. Listened to, part of it was that the fundamental thing is not the individual subject, but it is this. Just like Heidegger is saying that being in the world is fundamental. It's not me being. And then there's the world. It's being the world is one thing. For Buber, it was the I and thou is one thing. And the individual gets abstracted away from that. Is that the same thing that's happening here? That before the I is created before it would be an individual that takes fright that we just have. You and the face that you are contemplating are really a fundamental ontological unit before the self even comes into being?

1:30:43 Wes: Yeah, I couldn't really tell.

1:30:45 Mark: I mean. Right.

1:30:46 Wes: I don't know if Seth has a.

1:30:47 Mark: Or is it just that it's a pre reflective, non. Positional self. Passive experience.

1:30:53 Wes: Yeah. How you get into the ontology of it. Yeah. Is unclear to me. There's just this soup of sociality that the individual sort of crystallize out of.

1:31:03 Mark: Read the part about emotion in that paragraph. Emotion consists in being moved, being scared by something, overjoyed by something, saddened by something, but also in feeling joy or sadness for oneself. All affectivity, therefore, has repercussions for my being for death. Why? There is a double intentionality in the by and the for. And so there's a turning back on oneself and a return to anguish for oneself for one's finitude in the fear inspired by the wolf. An anguish for my death. Fear for the other man's death is not turned back into anguish for my death.

It extends beyond the ontology of the Heideggerian Dasein and the good conscience of being in the sight of that being itself. There is ethical awareness and vigilance in this emotional unease. Certainly Heidegger's being for death marks for this being the end of his being in the sight of that being, as well as the scandal provoked by that ending. But in that ending, no scruple of being is awakened. So do we want to just say more about Heidegger's being unto death and how this is a rejection of that?

1:32:07 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think Heidegger's. It's the way in which our consciousness of the fact that we're going to die defines us. If we're going to be authentic we have to keep it in mind. Seth, what is the real answer?

1:32:22 Seth: No, no, you're right. The key point here is Heidegger's notion of anxiety, anxiety before death or in front of death, about death is that it's something that reflects back on myself. It's the way I inhabit my full authenticity as Dasein. And up until that point. And the reason why that's the case is in his the Heideggerian ontology, I'm caught up in what is going on around me, the social. So people say I should do this, people say I should wear that, people say I should eat this and do that and think this and think that. And that's inauthentic.

It's bad conscience, right, that I'm following what the dictates of society or of fashion or what have you. And for Heidegger, the only way to escape that is that you fully come to experience the anxiety that comes with recognizing that at some point there will be no future for you. You will inhabit no possibilities. Your death is yours and yours alone. It's the one thing in your entire existence that you can uniquely own. And I don't mean own in terms of possession, but there is more fanciful language around that. But essentially it's the one thing that truly is your own and simultaneously is not at all anybody else's.

So it's not something you get from anybody else. So if you come to terms with your anxiety about the fact that at some point you will cease to be, you can truly then begin to live an authentic life.

1:34:01 Wes: So I'll be less inclined to be a conformist. I mean, what is it? Is it that my awareness of death means that I'm going to do what's important to me and block out the pressures to conform? Like if I wouldn't be so conformist if I knew what was at stake. Is that the idea?

1:34:17 Seth: It's the possibility for that happening? It's not to say that you will or won't do it, but it is the precondition as far as Heidegger is concerned.

1:34:25 Mark: It is possible that you won't join the Nazi party, even though.

1:34:29 Seth: Yeah.

1:34:29 Wes: So Levinas's. Yeah, difference here. He says awareness of death doesn't really awaken any scruple, as he puts it.

1:34:36 Seth: The awareness of my death doesn't. What he says is fear for the other man's death does not turn back into anguish for my death. That you're coming to recognition of mortality is a coming to recognition as a fear for the other person's death. Namely as possibly, possibly at your hands or by somehow in your responsibility. And that. That's the foundation of this ethics as first philosophy. Not a recognition of your own death and not a kind of self satisfying exploration of anxiety about your own death that somehow leads to an authentic existence.

1:35:13 Wes: It's anxiety about the other, in a way comes first.

1:35:16 Seth: Yes.

1:35:17 Wes: And so that's part of what we're thrown into. I think that's the sort of how that alters that this kind of the other and the. I'm putting it as the ethical demand that the other makes that. That's probably not the best way to put it, but that's sort of basic and that's part of what we are thrown into. It's not just this anxiety about ourselves.

1:35:34 Mark: So the next paragraph. This is the hidden human face behind perseverance in being.

1:35:39 Wes: Yeah. Exclamation point, huh? Why does that one deserve an exclamation? Said a lot of interesting things already. Didn't need an exclamation point.

1:35:49 Mark: Hidden behind the affirmation. He should just have exclamation points all over the place. Just make it like a Marvel comic from the 60s. Hidden behind the affirmation of being persisting analytically or animally in its being, and in which the ideal vigor of identity identifying and affirming and strengthening itself in the life of human individuals and in their struggle for vital existence, whether conscious or unconscious or rational. The miracle of the ego vindicated in the eyes of the neighbor, or the miracle of the ego which has gotten rid of the self and instead fears for the other, is thus like the suspension or epoch of the eternal and irreversible return of the identical to itself and of the intangible nature of its logical and ontological privilege.

1:36:33 Seth: Jesus, what a sentence.

1:36:35 Wes: I try to check my ontological privilege.

1:36:39 Mark: It almost is exactly what it means. Checking your privilege suspension. Assertion of privilege in the objectionable white privilege sense is an ontological privilege. I think the word is almost redundant.

1:36:55 Seth: So wait, let me read the next sentence and ask a question. What is suspended is its ideal priority, which wipes out all otherness by murder or by all encompassing and totalizing thought.

1:37:06 Mark: One of those, one of those, or

1:37:08 Seth: war and politics which pass themselves off as the relation of the same to the other. So is here. Is this the point where Levinas is saying the phenomenological is the move that suspends that privilege. It makes possible the suspension of that privilege so that you can get to this pre intention. What is he saying here?

1:37:27 Wes: Yeah, this sounds like De Beauvoir Here and rejection of the serious. Right. What is suspended is its ideal priority. Well, actually, in this case, the ideal priority is of the ego. Right. So it's a little different. Yeah.

1:37:39 Mark: Yes. So that is what you were taking seriously. You were taking as me, me, me, the self. That is the fundamental thing. And everything refers to it. And the means. You're suspending it, you're setting that. You're just kind of putting it on hold. Yes, it's still there, something that's operating in consciousness. You know, this sounds very much like a Buddhist practice here, suspending the ego and trying to see what emerges from that. But Levinas would criticize the Buddhist there because that still sounds like it's something that you're doing by yourself. But maybe the Buddhist connection is it's compassion, it's something connected to the other that is supposed to give rise to this. Right. Compassion can lead to the epoche.

1:38:15 Wes: Yeah. It's not compassion, he will say in the other essays. I think he explicitly rejects that.

1:38:19 Mark: Yeah.

1:38:19 Wes: Ah.

1:38:21 Mark: Because compassion would again, rely on some property of the person in particular.

1:38:26 Wes: So it's in time, in the other. And it's basically. He calls it sympathy. So it's not like we're related to the other, like they're another version of myself and that we participate in this common existence and that they sort of resemble me. And I sympathize with them because my relationship is with the mystery. The other's being is constituted entirely by its alterity. So it can't be sympathy. That's not the fundamental relationship.

1:38:50 Mark: I'm just not sure that compassion entails sympathy. That's normally, I guess, the way we think of it. But I brought it up in a Buddhist context and supposedly the enlightened Buddha who has compassion. Right. Even though he's not subject to all those awful illusions of self.

1:39:06 Wes: I mean, he says explicitly that it's not that I'm putting myself in the other person's place. I mean, he's definitely talking about compassion in that other essay. It's not like he's not talking about compassion as a moral sentiment. That's not what the face to face is, at least in my reading of the other essays. That's one of the. What I thought was really interesting about it.

1:39:23 Mark: I mean, it sounds like the emphasis on vulnerability and the actual emotion that you would feel in light of vulnerability, isn't that compassion?

1:39:31 Seth: Well, so when you talk about, like you have a newborn baby that you bring home, it's completely vulnerable. Right. It can't take care of itself. It can't feed itself. It has no self motive. It has no motive power. Would you say that your desire to take care of that baby and to protect it and whatever is out of compassion?

1:39:50 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point. Even though I think the other part we should look at is that we're talking about something pre reflective, remember? So whatever this comportment is towards the other, it's not necessarily, I think, something that we're going to be familiar with at the level of the day to day affectivity, the day to day kinds of thoughts and feelings we have. So that's why compassion may not be. Or sympathy may not be the right word. But Seth, I think that's a really good point because it brings into play this sort of, you know, I think some of what he's talking about with Eros, right? Yes. The relationship to the mystery is fundamentally erotic. It's about libido or about love, which is the same, I think, as the relationship to the infant.

1:40:30 Mark: Do we want to move off into that essay or do we want to keep charging through here?

1:40:35 Seth: Well, I think there's at least one other point to be made here. The next paragraph on page 85. The ego is the very crisis of the being of a being in the human domain, a crisis of being, not because the sense of this verb might still need to be understood, blah blah blah, but because I begin to ask myself if my being is justified, if the DA of my Dasein is not already the usurpation of somebody else's place. This question has no need of a theoretical reply in the form of new information. Rather, it appeals to responsibility, which is not a practical stopgap measure designed to console knowledge in its failure to match being.

This responsibility does not deny knowledge the ability to comprehend and grasp. Instead it is the excellence of ethical proximity in its sociality and its love without concupiscence. I did look up that word, I have to admit, when I was reading this. The human is the return to the interiority of non intentional consciousness, to bad conscience, to its capacity to fear injustice more than death, to prefer to suffer than to commit injustice, and to prefer that which justifies being over that which assures it.

1:41:53 Mark: So it's funny that the way that this talk of respect for the other, the way that it comes up in current political consciousness, is to sort of recognizing the other as other means that you can't understand it. Whereas he's saying this responsibility that you know, the result of this recognizing the other as other does not deny knowledge, the ability to comprehend and Grasp, it just is an appeal to responsibility. So it actually is not really relevant to knowledge at all.

1:42:20 Wes: Well, we don't cease to have intentionality just because of all this stuff. Sorry, am I misunderstanding?

1:42:26 Mark: Maybe I was trying to say that, you know, so you might say, hey, you white people, you don't understand us. We are radically other as compared to you. And so don't pretend to put your white gaze over everything and eat us in an aggressive way of knowledge. Recognize us in our otherness as something that exceeds your grasp. And that is the sort of respectful, politically correct way, in fact, not just among groups, of course, but for every single individual to recognize that the other person. So it really does have a very specific epistemic result. Whereas here he's saying it doesn't. The responsibility does not deny knowledge its ability to comprehend and grasp.

1:43:07 Wes: I was just thinking he meant that generally it's not like we cease to be knowing, grasping, intentional beings. Or in other words, it's not like the responsibility created by all of this means that we have to stop being scientists or we have to stop being knowledge seekers and experts and technicians. It's just that we can't. We also have this other thing going on.

1:43:28 Mark: So, okay, it could be compatible with limits in knowledge due to otherness, which is certainly implied by many other things in the text. If the other is primarily mystery, Right. Then, yeah, that implies something epistemic.

1:43:41 Wes: And this would be towards everyone. You know, love, without concupiscence. Whatever is ethical between us is not a matter of knowledge and grasping. And even, I would argue, empathy. And I think he's got a point, something I've given a lot of thought to recently. Not that we need to go down that. But I think this question of whether morality is like that, empathy is a proper grounds for morality. I think Kant would say no, and I think, as far as I can tell, Levinas would say no.

1:44:08 Mark: So we're finally to the last section, which is really just a recap, right?

1:44:12 Seth: Yeah.

1:44:13 Mark: To be or not to be is that the question is that the first and final question does being human consistent, forcing oneself to be? And does the understanding of the meaning of being, the semantics of the verb to be represent the first philosophy required by a consciousness, which from the first would be knowledge and representation, conserving its assurance in being for death asserting itself as the lucidity of a thought thinking itself right through, even unto death, in which, even in its finitude already or still an unquestioned bad conscience as regards its right to be.

This is all frickin One sentence is either anguished or heroic in the precariousness of its finitude. Or does the first question arise in the bad conscience, an instability which is different from that threatened by my death and my suffering. It poses the question of my right to be, which is already my responsibility for the death of the other, interrupting the carefree spontaneity of my naive perseverance. So there you go, that's just pure recap.

1:45:14 Seth: The question par excellence, or the question of philosophy is not why being rather than nothing, but how being justifies itself.

1:45:22 Mark: So the way that that last thing is just put is directly against Heidegger. Heidegger thought we actually the semantics. Oh, people have neglected the question of being. They don't ask the question of being.

1:45:34 Seth: That is correct.

1:45:35 Mark: Well, that's a thing you should worry about.

1:45:37 Wes: That's exactly the sound of voice that Heidegger used.

1:45:43 Seth: Yes.

1:45:43 Wes: For Levinas, there's a question more fundamental than being pre being, prior daycare for being where we learn to be nice to others, but it comes before we are beings. That's the main point is that, you know, comes before reflectivity at that low a level, our ethical comportment is.

1:46:03 Mark: All right, so to kind of wrap up here, what do you think so far? How does this measure up against say Simone de Beauvoir's existentialist defense of why ethics has to be fundamental? Which did you find more convincing? Either of them?

1:46:17 Wes: Can I say both? Because that's always my answer.

1:46:21 Mark: Well, tell more. What?

1:46:22 Wes: Well, the difference, and I think we've sort of, we've gotten at that at various places in this conversation, is that for de Beauvoir and I think for Sartre and existentialism in general, it's more about the. You ground the ethical and the freedom of the subject. Freedom is something he associates with self consciousness and what he calls good conscience and being an active objectifier and knower and things like that. And I think the point here is that these ethical obligations, again, I don't know if that's exactly the right word, but they arise before all of that.

They arise prior to our being self conscious reflective beings. And in a way they help constitute us as such. And in some ways it does sound Hegelian. Right. The sense in which we to be self conscious beings, we rely on the consciousness or the recognition of others. Here it's to be ethical beings, we rely on some sort of fundamental relationship to the other. And we can't really, even though Kant for instance, tries to relate freedom and our relationship to the other, that is the idea that we should treat people as ends in themselves, you may think that's a tenuous connection and that to really establish some sort of genuine obligation to another, it sort of has to be built into the ontology from the very beginning.

You can't just start out with these separate isolated individuals and then generate some sort of legitimate ethical relationship between them. It has to constitute them in some sense.

1:48:00 Mark: Yeah, I just think that I wouldn't describe Simone Dubovoir's solution as starting with isolated individuals and then they have to be connected in some sense. Because I feel like the fact that as soon as you're making decisions at all, you're exerting your freedom. Even doing this for Sartre and Simone Dubois, pre. Reflectively, you're doing this before you even think about like I'm making a decision, like you're just doing it. So the very act of acting involves, according to its internal logic, obligation to the other. That's pretty damn early. And I'm not sure that it's any earlier than Levinas.

1:48:38 Wes: Yeah. So she comes up with the idea that we have to will the freedom of others, but that's only because we can't will our own freedom without doing that to will our own freedom, we have to be able to will it indeterminately. And we can't do that unless we can rely on the freedom of others. It's a, it's a very. By the way, it's just a rehash of Kant, but the idea of universalizing maxims and not giving us a world which contradicts our aims and. Yeah, so that sounds kind of the same sort of grounding of ethics in a person's ego or almost even their own particular interests, as opposed to just saying, no, there's the fundamental obligation. And I don't have to justify that in terms of me willing my own freedom, for instance. I already have it set up from the very beginning before I'm free or an ego or any of that stuff.

1:49:28 Mark: It also is. We haven't said really what this obligation to other people involves for Levinas. I mean, it's really pretty extreme. It's like complete responsibility for the other person. Am I my brother's keeper? Yes.

1:49:43 Wes: He calls it a guilt free responsibility. So that's why I use the word obligation hesitantly, because it's almost proto ethical. Right. This talk of guilt free responsibility. It's responsibility. It's a weird thing to say that we're responsible even before we are reflective beings. Right. We usually associate responsibility with reason and being reflective so it would take a lot more to say, how can there be this guilt free responsibility even before we are beings?

1:50:11 Seth: I'll point out again that like, for example, he uses the term neighbor. There are callbacks to very traditional biblical notions of responsibility and so forth. That one of the things I really liked about de Beauvoir's account was her very, very comprehensive enumeration of psychological states or responses. So ways in which you could try to be responsible and free and somehow

1:50:39 Wes: not be or evade responsibility. Right.

1:50:42 Seth: Yeah. You think that you are taking responsibility, but you're actually not for one reason or another. What I like about Levinas is I can't help but read him in the context of Heidegger. And so, you know, on the one hand, Heidegger set a stake in the ground and there were a bunch of people that responded to him. You had Merleau Ponty because the criticism was, oh, Heidegger forgets the body. So Merleau Ponty comes along and he brings in the body and Heidegger forgets the other. So you have Sartre responding to that. But I think Levinas can be read as well.

Heidegger forgets the ethical somehow. And if you take seriously the idea that Levinas is addressing this gap, which is not addressed in Heidegger and more importantly is not addressed by the existentialists, if you don't think of Levinas as an existentialist, then you take a different view of what his project is about. And he's very explicit in here about how he's not talking about freedom. He doesn't mention Sartre, does he, in anything that we read.

1:51:45 Mark: I believe he does. But there was doubt that he'd actually read Being Nothingness in. Yeah. Even though that came out before this.

1:51:53 Wes: Well, transcendence of the ego would be the non positional. That's all he would need for the non positional stuff.

1:51:58 Mark: Yes, he was aware of that and of the imagination.

1:52:00 Seth: But there's this weird sense in which Levinas claims to be faithful to phenomenology. We'd have to read Totality and Infinity to see if he's actually doing something like what Heidegger is doing. But he talks a lot, you know, just as much about Husserl. And so I really don't see Levinas as an existentialist and particularly as the Jewish stuff comes up and sort of weaves its way into these things. I think there's some real tension there.

1:52:26 Wes: Yeah. So I thought this was really, really fantastic, actually.

1:52:30 Seth: Were you not expecting it?

1:52:32 Wes: Well, I expected it just to be hard. And I didn't know whether I was going to be able to get something out of it in the time I had. But I found this as one of those things where the first reading is like, oh, man, this is going to be a rough one. And then the second reading is actually, wow, this actually makes some sense.

1:52:50 Mark: Well, and the more I read about him and just the different readings fed into each other to just make it mutually easier to understand any given point, whereas initially it would just seem like word salad and like, oh, no, this is just a different way of kind of making the same point over and over again.

1:53:06 Wes: But some of the stuff that we'll talk about, we may talk about next time.

1:53:10 Mark: So next time we've decided we're going to continue on the same set of readings. We're basically done with Ethics's first philosophy, but we're going to read all of the time in the other, and not just the second half from 1948. So why don't you just get that and read along with us?

1:53:24 Wes: I like that one even better. The stuff about Eros and Shakespeare and all the rest of it, just very, very thought provoking and interesting, I have to say. I'm, like, moved by it. Just at that basic level.

1:53:35 Mark: I thought you would like it when he said, sometimes I think that all of philosophy is just a rumination on Shakespeare.

1:53:41 Wes: Yeah, I did enjoy that.

1:53:43 Seth: Mark, you just said something about word salad. One thing I do remember is that in totality and infinity, it's very much like Heidegger in that sense, where he's like, inventing a language and a way of talking, and it's brutal. But these essays are extremely coherent. And I think his chain of reasoning is very clear. I mean, you may not agree with every assertion, but the language is very graspable. And I think his process of moving from point to point is logical and coherent. And I think that's one of the things that I appreciate is that I think these were, you know, lectures, right? No, this one was published, but time in the other. Some of these, I think, was part of a lecture.

1:54:24 Mark: Yep. Our four lectures. Yep.

1:54:26 Seth: Maybe this is a good lesson for us. Every time we read somebody's lectures, we. We have a better go of it than when we try to read the masterwork. So maybe we ought to keep that in mind going forward. Anyway, I'm glad you guys enjoyed it. Well, Wes, anyway, Mark hasn't expressed an opinion.

1:54:43 Wes: Mark seemed to enjoy it.

1:54:44 Mark: I went in waves when I started it. I was like, yeah, I'm getting this let's read more. Let's read a lot. Then I didn't read for a few days and when the time was approaching for the episode, then I felt like, oh my God, I'm not even going to get through the one essay. This is terrible. But then I got in the groove and like, you know, by the end I was, I was feeling like, ah, no, I want to read three more essays. I want to read as much of them as I can. I want to get. That was what I was afraid that this was going to be such a difficult text. They were going to read our 12 page article and that's all we were going to get. And like, what? That we understand Levinas now. Like, it just seemed like it would be unsatisfying. But the way it turned out, the way we approached it with the multiple essays and looking at secondary literature, I feel better about it.

1:55:28 Wes: Well, what did you guys look at? I didn't find the Stanford article that helpful. It was kind of written in its own continental jargon.

1:55:35 Seth: I don't know, I didn't love the Stanford. I found two other secondary essays that I looked at just on ethics as first philosophy, one of which was almost like an outline and that helped me understand the structure of the argument. But yeah, I didn't find the Stanford very helpful either.

1:55:50 Mark: Well, the intro of the Levinas Reader and then like I said, I found the time in the other standalone version and that had a long intro that not only explained time in the other, but gave background on his thought in general. Well, we hope everybody enjoyed this and the return of Seth and likes it so much that they will go and become Partially Examined Life citizens or just donate heaps of cash to fund our drug habits. I think it's the fact that they don't see our faces that they don't feel like immediately obligated to give us money. Don't you think that's the issue? If we had a video podcast, they would be face to face, possibly. Or if we were touring, I think

1:56:30 Seth: we need to do that. Well, I would be happy too if people just spread the word and got everybody else to listen to. You don't have to give us money either.

1:56:38 Mark: All right, how about this? As soon as somebody goes to our website, then like we have a thing. You know how when you're at some sites, some customer service window opens and says, hey, can I help you with something? Like, we have to have a video window of one of us, us live. We have to man it between us at all times. We'll just Go and like, hey, I see you're enjoying the site. Do you want to give us money?

1:56:58 Wes: Hi, I'm Wes from the Partially Examined Life. I'd like to talk to you for a few moments about my lack of an income.

1:57:07 Seth: Do you guys have a great stock photo of you with like a little headset on In a call center.

1:57:12 Wes: Right, Exactly.

1:57:13 Seth: It's always like some woman in a. In a suit, a nice big smile. Usually a brunette.

1:57:19 Wes: Can I assist you with the giving of money to us?

1:57:23 Mark: Hey, I see you're nearby.

1:57:27 Seth: That's a different thing.

1:57:29 Mark: We hook up for some philosophical face to face.

1:57:33 Wes: Yeah. Mark, you're definitely not going to be in the customer service chat room.

1:57:38 Mark: We're not going to start running Philosophy Live webcam. Some version of that might be interesting. Just a short. Keep the Eros to a minimum.

1:57:47 Wes: That's all sublimated. Highly sublimated in legal ways.

1:57:53 Seth: Yeah.

1:57:54 Mark: Hey, you can get immediate response from somebody if you go post to our Facebook group. Because there's always people who will respond to whatever you post. That's probably not friendly, probably smart or obnoxious. There are many supportive people. It's a ecosystem. It's awesome. And yeah, follow us on Twitter, like our Facebook page, which is different than the Facebook group joined our LinkedIn group. Do all those things. Thanks, everybody, and good night.

1:58:20 Wes: Good night.

1:58:21 Seth: Good night.

1:58:34 Wes: Sa.

1:59:02 Mark: Have you ever caught a glimpse of someone else's dream? Have you ever tried to speak your soul.

1:59:44 Wes: Trying to breathe the stench of real life?

1:59:51 Mark: I find I'm crying out for. Taking in a context without life or love or meaning could you even try to live what you can? Don't think that I'm unhappy.

2:00:17 Wes: It's just. It's.

2:00:18 Mark: Sometimes I wake up and my heart is beaming and my mind explodes. If you ever feel like something complete. I'll be here I'll be here I. So, Seth, this is your first one back for a while. You felt like you needed a breather. Did this. Did we meet your. Is this a satisfactory experience? So we just need to fire Dylan? Is that what.

2:02:02 Seth: No, I don't. Clearly not fire Dylan. I just. It's a lot easier for me when there's just three of us. And obviously I was no less prepared and no less enthusiastic about de Beauvoir.

2:02:14 Mark: Perhaps we were less sensitive. I thought maybe what has changed from now from the years when Dylan had just joined us and we were fine with 4 is that Wes has gotten his shit together a lot more. And so there's a lot more to say on every single episode. Is way more prepared.

2:02:31 Wes: Are you kidding me?

2:02:32 Mark: And also, Dylan has gained a lot of confidence, I hope.

2:02:35 Wes: Any idea how much time I've spent preparing? Like, from the very beginning?

2:02:40 Mark: Then maybe I'm just hallucinating.

2:02:42 Seth: You are hallucinating.

2:02:43 Mark: It's hard to remember exactly how things were three years ago and how the dynamic has changed, or.

2:02:48 Seth: No, no, no.

2:02:49 Wes: I mean, I used to spend obscene amounts of time on this podcast. Obscene?

2:02:53 Seth: Yeah. Anyway, I think you probably still do. Well, no, I mean, but this is also kind of like the original vibe, right? There's a good balance, even on the de Beauvoir. I don't think Dylan was any more engaged than I was, to some extent. I don't know. You guys have a high level of energy, so I think that's what it comes down to.