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More Levinas, working this time through Time and the Other
What is it for a person to exist? What individuates one person from another, making us into selves instead of just part of the causal net of events? Why would someone possibly think that these are real, non-obvious questions that need to be addressed? Levinas gives us a phenomenological progression from the "there is," terrifyingly undifferentiated Being, to becoming an individual through "hypostasis," which is becoming an existent through a voyage out to the world and back to oneself. But this existing makes us solitary, not only in this weird ontological sense of being a distinct thing, but in a concrete, emotional sense. Overcoming this requires grasping the Other as a real Other, not as an object to fulfill our desires or get in our way. Really understanding this at our core takes some doing, and in the process, we gain a mature sense of time and of death, so, good for us!
This episode follows up on ep. 145, where we introduced some of these themes and gave Levinas's pitch for ethical responsibility.
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End song: "Call on You" by Mark Lint from from the 1993 Mark Lint album Spanish Armada: Songs of Love and Related Neuroses. The song was written in 1987 when I was 16, so it's extra gooey!
Levinas image by Corey Mohler.
if folks like this line of though they should check out Tom Sparrow’s work:
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/plastic-bodies/
“Sensation is a concept with a conflicted philosophical history. It has found as many allies as enemies in nearly every camp from empiricism to poststructuralism. Polyvalent, with an uncertain referent, and often overshadowed by intuition, perception, or cognition, sensation invites as much metaphysical speculation as it does dismissive criticism.
The promise of sensation has certainly not been lost on the phenomenologists who have sought to ‘rehabilitate’ the concept. In Plastic Bodies, Tom Sparrow argues that the phenomenologists have not gone far enough, however. Alongside close readings of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, he digs into an array of ancient, modern, and contemporary texts in search of the resources needed to rebuild the concept of sensation after phenomenology. He begins to assemble a speculative aesthetics that is at once a realist theory of sensation and a philosophy of embodiment that breaks the form of the ‘lived’ body. Maintaining that the body is fundamentally plastic and that corporeal identity is constituted by a conspiracy of sensations, he pursues the question of how the body fits into/fails to fit into its aesthetic environment and what must be done to increase the body’s power to act and exist.”
nice
Really enjoyed both parts of Overcoming Solitude and was able to better follow the ontological flow of Levinas as you wrestled with it. I think it is more powerful to treat Levinas as an ontologist rather than a phenomenologist, meaning the problem with phenomenology in general is it’s vulnerability to lose equidistant relations with both the subject and object, but to collapse into the subject as with Heidegger’s Beying, or to be too objective in representation. Nor was there the “moralizing” present in Levinas in the first go round with him, but a true ethical encounter with the existential based on encounter with pain, suffering, other and Otherness as the impossibility of Nothingness. Very enjoyable.
Thanks, Wayne! I always like reading your reactions. Yes, I felt like this reading and our discussion of it was smoother, such that I kind of feel bad for folks listening through 145 first.
Seth owes you guys big time for diving into the deep end of the pool without complaining, but we owe him big time for his lifetime passion finally being addressed which shows up in truly encountering such a deep soul as Levinas, encountering his own soul, and bringing us along for the party! Now fully examined?
Hi,
Hypostasis is interesting, but not necessarily ontological in an exclusive sense.
Existence is not a parking spot that is defined according to rules.
Paradox – as awful as it is to embrace – ‘IS’ existence.
Gotta read Levinas now. Thanks.
I again,
The crisis, or crises, is the paradox of the nominal attribute, the relegation as prescribed, the iridescent endeavor to find justification in something else and with otherness.
Language is the obvious problem! Pronouns. “I,” “you,” “me,” “they,” on and on. It is difficult to navigate the limits that relegate “us” to such constriction of ‘existence’ or ‘being’ or even not being. What about the outer realm of being? The inter realm. All of it but without definition? Is that so bad?
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duuuuudes, it’s /hʌɪˈpɒstəsɪs/. the ´ means pos is the strong sylable! Seth was so right, and I love him -not for that.