PHIL 494.001
Selected Topic
Dr. Deborah Achtenberg		 FALL 2003
Mon., Wed., Fri.
1:00-1:50pm

 
EMMANUEL LEVINAS
    In this course, we will read, think about and discuss the views of one of continental Europe's most important 20th century philosophers, Emmanuel Levinas.  According to Levinas, difference is more important than sameness for ethics:
Man's relationship with the other is better as difference than as unity:  sociality is better than fusion.  The very value of love is the impossibility of reducing the other to myself, of coinciding into sameness (quoted in Kearney, States of Mind, 188).
Love, according to Levinas, is not the discovery of a lost part of ourselves.  Instead, it is the encounter with something--someone--utterly new.  In love, and in all our ethical relationships, we experience the absolute upsurge of someone unique, of a singularity that cannot be encompassed or comprehended.

     Levinas seeks a relation with others that is not a knowledge relation.  Knowledge reduces the other to the same: 

Consciousness appears as the very type of existing in which the multiple is and yet, in synthesis, is no more....  The object is converted into an event of the subject.  Light, the element of knowledge, makes all that we encounter be ours (Totality and Infinity, 274).
The relation he seeks is ethical, not epistemological or ontological.  When we are ethical, we relate to the other as absolute upsurge.  The other as absolute upsurge transcends: 
The upsurge or the projection of the future transcends--not by knowledge only, but by the very existing of being (Totality and Infinity, 275).
     It is in the erotic relation that we experience the ethical, that we experience the other as other:
...in sexuality the subject enters into relation with what is absolutely other, with an alterity of a type unforeseeable in formal logic, with what remains other in the relation and is never converted into 'mine'....  Sexuality is in us neither knowledge nor power, but the very plurality of our existing (Totality and Infinity, 276-277).
     The course instructor, in accord with Levinas, presumes that multiple positions and backgrounds contribute to a rich and revelatory reading of course texts:
It all happens as though the multiplicity of persons....were the condition for the fullness of 'absolute truth', as though each person, through his uniqueness, ensured the revelation of a unique aspect of the truth, and that certain sides of it would never reveal themselves if certain people were missing from mankind....  (quoted in Nine Talmudic Readings, xvi)
In harmony with this idea, active response from all students and not just from the instructor will be solicited and encouraged.

     Concepts to be discussed in the course include totality and infinity; metaphysics and transcendence; desire and need; the said and saying; being and beyond being; revelation, teaching and singularity; subjectivity, responsibility and exposure; proximity, substitution and the glory of the infinite; absolute upsurge.

 
COURSE TEXTS:
Totality and Infinity:  An Essay on Exteriority.  Pittsburgh:  Duquesne University Press.
Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence.  Pittsburgh:  Duquesne University Press.
Selected interviews.
COURSE REQUIREMENTS:
To be announced.  See course outline.
LINKS:
The Emmanuel Levinas Webpage (Peter Atterton, UCSD)
L'Institut d'études Lévinassiennes (Israel)
Espacethique  (Gérard Schaefer, France)
Levinas Page (Gen Nakayama, Japan)