Emmanuel Levinas claims that “ethics is an optics,” but what exactly is an optics and why is it deemed ethical?[1] Existence is seen as a movement towards the optical. It begins with an existant: the I, and I exist within my ego, my dwelling—fleshy horizonality—through which I represent the exterior world to myself through the light I emit and qualify as a knowing. This self-contained mode of being is the same, totality: total for all objects encountered can be accounted for; I possess the world. The consideration of ethics becomes imperative as the world is peopled and other people cannot be considered objects of my same. There is a responsibility for the other and I cannot totalize or harm his being. The rupture of my enclosure first appears as an eschatological message,
The first ‘vision’ of eschatology […] reveals the very possibility of a eschatology, that is, the breach of the totality, the possibility of a signification without context. The experience of morality does not proceed from this vision—it consummates this vision; ethics is an optics.But it is a ‘vision’ without image, bereft of the synoptic and totalizing objectifying virtues of vision, a relation or an intentionality of a wholly different type.[2]
The first encounter with the other signals the possibility of the encounter with the other as a relation that repeats. The other relays to me a desire for infinity; this desire is a metaphysical desire for the beyond; the relationship with the other is a metaphysics. The optical appears to come from the relationship with the other, but how or what exactly it is, is yet to be uncovered. Furthermore, optics is contrasted to synoptics, the totalizing aspect of vision. Where the synoptic has an ‘image,’ the optical is devoid of such. Ontology can be considered as an image that casts plastic forms out into the world. What the optical may be will be discussed subsequently, but it should be noted that the optical announces a radically—an alteric—relation or intention. Ethics is a other than phenomenological procedure, it appears to exceed phenomenology.
Levinas surmounts ontology with ethics and sight with optics. Ethics is stated first as an optics, then Levinas will claim that ethics is a spiritual optics. The proceeding intention is to follow this movement that begins with the I, as the I encounters the other, as the other commences the face to face relation in which I become aware of the distance, or the height between him and I, and how in the process of this an ethics that is optical arises.
The synoptic resides in the ontological; it is a meaning making operation. Ontology is the explication of being. For Levinas it is both the way representation appears in the world—identities, knowledge, comprehensive forms—and it serves as a rigid cast over the possibilities and movements of beings; it drapes form in something akin to plastic, it paralyzes meaning in its place.[3] At the extreme, an ontology that serves to dominate the individual’s perception of the world is that of war.[4] “The ontological event that takes form in this black light [war] is a casting into movement of beings hitherto anchored in their identity, a mobilization of absolutes, by an objective order from which there is no escape.”[5] The concern that commences Totality and Infinity is that being will be sedimented into a totality, the same; the relationship with other will disappear.
Considering the synoptic is to critique, furthermore to understand, the phenomenological procedure. The light I cast[6] onto the world is not merely given to me, but is given by me; my I—my eye—fortifies meaning in the world. Establishing the world is to know it;
To know amounts to grasping being out of nothing or reducing it to nothing, removing it from its alterity. This result is obtained from the moment of the first ray of light. To illuminate is to remove from being its resistance, because light opens a horizon and empties space—delivers being out of nothingness. Mediation […] is meaningful only if it is not limited to reducing distances.[7]
To represent another is to reduce, it is to enact a kind of violence that strips another from their interiority—something cannot be comprehended as similar to mine. When knowledge is announced it signifies the thing before it, it does not let it speak for itself. The world becomes mine when I grasp and come to know it in the light that is my own. The representations that materialize in vision are enjoyable for the fact that “representation is a movement proceeding from the same with no searchlight preceding it,” what is encountered and created in representation is not the thing as it is, that which rises out of the my same, and the searchlight—the light of the I—”discovers, properly speaking, nothing before itself.”[8] Representation is idealist, interiority is projected outwards and taken as the truth for beings that vision falls upon.[9] Light establishes a horizonality in which the same is seen and maintained; it provides a dwelling for the I to be in the world. This conception of the world falls prey to a paralysis as the light of my I is only of my I being that my “body is a permanent contestation of the prerogative attributed to consciousness of ‘giving meaning’ to each thing.”[10]
I take and I take and I take the world before me, but in the face-to-face relationship I am struck by the epiphany that I cannot take the other as something for myself. This other comes to me as a revelation and reveals infinity in their exteriority; their alteric state of being. The other is announced as an eschatological message that has the possibility of rupturing totality.[11] The eschatological message, the revelatory message of the beyond, is from the exterior and is not a part of my same. The break of my continuity otherwise known as “totality can be maintained against an inevitably totalizing and synoptic thought only if thought finds itself faced with an other refractory to categories.”[12] It begins outside of the synoptic.
The relationship with the other is not premediated, it comes out of nowhere and shocks me at its arrival; it is not accounted for nor is it something I have the time to translate into a representation that can be situated within knowledge, it is absolute experience.
Absolute experience is not disclosure; to disclose, on the basis of a subjective horizon, is already to miss the noumenon. The interlocutor alone is the term of pure experience, where the Other enters into relation while remaining καθ’αὐτό where he expresses himself without our having to disclose him from a ‘point of view,’ in a borrowed light[13]
Pure presenticity, he who is before me speaking to me at the time of his arrival ruptures my enclosed dwelling. The other speaks himself from his light and does not translate himself in the terminology of mine. It is an immediate relationship, without mediation, it is “the breach of the totality, the possibility of a signification without context.”[14] The other is noemata, beyond the phenomena, he is not something I can locate with my faculties of perception. The truth of the other is not in the dimension of my vision but is exterior to my being.
The other expresses himself with speech, with language. “Speech, better than a simple sign, is essentially magisterial. It first of all teaches this teaching itself, by virtue of which alone it can teach (and not, like maieutics, awaken in me) things and ideas.”[15] Speech delivers something that was never inside of me, something that cannot be awakened. The visual realm is not the realm where transcendence occurs; vision is perspective and horizon and “speech cuts across vision.”[16] Speech is the traversal line of flight that opens up an infinity, unveils to me the possibilities of alternate modalities that exist outside of my same for “to speak to me is at each moment to surmount what is necessarily plastic in manifestation.”[17]
Language in the relationship with the other is not the synoptic, synthesized, representational, but its the medium on which infinity is presented and where the other expresses himself. “Language is universal because it is the very passage from the individual to the general […] To speak is to make the world common, to create commonplaces. Language does not refer to the generality of concepts, but lays the foundations for a possession in common.”[18] Language overflows me; overflows my idea of the other and my positionality in the world; language from the other transcends my former understanding and compels me to submit myself to the other’s teaching; it both demands and bestows a kind of undiluted attention for the other before me—above me—perhaps at the cost of me losing my subjectivity. Language in the realm of the other is excess, exceeding my egoist and relative experience and introduces me towards “a dimension of transcendence.”[19]
The dimension of the transcendence comes from infinity, the metaphysical relationship with the other through discourse. Speech is teaching and receiving and is
[a] being receiving the idea of Infinity, receiving since it cannot derive it from itself, is a being taught in a non-maieutic fashion, a being whose very existing consists in this incessant reception of teaching, in this incessant overflowing of self (which is time). To think is to have the idea of infinity, or to be taught.[20]
Furthermore, “revelation is discourse” and “discourse is rupture and commencement.”[21] The force of speech in the relationship with the other scrambles the previous codes of representation, rips through the fabric of my ego, and opens me to the light of the other. The other arrives as the potential for radical fracture as “speaking implies a possibility of breaking off and a beginning.”[22] This procedure is an incessant teaching; thinking is the movement of thought with the other.
It begins with the synoptic encounter of another being, who, in discourse, reveals themselves as an other, a subject that cannot be totalized. In speech the other teaches the idea of infinity through the face to face relationship.
A relation whose terms do not form a totality can hence be produced within the general economy of being only proceeding from the I to the other, as a face to face, as delineating a distance in depth—that of conversation, of goodness, of Desire—irreducible to the distance the synthetic activity of the understanding establishes between the diverse terms, other with respect to one another, that lend themselves to its synoptic operation.[23]
The face to face is a transcendence that is non-integratable and commences with conversation and teaching, the ethical relation.[24] It is in fact essential that language coincide the revealer and the revealed in the face, “accomplished in being situated in height with respect to us—in teaching.”[25] Vision adequates the idea with the thing and thus the idea becomes the image that solidifies the world and has the danger of casting beings into identity.[26] Desire emerges as Desire for the “absolutely other,” the metaphysical Desire for his teaching will bring me “more than I contain,” and will disrupt the same I am sheltered in.[27] The distance between myself and the other is manifested in a height which is not a heaven, but an Invisible: “the very elevation of height and its nobility.”[28]
It appears in the course of the face to face relationship that a transformation comes to pass within the self and vision forgoes its image. The appearance of the face that unveils itself in language, the face to face relation or transcendence, “is not an optics, but the first ethical gesture.”[29] The epiphany of the face welcomes in the optical operation. Only once vision is transformed from the interaction with the other the optical relation can begin. The face to face disintegrates the synoptic gaze and moves it towards a sight that is without image. The eye now serves another kind of ‘visionary’ function; “the eyes break through the mask—the language of the eyes, impossible to dissemble. The eye does not shine; it speaks.”[30]The eye, still the mechanism for the ethical, no longer produces an image in which it filters its thought and synoptic activity through.
I move from the plane of my representational ego in the synoptic to the plane of the face to face where a height is produced between myself and the other who has now become Other, or something akin to God, “the absolutely other is Other.”[31] It is paramount that there be distance; the distance is the message of the Other’s sanctity.[32] When eyes are cast upwards towards the Other, “the infinite does not burn the eyes that are lifted unto him.” [33] The look upon the Other can be taken as a grace, I can gaze upon the face of the Other—God—and not be burned. The gaze upon God cannot be synoptic as it is impossible for God to be comprehended; God is the Invisible, outside of synoptic vision and is unimaginable, but is “accessible in justice. Ethics is the spiritual optics.”[34] God comes to be through the relationship I have with the other, through the justice I demonstrate to the other in maintaining a distance between myself and he, regarding his exteriority, not consuming him into totality.
Rather than a visual ascent the relationship with the other, then with the Other, it is an ascent in thinking. Objects in “clarity,” my light, are intelligible and determined by me, and this intelligibility “is a total adequation of the thinker with what is thought, in the precise sense of a mastery exercised by the thinker upon what is thought in which the object’s resistance as an exterior being vanishes.”[35] The relationship with the Other is a movement towards thought that involves me in an alteric and exterior form of thinking; a thinking in the dark. The other and the Other are things I cannot determine but must maintain and preserve nonetheless.
God is not a good time feeling but an undulating pattern that appears when the proper distance is respected between myself and the other, and when the other teaches me Infinity through his discourse.
It is from moral relationships that every metaphysical affirmation takes on a ‘spiritual’ meaning, is purified of everything with which an imagination captive of things and victim of participation charges our concepts. The ethical relation is definite, in contrast with every relation with the sacred, by excluding every signification it would take on unbeknown to him who maintains that relation.[36]
The relationship with the other dissolves the totalizing image in thought. And thus there is another ascension upwards from the ethical to the sacred. The ethical is the mundane glimpse to another plane, the infinite. Faith is now maintaining a relationship with the Invisible. The ethical relation becomes the lining of every interaction with another, which is not to say that every relation becomes the face to face, but a just and moral stance is now recognized as the way in which to attend to other beings.
Optics is immediacy without referent as it forgoes the visual field and relies on language as expression. Yet, comprehension of the Other, of Infinity, is impossible, so it is to glimpse it with the eyes but it is not to comprehend it as a synoptic procedure. The glimpse of the infinite is pure immediacy, void of mediation or representation. To Desire the other is to desire Infinity, the excess that overflows the boundaries of the lighted world. This metaphysical desire leads one upwards to gaze upon a height where God resides.
The ethical relation, the face to face, also cuts across every relation one could call mystical, where events other than that of the presentation of the original being come to overwhelm or sublimate the pure sincerity of this presentation, where intoxicating equivocations come to enrich the primordial univocity of expression, where discourse becomes incantation as prayer becomes rite and liturgy, where the interlocutors find themselves playing a role in a drama that has begun outside of them[37]
My vision, my enclosure is illusionary, it promotes an image of thought of what one ought to be here on earth, it cultivates an ontology. Levinas’s ethics becomes an existential ethics for I am cast into this world and partake in this modality of being as fact without escape. The eye moves from the light into the dark, which is the beyond of this plane and up into the sacred. The sacred cannot be comprehended yet it somehow rearranges the visual faculties so the eye can attend to God. Optics is not visual, it is spiritual. The other is not a mirror for me, he teaches me the epiphany of the Other, in fact, my justice towards the other is the bridge into that beyond. The other grants me access into the Highest Truth.
[1] Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquense University Press, 1969), 23. Please forgive the informality of the first person, it’s more fun.
[2] Ibid, 23.
[3] Ibid, 22.
[4] Ibid, 21.
[5] Ibid, 21.[war] as my addition for clarity, but not in a light cast out clarity kind of way.
[6] Casting light; furthermore as the plasticity of representation
[7] Ibid, 44.
[8] Ibid, 124; 125.
[9] Ibid, 126.
[10] Ibid, 129.
[11] Ibid, 23.
[12] Ibid, 40.
[13] Ibid, 67.
[14] Ibid, 23.
[15] Ibid, 69.
[16] Ibid, 191; 194.
[17] Ibid, 200.
[18] Ibid, 76.
[19] Ibid, 193.
[20] Ibid, 204.
[21] Ibid, 77; 203.
[22] Ibid, 88.
[23] Ibid, 39.
[24] Ibid, 53; 51.
[25] Ibid, 67.
[26] Ibid, 34.
[27] Ibid, 34; 51.
[28] Ibid, 35.
[29] Ibid, 174.
[30] Ibid, 66.
[31] Ibid, 39.
[32] Ibid, 77. The spiritual Other is the capital O-other.
[33] Ibid, 66.
[34] Ibid, 78.
[35] Ibid, 123; 124.
[36] Ibid, 79.
[37] Ibid, 202.
bbkafka 