Abstract
In this chapter I begin by considering the prospects for the type of transcendental argument that has recently been attributed to Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics by Diane Perpich. I then go on to argue that this is not a convincing way to deal with moral skepticism, as it fails to achieve what it sets out to do. I then turn from Levinas to the Danish philosopher K. E. Løgstrup and go on to show that one can find transcendental reflections in his thought too, but used in a different way: not to answer the moral skeptic via a transcendental argument, but to help us show how certain fundamental misconceptions underlie moral skepticism nonetheless. In this role transcendental reflections can be more successful—and that perhaps this is the way we should understand Levinas’s comments, too.
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Notes
- 1.
Cf. Barry Stroud, “Transcendental Arguments,” Journal of Philosophy, 65, no. 9 (1968): 241–56.
- 2.
Additional bibliographical details are provided in the List of Abbreviations and in further references to Løgstrup’s works below.
- 3.
Levinas was in Strasbourg in 1923–29, then Freiburg in 1928–29, then back in Strasbourg before going to Paris in 1930 until 1940, while Løgstrup was in Strasbourg in 1930–31, Göttingen in 1931–32, Freiburg in 1933–34, and Tübingen in 1934–35. It is thus at least possible that they both attended Jean Héring’s classes in Strasbourg at some point in 1930, though we have no evidence of this. Hans Hauge has also suggested via personal communication that he finds it plausible that Løgstrup might have got the idea of criticizing Husserl (in his first attempt at writing a doctoral thesis, submitted in 1933) from Levinas’s own thesis defense in 1930, which was on “The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology.” As Bjørn Rabjerg has pointed out, Husserl was almost completely unknown in Denmark at the time (there are only two references to him before Løgstrup discussed him: in 1915 and 1922 and both by the psychologist Edgar Rubin), so it is very likely that Løgstrup got this idea in Strasbourg in 1930. So perhaps not only Sartre, but also Løgstrup, “was introduced to phenomenology by Levinas,” as Levinas famously observed of the former.
- 4.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 21.
- 5.
Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 9.
- 6.
Cf. H. A. Prichard, “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?” in Moral Writings, ed. Jim MacAdam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 7–20.
- 7.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “Morality as Anti-Nature” §6, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 46.
- 8.
Cf. Kant’s worry that morality might be a “phantasm” in Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, AK 4:445.
- 9.
G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33, no. 124 (1958): 1–19.
- 10.
Emmanuel Levinas, Is it Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jill Robbins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 184; cited in Diane Perpich, The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 130, her emphasis.
- 11.
Perpich, Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, 130–1.
- 12.
And also at the beginning of Totality and Infinity in the passage cited, where Perpich notes “that Levinas imagines the skeptic in this way is evident in the opening lines of Totality and Infinity.” Perpich, Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, 209 n. 5.
- 13.
Perpich notes that her way of presenting things “illuminates [Levinas’s] position from a different perspective and in a different idiom,” but still claims that it “illuminates the structure of his thought” (Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, 209 n. 7; cf. 134–5 and 14). Michael Morgan also offers what he calls a “transcendental reading” of Levinas, but without seeming to identify any transcendental argument as such: see Michael L. Morgan, Discovering Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 50–60. Transcendental aspects of Levinas’s thinking are also discussed and debated in: Robert Bernasconi, “Rereading Totality and Infinity,” in The Question of the Other: Essays in Contemporary Continental Philosophy, ed. Arleen B. Dallery and Charles E. Scott (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), 23–34; Theodore de Boer, “An Ethical Transcendental Philosophy,” in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), 83–115; Jeffrey Dudiak, The Intrigue of Ethics: A Reading of the Idea of Discourse in the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001); and Brian Treanor, Aspects of Alterity: Levinas, Marcel and Contemporary Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).
- 14.
Perpich, Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, 131–3.
- 15.
Perpich, Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, 134.
- 16.
B276. Kant of course talks about the idealist, rather than the skeptic.
- 17.
Perpich is here referring to a passage in Otherwise than Being, where Levinas writes:
Why does the other concern me? What is Hecuba to me? Am I my brother’s keeper? These questions have meaning only if one has already presupposed that the ego is concerned only with itself, is only a concern for itself. In this hypothesis it indeed remains incomprehensible that the absolute ego posited for itself speaks a responsibility. The self is through and through a hostage, older than the ego, prior to principles. What is at stake for the self, in its being, is not to be. Beyond egoism and altruism it is the religiosity of the self.
Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alfonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 117. Cf. Perpich, Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, 135.
- 18.
Perpich, Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, 143–4.
- 19.
Perpich, Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, 145–6.
- 20.
Perpich, Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, 134.
- 21.
For further discussion, see my “Silencing the Sceptic?” in Transcendental Arguments in Moral Theory, ed. Jens Peter Brune, Robert Stern, and Micha Werner (Berlin: de Gruyter, forthcoming). I here distinguish performative or retorsive transcendental arguments which try to convict skeptics of undercutting their own position by denying what they must presuppose, from deductive transcendental arguments which try to establish the falsity of the skeptics’ position on the basis of premises that they accept via the claim that the former is a necessary condition of the latter holding true. I also argue that the promise of performative or retorsive transcendental arguments is illusory.
- 22.
Perpich, Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, 134.
- 23.
Cf. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, 8 vols, ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss and Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–60), vol. 2, §113:
I do not admit that indispensability is any ground of belief. It may be indispensable that I should have $500 in the bank—because I have given checks to that amount. But I have never found that the indispensability directly affected my balance, in the least…When we discuss a vexed question, we hope that there is some ascertainable truth about it, and that the discussion is not to go on forever and to no purpose. A transcendentalist would claim that it is an indispensable “presupposition” that there is an ascertainable true answer to every intelligible question. I used to talk like that, myself; for when I was a babe in philosophy my bottle was filled from the udders of Kant. But by this time I have come to want something more substantial.
- 24.
Perpich, Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, 132.
- 25.
See for example Frederick A. Olafson, Heidegger and the Ground of Ethics: A Study of Mitsein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
- 26.
This is not to say that he does so without any reservations: cf. Levinas, Is it Righteous to Be?, 177: “in Heidegger, the ethical relation, Miteinandersein, being-with-another, is only one moment of our presence in the world. It does not have the central place. Mit is always being next to…It is not in the first instance the face, it is zusammensein (being-together), perhaps zusammenmarschieren (marching-together).” Cf. also 137.
- 27.
What precisely Løgstrup means when he speaks of life being a gift in The Ethical Demand is somewhat controversial, but I am here following the suggestion of Hans Fink and Alasdair MacIntyre that his argument relies on the idea of “life being something given in the ordinary philosophical sense of being prior to and a precondition of all we may think and do.” Hans Fink and Alasdair MacIntyre, “Introduction,” in ED xxxv.
- 28.
ED 54–5.
- 29.
Cf. Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (London: Duckworth, 2009).
- 30.
ED 107.
- 31.
M1 88, translation modified. Cf. also ED 66: “to be an individuality, a self, implies that something is claimed of me.”
- 32.
For more on the distinction between transcendental arguments and transcendental claims that is developed in what follows, see Robert Stern, “Taylor, Transcendental Arguments, and Taylor on Consciousness,” Hegel Bulletin 34, no. 1 (2013): 79–97.
- 33.
Cf. Gary Gutting, who observes that “Levinas’s response to ethical skepticism appeals to experience rather than to argument or linguistic analysis.” Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy since 1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 125.
- 34.
Cf. Is It Righteous to Be?, 50, where Levinas responds to the question “How to encounter the other?” by saying: “To encounter, what does that mean? From the very start you are not indifferent to the other. From the very start you are not alone! Even if you adopt an attitude of indifference you are obliged to adopt it! The other counts for you; you answer him as much as he addresses himself to you; he concerns you!” And for a more general comment that may be relevant here, cf. p. 221: “In reflecting on the transcendental conditions of the poem, you have already lost the poem.”
- 35.
Cf. Korsgaard, Sources of Normativity, 140:
If I call out your name, I make you stop in your tracks. (If you love me, I make you come running.) Now you cannot proceed as you did before. Oh, you can proceed, all right, but not just as you did before. For now if you walk on, you will be ignoring me and slighting me. It will probably be difficult for you, and you will have to muster a certain active resistance, a sense of rebellion. But why should you have to rebel against me? It is because I am a law to you. By calling out your name, I have obligated you. I have given you a reason to stop.
Cf. the interview with Levinas cited previously, where he continues: “however indifferent one might claim to be, it is not possible to pass a face by without greeting it, or without saying to oneself, ‘What will he ask of me?’ Not only our personal life, but also all of civilization is founded upon this” (Is it Righteous to Be?, 184). Cf. ibid., 216: “when you have encountered a human being, you cannot simply leave him alone.”
- 36.
M1 72.
- 37.
M1 91.
- 38.
ED 116.
- 39.
ED 156.
- 40.
K. E. Løgstrup, Norm og spontaneitet (1972), partially translated in Beyond the Ethical Demand, ed. Kees van Kooten Niekerk (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 95.
- 41.
That is one way of putting it. Another, suggested by some of Levinas’s comments, is that in some sense the egoist is just right, and there is a kind of “madness” or “irrationality” in responding to the ethical demand—but still not in a way that need trouble us, or that requires some transcendental argument in response. Cf. Is it Righteous to Be?, 145: “Now let us approach something truly mad: I must care for your being. I cannot allow myself to abandon you to your death. This madness is what is human.” See also 190: “[Charity] is wisdom, which interrupts the good sense of the interested animal”; and 250, where he calls our responsibility for the other “madness in a way.”
- 42.
I am grateful to Diane Perpich for her helpful comments on a previous draft of this chapter, and also to the editors of this volume.
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Stern, R. (2016). Others as the Ground of our Existence. In: Kim, H., Hoeltzel, S. (eds) Transcendental Inquiry. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40715-9_9
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