Ontological Responsibility and the Poetics of Nature

Abstract

Levinas argues that Heidegger is so preoccupied with giving being its due that he fails to do justice to the human being who is my neighbour. It is arguable that Levinas is so preoccupied with doing justice to the human being that he fails to do justice to the non-human being, for despite his rare references to our responsibility ‘for everything’ which we noted in the last chapter, these go unexplained and stand out as anomolies in writings which say or imply that direct, unmediated responsibility is responsibility to the other human being. The question therefore arises whether Heidegger’s preoccupation with giving being its due allows human and non-human beings to be given their due? More particularly, does Heidegger’s reflection on the question of being through Heidegger’s poetics of the holy allow, perhaps even imply, a less exclusive view of direct responsibility? What light is shed on the Auseinandersetzung between Heidegger and Levinas by the Auseinandersetzung between Heidegger and Hölderlin? An approach to the first conversation through the second is all the more apt on account of the tendency we have found Levinas displaying in some of his writings to impute irresponsibility to poetry and to art in general. It is to be expected that he would find the poetry of Hölderlin especially lacking in a sense of responsibility in so far as it speaks of nature. Responsibility, Levinas maintains, is beyond nature, beyond phusis, metaphysical.

Insofar as beings which linger awhile do not entirely dissipate themselves in the boundless conceit of aiming for a baldly insistent subsistence, insofar as they no longer share the compulsion to expel one another from what is presently present, they let order belong, didonai dikèn.

Martin Heidegger, ‘The Saying of Anaximander’