Abstract
This paper challenges Levinas’s thesis that it is necessary to escape Heidegger’s fundamental ontology in order to think ethically. It discusses how Levinas thinks the ethical relationship in Otherwise than Being, as “substitution,” as “responsibility for the responsibility of the other,” and it shows that one’s responsibility for the other’s responsibility can also be interpreted existentially, as authentic Fürsorge, as care for the other’s care. The “substitution of one for the other” and the “care for the other” are indeed different, but not antithetical. Firstly, Dasein’s authentic existentiell understanding of the other does not reduce him to “the same”, because it does not “reduce” him to the apriori structures of Dasein. Secondly, the equiprimordiality of “Being-with” (Mitsein) and “Dasein-with” (Mitdasein) – in short, Mitt(da)sein – indicates the exposure of one to the other within the factical modes of Being-with-one-another and, therefore, the indebtedness of one to the other for one’s potentiality-for-Being. Consequently, Dasein’s assumed responsibility or authentic care for its potentiality-for-Being is not ego(t)istic, as Levinas contends, but entails caring for the other’s Being, for his unique otherness.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Levinas explicitly contrasts the responsibility for others with “the concern [i.e. care (souci)] ‘that existence takes for its very existence’” (Levinas 2011, p. 93), with “the limited and egoist fate of him who is only for-himself” (ibid., p. 116).
- 2.
In a 1990 “Prefatory Note” to his Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism (1934), Levinas affirms his conviction that “the source of the bloody barbarism of National Socialism … stems from the essential possibility of elemental Evil … which … is inscribed within the ontology of a being concerned with Being (de l’être soucieux d’être)… Such a possibility still threatens the subject correlative with Being …, that famous subject of transcendental idealism that before all else wishes to be free and thinks itself free” (Levinas 1990, p. 63).
- 3.
It is “ethical” in the pre-theoretical sense of the Greek ethos: “abode, dwelling place,” used by Heidegger (1993b, pp. 256, 258) when he characterizes the thought of Being as “the originary ethics.”
- 4.
Levinas’s “substitution” and Heidegger’s authentic “care for” the other or “solicitude” (Fürsorge) are different, but not – as Marion (2011, pp. 57–59) argues – diametrically opposed.
- 5.
The understanding – or, for later Heidegger, thinking – of Being can be regarded as a recognition of otherness also because it is not a cognition, but a letting be of Being: Being is “the other of thought,” because “one can have to let be only that which one is not” (Derrida 2001, p. 176). As I argue toward the end of this paper, that is why Dasein’s authentic self-understanding, by which it lets itself be its potentiality-for-Being, is not actually a movement of the same.
- 6.
Heidegger specifically warns us off confusing Dasein “in each case mine” with an ego. Mineness (Jemeinigkeit) “belongs to any existent Dasein … as the condition which makes authenticity and inauthenticity possible” (Heidegger 1962, p. [53]). So this “ontologically constitutive state” explains also Dasein’s everyday and rather inauthentic self-understanding, on which the philosophy of subject actually rests (cf. ibid., pp. [114–115]).
- 7.
Being “is no class or genus of beings; yet it pertains to every being. Its ‘universality’ is to be sought higher up”; “Being is the transcendens,” i.e. it is not to be found among beings; yet it is not divorced from them. Most importantly, the transcendence of Dasein’s Being “implies the possibility and the necessity of the most radical individuation” (Heidegger 1962, p. [38]). — Since Being is not a “first being,” Heidegger’s ontology is not a “first philosophy.” Accordingly, it is highly problematic to conflate it with traditional ontology, as Levinas does. On this point, see for example Derrida 2001, pp. 170–171, and Raffoul 2005, pp. 144–145.
- 8.
- 9.
That Levinas does not fully acknowledge Heidegger’s destruction of subjectivity is already detectable in his commentary Martin Heidegger and Ontology (1932), where he says that Being and Time analyzes “the subjectivity of the subject” (Levinas 1996a, pp. 18, 26, 28).
- 10.
For a discussion of Levinas’s interpretation of Heideggerian ontology as idealism, see Lilly 2008, pp. 43ff. As Lilly puts it, this interpretation is “a fantasm that simplifies Heidegger’s thought”; Levinas “does not just misread Heidegger, but vigorously suppresses basic elements of Heidegger’s thought whose recognition would have challenged his misreading” (ibid., pp. 35–36).
- 11.
By determining temporality as what makes possible the interpretation of Dasein’s Being as care, the existential analytic fulfils its foundational role, permitting “the interpretation of time as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of Being” (ibid., p. [1]).
- 12.
Certainly, Dasein’s Being is not separated from its meaning, which is the meaning of this Being itself (ibid., p. [325]); but they are not indistinguishable.
- 13.
We must say factical Dasein because it is the one involved in a concrete existentiell relation – authentic/ethical or not – with the other, and not Dasein “in general.”
- 14.
Of course, one important difference is that while Dasein’s responsibility is more fundamental than accountability, Levinas’s substitution is the reversal of it (cf. Raffoul 2010, pp. 163–219; 242ff).
- 15.
That Dasein’s existence should be seen as exposure is emphasized by Nancy (1999, p. 207), who rightly argues for the need to radicalize Mitsein in order to dispel the apparent solipsism of Dasein’s individualization. My insistence on the co-originarity between Mitsein and Mitdasein is one attempt in this direction.
- 16.
This becomes clear when, for example, somebody important to me dies and I feel that a part of me has died too, namely those possibilities that I could have realized (only) in relation to that person (together with or inspired by her).
- 17.
The idea that existence is a “private fact” (Levinas 1987, p. 41) deeply informs Levinas’s – ultimately, unsustainable – thesis that Dasein is a solipsistic subject (cf. ibid., p. 65).
- 18.
I am indebted to them even privatively for my potentiality-for-Being: even when someone does not respect my individuality, I still can understand, however implicitly, how I should be treated.
- 19.
The translation of Entschlossenheit by “resoluteness” (in French, “résolution”) is dictionary-wise correct, but hermeneutically misleading: it loses the kinship with Erschlossenheit, “disclosedness,” which is not under Dasein’s control, it “is not the deliberate action of a subject” (Heidegger 1993a, p. 192).
- 20.
My Dasein “has, in Being-with others, already become guilty toward them” (Heidegger 1962, p. [288]).
- 21.
For a wider discussion of the heteronomy of Dasein’s self, see for example Schürmann 2003, pp. 532 ff.
- 22.
It is uncanny because it is other – not “an anthropological or ontic other,” for it is not a being (Raffoul 2010, p. 252). It is my Being.
- 23.
By doing this I would also violate the individuality of those others whose existence is intertwined with his existence and thus, however indirectly, with mine.
References
Bernasconi, Robert. 2002. What is the question to which “substitution” is the answer? In The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi, 234–251. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dastur, Françoise. 2002. The call of conscience. The most intimate alterity. In Heidegger and practical philosophy, ed. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew, 87–97. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2001. Violence and metaphysics: An essay on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas [1964]. In Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (trans: Alan Bass), 97–192. London: Routledge.
Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time (trans: John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Heidegger, Martin. 1993a. The origin of the work of art [1935–6] (trans: Albert Hofstadter). In Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. Davis Farrell Krell, 139–212. New York: Harper Collins Publishers.
Heidegger, Martin. 1993b. Letter on “humanism” [1946] (trans: Frank A. Capuzzi and J. Glenn Gray). In Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, 213–265. New York: Harper Collins Publishers.
Husserl, Edmund. 1960. Cartesian Meditations [1929-] (trans: Dorion Cairns). Dordrecht: Springer.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1951. L’Ontologie est-elle fondamentale?. Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 1 (janvier-mars):88–98.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority [1961] (trans: Alphonso Lingis). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1971. Totalité et Infini. Essai sur l’extériorité. Paris: Livre de Poche
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1987. Time and the Other [1948] (trans: Richard A. Cohen). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1990. Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism [1934] (trans: Seán Hand). Critical Inquiry 17(1):62–71.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1996a. Martin Heidegger and Ontology [1932] (trans: by The Committee of Public Safety). Diacritics 26 (1):11–32.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1996b. Is Ontology fundamental? (trans: Simon Critchley, Peter Atterton, and Graham Noctor). In Emmanuel Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, 1–10. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1998. From the one to the other: transcendence and time [1983] (trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav). In Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, 133–153. New York: Columbia University Press.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 2011. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence [1974] (trans: Alphonso Lingis). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
Lilly, Reginald. 2008. Levinas’s Heideggerian fantasm. In French interpretations of Heidegger. An exceptional reception, ed. David Pettigrew and François Raffoul, 35–58. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Marion, Jean-Luc. 2005. A note concerning the ontological indifference [1998]. In Emmanuel Levinas. Critical assessments of leading philosophers, Levinas, phenomenology and his critics, vol. I, ed. Katz Claire and Trout Clara, 312–325. London: Routledge.
Marion, Jean-Luc. 2011. The Reason of the Gift [2008] (trans: Stephen E. Lewis). Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1999. La Communauté désœuvrée [1983/1986]. Paris: Christian Bourgois.
Raffoul, François. 2005. Being and the other: Ethics and ontology in Levinas and Heidegger [1999]. In Addressing Levinas, ed. Nelson Eric Sean, Kapust Antje, and Still Kent, 138–151. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Raffoul, François. 2010. The origins of responsibility. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Schürmann, Reiner. 2003. Broken Hegemonies [1996] (trans: Reginald Lilly). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Borţun, I. (2016). Substitution and Mit(da)sein: An Existential Interpretation of the Responsibility for the Other. In: Foran, L., Uljée, R. (eds) Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida: The Question of Difference. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 86. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39232-5_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39232-5_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-39230-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-39232-5
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)