The Ethic of Loyalty to the Visible

Sagi, Avi

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-99178-8_3

Avi Sagi⁴

Part of the book series: Contributions To Phenomenology ((CTPH,volume 99))

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Abstract

The previous chapter dealt with the relationship between an ethic of justice and an ethic of compassion. One of the foundations of an ethic of compassion, as I showed, is loyalty to the event—a loyalty driven by the recognition of the moral agent’s unique situation. In this chapter, I will attempt to broaden the scope of this loyalty and will refer to it as “loyalty to the visible.” I open with an explication of the nature of loyalty in general and then move on to consider loyalty to the visible in particular. This chapter will serve as a theoretical platform for the others since the “ethic of loyalty to the visible” is the foundation for all the variations of inner retreat.

This chapter appeared in a Hebrew book titled Facing Others and Otherness: The Ethics of Inner Retreat (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2012). The Hebrew title is Mul aherim ve-aherut: Etika shel ha-nesigah ha-penimit.

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Notes

1.
Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 16–17.
2.
Ibid., 120.
3.
George Fletcher, Loyalty: An Essay on the Morality of Relationship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 7.
4.
Ibid., 18.
5.
Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 31.
6.
Cf. Richard Mullin, “Josiah Royce’s Philosophy of Loyalty as the Basis for Democratic Ethic,” in Democracy and the Post-Totalitarian Experience, ed. Leszek Koczanowicz and Beth J. Singer (New York: Rodopi, 2005), 183–184.
7.
Fletcher, Loyalty, 17.
8.
Ibid., 14.
9.
Ibid., 122.
10.
Ibid., 18–19.
11.
Andrew Oldenquist, “Loyalties,” The Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982), 175. See also John Ladd, “Loyalty,” The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 97; Fletcher, Loyalty, 14.
12.
R. E. Ewin, “Loyalty and Virtues,” The Philosophical Quarterly 42/169 (1992), 406.
13.
Ibid., 411.
14.
Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 18.
15.
Ibid., 22.
16.
Ibid., 18–19.
17.
See Ladd, “Loyalty,” 97.
18.
Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 19.
19.
Ibid., 131. See also 130.
20.
Ladd, “Loyalty,” 98.
21.
Fletcher, Loyalty, 6.
22.
Ibid., 10.
23.
Ibid.. On the meaning of the “voice,” see ibid., 4.
24.
Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 353.
25.
Ladd, “Loyalty,” 98. On the additional elements of loyalty, beyond duty, see Sophie Bryant, “Loyalty,” in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. 8, 183–184.
26.
Ibid., 184.
27.
Ibid., 187.
28.
See Ewin, “Loyalty and Virtues,” 405; Bryant, “Loyalty,” 184, 187.
29.
Fletcher, Loyalty, 8.
30.
Ibid., 9.
31.
John Kleining, “Loyalty,” Stanford Encyclpedia of Philosophy,
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/loyalty/
32.
See also Stephen Nathanson, Patriotism, Morality and Peace (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993), 106–109.
33.
Fletcher, Loyalty, 9.
34.
See Avi Sagi: Halakhic Loyalty: Between Openness and Closure (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2012) [Heb], especially 203–223.
35.
This matter points to the crucial role of the loyalist in constituting the object of his loyalty, including when the object is God. I discuss this complex issue in ch. 7 below.
36.
Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 85.
37.
Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 94 (emphasis in original).
38.
Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 30 (emphasis in original).
39.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), 197^e.
40.
Ibid.
41.
See ibid., 212–213.
42.
Ibid., 193.
43.
See Gordon Baker, Wittgenstein’s Method: Neglected Aspects (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 1–2, 182.
44.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 191–192.
45.
Ibid., 193.
46.
Ibid., 194–196.
47.
James Joyce, Stephen Hero, ed. Theodore Spencer, John J. Slocum, and Herbert Cahoon (Norfolk, CO: New Directions, 1963), 211.
48.
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 202 (emphasis in original).
49.
Ibid., 215.
50.
Ibid., 75. See also Emmanuel Levinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 54–55.
51.
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 203.
52.
Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 68.
53.
Ibid., 72.
54.
Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other, trans. Nidra Poller (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 7.
55.
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Allan Bass (London/New York: Routledge, 2001), 115.
56.
Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, 78.
57.
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 39.
58.
Levinas, Humanism of the Other, 65–67.
59.
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 35–38. See also Derrida, Writing and Difference, 116–117.
60.
Ibid.
61.
Charles E. Scott, “A People’s Witness Beyond Politics,” in Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas for Philosophy, Literature, and Religion, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak (New York: Routledge, 1995), 27.
62.
Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara E. Galli (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 234.
63.
Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 98.
64.
Ibid., 99.
65.
Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, 68.
66.
Ibid., 70.
67.
Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 29.
68.
cf. Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, trans. Simon Kaplan (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1972), 146.
69.
Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor-Smith (London: Collins, 1961), 41.
70.
Martin Buber, The Knowledge of Man, trans. Maurice Friedman and Ronald Gregor Smith (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1965), 79.
71.
Buber, Between Man and Man, 47. For further discussion, see Avi Sagi, “The Category of the ‘Other’ and Its Implications for Buber’s Philosophy of Dialogue,” Daat 13 (1984): 95–114 [Heb].
72.
Cohen, Religion of Reason, 134.
73.
Ibid.
74.
Ibid., 135.
75.
Ibid., 134–135.
76.
Ibid., 146.
77.
For a discussion of the “trace” concept, see ch. 6 below.
78.
Cohen, Religion of Reason, 146–147.
79.
Ibid., 114.
80.
Ibid.
81.
Ibid., 147.
82.
Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: The Orion Press, 1959), 21.
83.
Ibid., 123. Similar descriptions appear in Robert Antelme, L’espèce humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 35–37.
84.
Axel Honneth, “Invisibility: On the Possibility of ‘Recognition,’” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 75 (2001), 111.
85.
Ibid., 112.
86.
Ibid., 113.
87.
Ibid., 116–126.
88.
Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis, ID: Hackett, 1981), 14.
89.
Honneth, “Invisibility,” 121.
90.
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 195.
91.
Ibid., 65.
92.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Pocket Books, 1978), 256–257.
93.
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 75.
94.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 51.
95.
Ibid., 52 (emphases in original).
96.
Ibid., 187.
97.
Ibid., 186–187.
98.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 240.
99.
Ibid., 241.
100.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, trans. Carleton Dallery (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 167.
101.
Marion, In Excess, 30 (emphases in original).
102.
Ibid., 30–31.
103.
Ibid., 32.
104.
Ibid., 32–33.
105.
Ibid., 34 (emphases in original).
106.
Ibid., 56,115.
107.
Ibid., 57.
108.
Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 89–150.
109.
Ibid., 148–149.
110.
Ibid., 149.
111.
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 255.
112.
See Robert Gibbs, “Height and Nearness: Jewish Dimensions of Radical Ethics, in Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas for Philosophy, Literature, and Religion, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak (New York: Routledge, 1995), 14–15.
113.
Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 82.
114.
Ibid., 86.
115.
Ibid., 86.
116.
Ibid., 86–87.
117.
Ibid., 183.
118.
Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London/New York: Verso, 2001), 40–44.
119.
Avi Sagi, A Challenge: Returning to Tradition (Jerusalem/ Tel Aviv: Shalom Hartman Institute/Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2003) [Heb].
120.
Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 113–115.
121.
Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other (and Additional Essays), trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 82.
122.
Marion, In Excess, 37.
123.
John Kekes, The Morality of Pluralism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 93.

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Department of Philosophy, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel
Avi Sagi

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Sagi, A. (2018). The Ethic of Loyalty to the Visible. In: Living With the Other. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 99. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99178-8_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99178-8_3
Published: 14 January 2019
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-99177-1
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