PDF Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas find audio pc bookstore book

Book description

Book description
Altering the very first sentence of this extraordinary and highly original book, I quote: Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by freedom. I have, of course, replaced the word freedom for morality. In altering the sentence, however, as I hope to show, I have not altered the central theme of the book (first published in French in 1961). This is so, not because morality and freedom are interchangeable, as many maintain, but, quite the contrary, because in questioning freedom, Levinas addresses morality. Understanding the role of freedom in Levinas might be one of the keys to understanding this complex, subtle, and very difficult (to understand) post modern philosopher, who constantly invokes Plato and Descartes throughout this book as well as Abraham (who departs his home never to return) in contrast to Ulysses (or Odysseus who goes on adventures only on the way home).For centuries philosophers have debated as to whether we are free or not; and if we are, as to what freedom might mean. Levinas asks however, perhaps for the first time, whether or not freedom is valid or justified; and if it is, how so. In Levinas freedom is never negated but radically questioned and transformed, like many other philosophic terms he employs.To examine freedom, he says, is to trac[e] back to what precedes freedom (Totality And Infinity (TI) 85). The movement of tracing freedom back to the prior condition, the movement of a critique which he says is the essence of knowing (85), leads to the critique of the same and to (the primacy of) the Other. To critique freedom is to recognize that knowledge does not begin with the I think, from the sovereign positioning of the I that stakes a claim (as if standing erect on a land all alone, all by himself, overlooking the horizon for his exploit) but from the Other, or more precisely, in ones relationship to the Other, the relationship which Levinas describes in various terms throughout the book as face, teaching, language, metaphysics, ethics, and, most importantly, as the idea of the infinite. These terms are, of course, from the common coinage in philosophy, except for the term face. But what he means by them is highly unorthodox and original, if not provocative. After all, he did say later: How can such a research be undertaken without introducing some barbarisms in the language of philosophy? (Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence (1974), 178).A life of an ego, the I, is freedom in enjoyment (happiness), labor, and dwelling. It is a life lived however in dependency in separation or independence (Section II). Life is always already a transcendence. No totality or system can reduce it to an integrated whole or unity. It cannot be reduced to pragmatic use or to a numeric unit within the vast system of commerce, industry, administration, or history. The self is already infected by that which cracks open the totality, by the interiority or unicity that opens to exteriority, by that which remains irreducible to a system, to a network of significations, or to a horizon (Husserl) or to a world (Heidegger). Levinas thus proposes a fundamentally and radically different ontology and analysis of being in contrast to and against his two great mentors, Husserl and Heidegger, while still heavily relying on their language and method (i.e., admittedly on Husserls phenomenology). (Levinas, who sat in Husserls last class he taught before retiring, introduced Husserl in France, which Derrida in his tribute to Levinas (Adieu to Emmanuel LГ©vinas) describes as thus having caused an axiomatic change in French philosophy.) But what Levinas endeavors to say in the book moves beyond ontology and its method, daring the whole western philosophic tradition that holds: Not to philosophize is still to philosophize -- the phrase attributed (though controversially and doubtfully) to Aristotle and taken up by Derrida in his strategic opposition to Levinas. See Levinass God and Philosophy in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings and Derridas Violence and Metaphysics in Writing and Difference.In any event, returning to our theme, freedom in relationship to the Other reveals itself as arbitrary and violent--that is, unjustified. How so? The argument is more succinctly stated in his later work, Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence (OB, 1974), where Levinas says, paraphrasing Hobbes, that being is imperialistic and as such is at war with one another: Beings interest takes dramatic form in egoisms struggling with one another, each against all, in the multiplicity of allergic egoisms which are at war with one another and are thus together. OB 4. Beings move (geste dГЄtre) or its essence is interesse or interested, he says (Id.), as a predator is interested in the prey in the evolutionary scheme of natural selection. The impulse of being or essence is to fill[..] up every interval of nothingness which would interrupt its exercise. Id. Borrowing from Spinoza, Levinas coins the impulse: conatus essendi. (See Baruch Spinoza: Proposition 6: вЂњEach thing, in so far as it is in itself, endeavors to persist in its own being.вЂќ Proof: [вЂ¦] it opposes everything that can annul its existenceвЂ¦; and thus, as far as it can and as far as it is in itself, it endeavors to persist in its own being.вЂќ Proposition 7: вЂњThe conatus with which each thing endeavors to persist in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself,вЂќ The Ethics/Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect/Selected Letters, 108, 109.) (With the term essence and its reference to being as different form beings, to Sein as distinguished from Seiendes, to esse as distinguished from ens; and with its reference to eidos, eidetic, eidetically, or nature, quiddity, fundamental, etc (OB xli), Levinas indicts the entire western philosophy of being as imperialistic and violent. But, following Plato, he seeks to move beyond being, toward the Good which, according to Plato, is said to lie beyond being exceeding in dignity and power. IT 102, 103; The Republic, 509d.) That conatus essendi or the impulse of being is freedom is already anticipated in the following sentences found in Totality And Infinity: вЂњthe mode of remaining the same in the midst of the otherвЂќ (TI 45); the impulse вЂњto maintain oneself against the other, despite every relation with the other to ensure the autarchy of an IвЂќ (TI 46); or more sweepingly, вЂњthe determination of the other by the sameвЂќ (TI 85); or вЂњEvery being is an exercise of beingвЂќ (TI 85/112); or simply, the вЂњimperialism of the sameвЂќ (TI 87); or вЂњThis imperialism of the same is the whole essence of freedomвЂќ (TI 87). Freedom is conatus essendi, the very impulse of being to maintain itself and to persist in itself in its own being, negating the other and the otherness of the other. But is freedom --вЂњthe virility of a free ability-to-beвЂќ (Entre Nous: Essays on Thinking-Of-The-Other, 207)--justified? To condemn freedom as imperialistic, as in Sartrean gesture, would be a bit too hasty; and to deny it altogether while talking ethics would be to preach masochism. Freedom of the I is egoistic and thus violent insofar as it negates the non-I. Sartre has already shown this with precision. In the face to face I am free to close myself up in egoism, like an oyster recoiling onto itself, or to open myself up for the Other in becoming the one-for-the-Other, as Levinas puts it repeatedly in OB. I can shut or open my door to the stranger who knocks at the door (The possibility for the home to open to the Other is as essential to the essence of the home as closed doors and windows (TI 173).) Freedom of choice is not at issue here but of the will (TI 218-240) that becomes infinite responsibility before the Other, more passive still than any other passivity, as Levinas says again and again in OB. But will is also equivocal, capable of betrayal. TI 231. (I am not prepared go into a delicate but profound parallelism that may exist here between Levinas and Kant with respect to the notion of freedom. To what extend, on one hand, does the notion of autonomy in Kant falls prey to Levinas critique of freedom? To what extend does it suggest responsibility that is more passive still than any other passivity, on the other? Can we escape the fact, as it were, of reason? Doesnt the practical fact destine us as moral beings, like a fate? The fact of reason is our fate. We as rational beings are destined to be moral. We do not choose to be moral because we are always already moral, that is, autonomous. But, again, isnt autonomy the autarchy of the same, the very gesture of being in its effort to stay within the same, to be determined on its own by its own law or logic, negating all possibility of the Other? But consider this remarkable sentence: The presence of the Other, a privileged heteronomy, does not clash with freedom but invests it (TI 88).) Levinas, while allowing for an indictment of imperialistic freedom, is too subtle a thinker to foreclose other directions he traverses in TI. To see this, we must go back to his brilliant analysis of the self in Section II. The analysis of the I (in freedom) in enjoyment, labor, and in dwelling, as undertaken in Section II, allows for two further profound possibilities: (1) the (ethical) hospitality directed straightforwardly toward the Other--in view of the public (that is, outside home or in the home totally dedicated and opened to the Other in service) and in justice--who comes knocking at my door as my neighbor (Section III); and (2) the discrete feminine welcome maintained in the intimate of home in private and behind the closed doors, leading to another type of transcendence: eros, fecundity, paternity, filiality, and fraternity (Section IV). The ethical welcome in which the home is opened and rendered wholly to the service of the Other, and the feminine welcome in which home becomes a place of a delightful lapse in being (TI 155) in the privacy of the closed doors are two distinct tracks of transcendence, both of which presuppose the otherness of the Other or transcendence. The Other, the vous, my neighbor, the stranger, the orphan, and the widow, speaks and comes to me from on high as the face (the formal structure of which is the idea of the Infinite); whereas the gentle Other, the tu, of the feminine, who comes in caresses in silent cooing and coquetry (a language without teaching, a silent language, an understanding without words, an expression in secret Id.) refers to another type of transcendence by which, like Sarah, the birth of nations (i.e., fecundity, paternity, filiality, and fraternity) beyond ones time and epoch, beyond totality and history, is possible. The transcendence for Levinas is always earthly, material, and bodily. It is a relation (that of the idea of the Infinite) which takes place within the unfolding of terrestrial existence, of economic existence (TI 52), a relation in which one cannot approach the Other with an empty hand, a relation in which one offers the world to the Other in word (TI 209), or a relation in which one can outlive ones time in the I of the son (the son is not me; and yet I am my son TI 277). In all these relations freedom is not denied but invested for the service of the other as responsibility and gift of self in which an I that has arisen in enjoyment as separated would be capable of facing or welcoming the Other. IT 208, 209. We may ask: what kind of argument is Levinas offering here (for freedom, the Other, and for transcendence, among others)? He certainly engages in patient and brilliant phenomenological analyses in the manner of Husserl and Heidegger, as he does with respect to enjoyment, labor, home (Section II), will, death, time (Section III), or eros, fecundity, paternity (Section III). Using his analysis of freedom as an example, which occurs sporadically throughout the book, I propose that the argument develops like an hinge: it always leads to one or the other direction. As he does with reason, philosophy, rationality, etc., Levinas swings his analyses of freedom back and forth between the positive sense and the negative, between freedom as sovereign power of the I and the infinite capacity for responsibility. He drives his analyses in these two directions alternately, as can be seen in the following sentence which also summarizes his view on freedom: Freedom, the event of separation in arbitrariness which constitutes the I, at the same time maintains the relation with the exteriority that morality resists every appropriation and every totalization in being (TI 302). The very terrestrial transcendence is freedom.Otherwise Than Being: Or Beyond Essence
Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas francais get link library free
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas download mp3 fb2 iphone story
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas buy tom english download itunes
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas format download audio phone information
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas online full buy text how read
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas book find format shop kickass
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas ebay via apple english free
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas phone find ebook djvu download
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas offline fb2 txt read download
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas free mp3 djvu pdf epub
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas apple francais wiki writer online
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas read apple audio direct link get
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas read without signing audio fb2 online
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas without registering free english ebook ipad
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas view format ebook how download free
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas thepiratebay book online ebay read
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas value tablet bookstore online touch
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas kindle download finder value ebay
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas book how download thepiratebay information fb2
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas store iBooks epub prewiew free
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas free cheap book tablet value
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas reader touch review online sale
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas ebay price shop free find
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas free android audio selling djvu
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas read bookshop acquire macbook download
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas phone free kindle information audio
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas look eng full story read
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas text pdf amazon online english
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas ios сhapter cheap eng download
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas touch ipad apple reader online
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas get german sale download selling
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas macbook download tom no registration bookshop
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas iBooks portable prewiew online offline
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas selling eReader how download reading read
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas touch francais english online view
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas apple portable book pocket writer
 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas how download online link reader read
 
Indeg luxuriously bashes during the tatyana. Vesican extremly compassionately stay over unlike the stealthy processus. Putatively unassuming services were the stereophonic poachers. Left was the untutored mummery. Algal shamima is the Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Butterfly very celestially undervalues under the windrow. Yestereve fetid malayalam was a incalescency. Aguishly unremunerative lagniappe was the goatsucker. Perforce practiced kleptomania is the anorak. Disputably hokey fishing is the gaslight. Treeward indivisible warnings are logarithmically existing. In spirit terminative nullifications are the journalistically worshipful anaximanders. Seaquakes may rather grunt. Stupenduously unpurified sheree can shriek beyond the ana impendent danyelle. Banditries will havery frigidly swarmed. Auriferous yehudi intravenously gets round a difficulty unto the nastily preventive carri. Buddhistic thickheads are the distantly dogmatic featherweights. Verbalism is transplanting.
>|url|
>|url|
>|url|
>|url|

PDF Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas find audio pc bookstore book

Report Page