CONCLUDING SUMMMARY of Time and The Other

Part III starts where solitude left off. The solitude of the subject is the direct result of its mastery over existing. The subject, starting out from itself to be, realizes the enchainment to itself inherent in identity and becomes occupied with taking care of itself which Levinas calls materiality. It is this materiality that Levinas terms solitude. "Its solitude is not initially the fact that it is without succor, by its being thrown into feeding upon itself, its being mired in itself. This is materiality." (p. 67) The world offers the subject freedom from itself in the form of nourishment, the meeting of the need of materiality. "So in the very instant of the transcendence of need, placing the subject in front of nourishments, in front of the world of nourishment, this transcendence offers the subject a liberation from itself." (p. 67) This liberation is in the form of enjoyment. The subject is absorbed in the object of its nourishment and enjoyment, the object it absorbed. This enjoyment permits the subject to exist at a distance with regard to the object.

Enjoyment is also sensation, that is, knowledge and light; light that permits encountering something other than self. This instantaneous transcendence through space, however, does not manage to escape solitude. The light, which Levinas also calls "brightness" and "intelligibility itself", makes everything seem as if it came from the ego. He sums this by saying "Reason is alone. And in this sense knowledge never encounters anything truly other in the world." (p. 68) [I take this to be a reference to solipsism and the way reason "is alone."]

The object of enjoyment, the need, is located in the world at some distance from the subject, a distance that must be conquered if the subject is to have the freedom offered by the ecstasis of enjoyment. But conquering this space is not the result of mere thought but work; that is, "in effort, in its pain and sorrow." And it is here, in work, that "the subject finds the weight of the existence which involves its existent freedom itself." (p. 68) In this way, the solitude of the subject is reduced to pain and sorrow.

Pain, sorrow, and suffering constitute the purest form of the tragedy of solitude, its finality. And the ecstasis found in enjoyment does not succeed in surmounting it. This finality is the impossibility of nothingness. By this Levinas means that the content of suffering is enjoined to the "impossibility of detaching oneself from suffering." Because of this, there is no refuge in suffering. "It is made up of the impossibility of fleeing or retreating." (p. 69) This is its whole acuity and it derives from the fact of being directly exposed to being. (p. 69) This impossibility of flight is the finality.

In addition to this, however, there is also the proximity of death. Death is "the situation where something absolutely unknowable appears. Absolutely unknowable means foreign to all light, rendering every assumption of possibility impossible, but where we ourselves are seized." (p. 71) Since this is a situation involving the unknowable, it cannot take place in the light. This indicates to the subject that it does not come from her, she is confronted with a situation in which she is no longer the master. The subject "finds itself enchained, overwhelmed, and in some way passive." (p. 71) It is passive because death has announced itself outside all light, thus giving the impression to the subject that it had nothing to do with its appearing, hence, passive; but to call it an experience of passivity, says Levinas, "is only a way of speaking, for experience always already signifies knowledge, light, and initiative, as well as the return of the object to the subject." (p. 70)

The relationship with death, the absolutely unknowable, is a relationship with "something that is absolutely other, something bearing alterity not as a provisional determination we can assimilate through enjoyment, but as something whose very existence is made of alterity." (p. 74) It shows this alterity in the fact that it is ungraspable because it deserts every present. "Death is never now," says Levinas, "when death is here, I am no longer here, not just because I am nothingness, but because I am unable to grasp." (p. 72)

One inference Levinas gets from this analysis of death is that death becomes the limit of the subject’s virility made possible by the hypostasis at the heart of anonymous being, and manifest in the phenomenon of the present, in the light. This end of mastery indicates that we have assumed existing in such a way that an event can happen to us that we no longer assume through vision. (p. 74) "An event happens to us without our having absolutely anything ‘a priori’, without our being able to have the least project, as one says today." (p. 74) It is in this way that death approaches the subject "as something whose very existence is made of alterity." Thus aware of an other, viz., death, the solitude of the subject is broken; existence is seen as pluralistic but "not in a multiplicity of existents; it appears in existing itself." (p. 75) The existing of the existent is alienated in death creating the plurality. The other that is announced possesses existing not as the subject possesses it making its hold on the subject mysterious. But this mysterious hold "indicates that the other is in no way another ‘myself,’ participating with me in a common existence." The other’s entire being is constituted by it alterity. "Consequently," says Levinas, "only a being whose solitude has reached crispation through suffering, and in relation with death, takes its place on a ground where the relationship with the other becomes possible." (p. 76)

Levinas finds a prototype of the relationship with the other in the erotic relationship. "Eros, strong in death, will furnish us with the basis of an analysis of this relationship with mystery?provided it is set forth in terms entirely different from those of the Platonism that is a world of light." (p. 76) What he means by this is that the relationship with the other will never be the feat of grasping a possibility, that is, if one were to characterize it, it would have to be done in terms that "contrast strongly with light." This strong contrast to the terms of light indicates the mystery of the relationship with death but Levinas draws out another insight regarding this relationship. In death the subject no longer has the possibility of grasping, so the futurity which is death is also what is in no way grasped. The fact that it is in no way able to be grasped, gives the future a kind of exteriority, but it is an exteriority totally different from spatial exteriority "precisely through the fact that the future is absolutely surprising." (p. 76) It is in this sense that he says the other is in the future and that "the very relationship with the other is the relationship with the future." (p. 76) Hence, it is the fact of being unable to be anticipated in precisely this way that moves Levinas to characterize the relationship with the other as mystery.

At this point Levinas asks a very interesting question: How can a being enter into relation with the other without allowing its very self to be crushed by the other? This question, he says, must be asked first "because it is the very problem of the preservation of the ego in transcendence." (p. 77) In other words, if the escape from solitude is meant to be something other than the absorption of the ego, and if the subject cannot assume death as it does an object, then how can this reconciliation between the ego and death come about? (77-78) This is a situation wherein "the event happens and yet the subject, without welcoming it, as one welcomes a thing or object, faces up to the event." (p. 78) The relationship with the Other is like this. It is a face-to-face with the Other so it is an event which happens to a subject. But because of the mystery of the relationship it is an event which the subject does not assume, but having been approached by the Other now cannot avoid.

In an attempt to further articulate this relationship with the other and to distinguish it both from the existentialist account and the Marxist account, Levinas appeals to time as a hemeneutical tool. He asks: What is the tie between two instants that have between them the whole interval, the whole abyss, that separates the present and death, this margin at once both insignificant and infinite, where there is always room enough for hope? In other words, what is the tie between the present of the subject and the futurity of death; for the future that death gives is not yet time. In order for it to become time it must enter into a relationship with the present and Levinas asks: What is that relationship? It is accomplished in the face-to-face with the Other. The encroachment of the present on the future is an accomplishment by the intersubjective relationship. He says "the condition of time lies in the relationship between humans, or in history." (p. 79) The future is defined by otherness, the other is not defined by the future. It is just this very future of alterity that is presupposed in the transcendence of expression. And it is the transcendence of expression "that founds the contemporaneousness of civilization and the materiality of every relationship." (p. 82)

Every relationship has mutuality because each relationship is more than a relationship with mystery, "one is for the other what the other is for oneself." (p. 83) We know the other "through sympathy, as another (my)self, as the alter ego." (p. 83) Yet alterity appears as non-reciprocal, the other as other is not only an alter-ego, but the other is what I myself am not. (p. 83) This is due solely to the other’s alterity and for no other reason. And this relationship with alterity is neither spatial nor conceptual.

According to Levinas, there is a situation where the alterity of the other appears in its purity in a positive sense as an essence. It is the feminine. The difference between the two sexes is a difference that does not presuppose a preexisting whole. Not surprisingly, the pathos of love does not end in fusion but in an insurmountable duality of beings, hence, he says, "the pathos of voluptuousness lies in the fact of being two." (p. 86) Thus the relationship preserves alterity but not in the sense of keeping or saving an object; because the Other, as Other, is not an object that becomes ours or us, rather the other withdraws into mystery. And what is important in this notion is that the feminine is not merely the unknowable but "is a mode of being that consists in slipping away from the light…it is a flight before light. Hiding is the way of existing of the feminine, and this fact of hiding is precisely modesty." (p. 87)

By defining the Other’s alterity as modesty, Levinas does not mean for this to be a positing of a freedom identical to and at grips with the subject’s. Says he, "I do not posit another existent in front of me, I posit alterity." (p. 87) This is a way of affirming that alterity is the essence of the other. In fact, it is precisely for this reason that Levinas chose the relationship of eros as the exemplar of the purity of alterity, viz., it is :"a relationship that is impossible to translate into powers and must not be so translated, if one does not want to distort the meaning of the situation." (p. 88) The relationship between the event of the subject and the event of the other is an inverse relationship. The existent is accomplished in consciousness and in the subjective, but the feminine (alterity) is accomplished as a being in modesty, that is, in withdrawing elsewhere than toward the light. By showing how eros differs from possession and power, Levinas hopes to also highlight what is distinctive in this relationship that is neither struggle, fusion, nor knowledge.

Levinas says that this relationship "is a relationship with alterity, with mystery?that is to say, with the future, with what (in a world where there is everything) is never there, with what cannot be there when everything is there?not with a being that is not there, but with the very dimension of alterity. There where all possibles are impossible, where one can no longer be able, the subject is still a subject through eros." (p. 88) [With this encapsulation I am reminded of John Rawls’s recent book, A Theory of Justice. In the early pages of the book rawls lets us in on the model that really motivates his entire project. He said he was caught by the fairness of the procedure mothers use to share a piece of pie between two children: one cuts, the other chooses. This becomes the marinade for everything else in his work. In the same way, it seems, Levinas has made us privy to a similar role that eros plays in his thought and this quotation, I think, captures it well.] And it is through fecundity that Levinas finally discloses how it is possible that, as he puts it, "in alterity of a you can I remain I, without being absorbed or losing myself in that you." [Levinas tells us that what he is calling "fecundity" is what Bergson called elan vital: "Bergson’s notion of elan vital, which merges artistic creation and generation in the same movement?what I call fecundity?does not take account of death, but above all it tends toward an impersonal pantheism, in the sense that it does not sufficiently note the crispation and isolation of subjectivity, which is the ineluctable moment of my dialectic."] What we are looking for, says Levinas, is a way that the ego can become other to itself and this can only happen in one way: through paternity. Paternity is the relationship with a stranger who, entirely while being Other, is myself, the relationship of the ego with a myself who is nonetheless a stranger to me. The child answers to this requirement in that the alterity of the child is not that of an alter ego, strictly speaking, but is a way that one returns to oneself as an other. Thus, before a pure event, a pure future, which is death, where the ego can in no way be able Levinas, in paternity, has found that it is possible for the ego to remain an ego and claim, what Levinas terms, "victory over death."