My Take on Levinas

There's a kind of person who finds it funny that you care about right and wrong. He'll tell you, patiently, that morality is a story the comfortable tell themselves, that power is the only real currency, and that when it's spent every nice idea you have evaporates. He's usually winning the argument, too. Levinas spent a whole book taking him seriously.

He took him seriously and he still answered no. Morality isn't the dupe. The cynic is missing something. I agree. The trouble is how Levinas gets there, because his answer runs straight through God, and I haven't taken that leap of faith.

So the question I'm really asking is whether his answer survives without the foundation he stood it on. There's a colder version of the doubt, and it's mine too. Maybe the whole thing is just a man who lived through the worst of the last century wishing people had been gentler than they were. I'll get to that. First, the part even the cynic has to grant.

Totality

Levinas doesn't answer the cynic with kindness or any of the soft words the cynic is waiting to mock. He starts with war, because war is where the cynic's picture of the world stops hiding.

War is a complete system with no outside. Every person in it gets reduced to a carrier of forces they didn't choose and can't see, handed a role and made to play it. He calls this totality, and what defines it is that there's nowhere to stand and decline it, because the map already has a slot marked for that too. The worst of it, he says, isn't the wound. You get broken off from your own life and made to play a part you don't recognize as yours while you're still standing in it.

You don't need a war for that. Most of the totalities that process people run quietly during peacetime. The foster kid is a case number, the worker is a headcount, the patient is a bed and a billing code, the migrant is a figure in a politician's speech. I was the case number. Each one is a function the system tracks perfectly, and being tracked that perfectly is the quiet violence of it.

It even catches the people who think they run it. "We have to build it, because if we don't, they will." That one sentence holds the whole grammar of totality. Nobody can step out and refuse, and the builders are carried along too, most of them running a race they don't even want. The AI arms race is a war nobody declared and nobody can leave.

The cynic looks at all this and says there's nothing else. About the inside of the map, he's right. What I want to know is whether the map is the whole territory.

The Face

If totality has no outside, then to answer the cynic I have to find one, something the complete map can't hold. Levinas calls it the face.

The face isn't a look or an expression, or the warm feeling of meeting a person instead of reading their file. Those are things you take in and sort, and the moment you sort someone you've made them one more item on the map. The face is the part of a person that won't sit still inside the box you have for them.

It can't be a better description, either. If what makes someone different from me is a quality, poorer or foreign or some other type, then I've only found them a new box. You can flatten a cobalt miner into a line on a supply chain, and the line can be accurate, and adding more data never gets you the man. More data is still the map.

What keeps him off it is that he can answer back. When you turn a person into a topic or a case or a statistic, the description seems to hold them. Then they speak, and the description stops fitting. The man at the bottom of the supply chain has his own account of his life, and it disagrees with mine. My file can't close over someone who can say that's not who I am.

For Levinas, that talking back points up. The face spills over every box because it carries a trace of the infinite, and infinity is, in the end, his word for God. That's the part I can't keep. I have one world and nothing above it to appeal to.

So I look sideways instead of up. The face stands in front of you at eye level, close enough to argue with, and the arguing is enough. Whatever keeps a person from collapsing into their file is already here, between me and someone the system would rather I saw as a number.

Ethics doesn't stop at war

The cynic's strongest move is to wait. He lets me have my face, my person who can't be filed, and then he points at a battlefield. When the artillery opens up, where's your face then? Murdered, in a ditch, with the rest of the soft ideas. So much for ethics.

He's right about the ditch, and I won't argue that part. The face gets murdered. It happened to Levinas's own family. His parents and brothers were killed in the war for belonging to a category, and the face didn't save them. He knew better than the cynic ever will that the face doesn't work like a shield. A philosophy that needed it to win would have died with them.

His claim is that the face obligates you, whether or not anyone obeys. A murder is ethics being violated, and you can only violate something that was there to begin with. Killing a person is a different act from felling a tree because the person said, without a word, you shall not, and you did it anyway. The cynic looks at the broken obligation and says it was never real. You don't break what isn't there. The body in the ditch is the face, refused.

A lot of people stop there. The obligation is real but it loses, the decent thing is real but the world grinds it under, so what. The record shows a second thing, and the cynic has a harder time with it. Sometimes the hand stays.

Trench warfare is about the worst place people have ever built. The men in it were already killers, inside a machine that ordered the killing. And sometimes they didn't fire. Along the quiet stretches of the front, both sides worked out unspoken truces, live and let live. Most of that was a deal, restraint traded for restraint, and the cynic can have that part. A deal explains why a line went quiet. It doesn't explain the man who had someone in his sights, alone, and let him walk. Nothing with any force stopped his hand. A face did.

Mostly the order wins. Mostly men kill when they're told to, and every war ever fought proves the face doesn't always stop the sword. But if the cynic's map were the whole territory, the number of men who held their fire would be zero, and it isn't. With every pressure to kill, no god promising a reward and nobody watching to applaud, some men still couldn't. That mercy paid for nothing and got chosen anyway.

Both things are true at once. The face gets murdered and the hand sometimes stays. You don't get to keep only the bright one, and you don't have to give in to the dark one.

The cynic mistook a violation for a refutation. He saw the obligation broken and decided it was never binding. The order had to override something to get the trigger pulled, and in the man who held his fire it couldn't. War is where you find out ethics was never optional.

Camus

I had this argument with Simone Weil, and it comes back here harder.

Camus said the leap of faith is a dodge. The world hands you no meaning, and sneaking it back in through God is a way of not looking at that straight. Weil leapt to grace. Levinas leaps too, but his is the most careful leap I've read. He doesn't promise the face will win. He throws out the cheap answers to the cynic first. Peace can't just mean the absence of war, and it can't be whatever order the winners leave behind, because that peace is still built on war. Then he says the only real answer is a relation to something beyond history altogether.

By Camus's measure that's still the leap. Take it out and you keep his diagnosis and lose his guarantee. That's where I want to stand.

And like with Weil, I don't stop where Camus stops. Camus gives you one man refusing to pretend, and one man isn't enough when the system processes people by the million. Levinas saw part of this himself. The face is two people, but there's always a third. The moment there are two others in front of me, I have to weigh them and judge between them. That's where justice comes from, and law, and every institution. It's also the door totality walks back in through, because judging between people means putting them on the same scale. He knew that risk was in his own work. He walked through that door himself once, and I'll get to it.

Without God

This is where my version has to earn itself.

Levinas says the first thing a face tells you is you shall not kill, and he ties that command to the infinite on purpose. Without it, he worries, the command is only my feeling, something I can talk myself out of. So the real question is whether you shall not kill stays binding once God is gone, or shrinks into I'd personally prefer you didn't.

My answer is that it binds sideways. The face binds me because I'm a face too. The person saying don't kill me is the same kind of being I am, someone who can be wronged and can say no. If I decide that one can be erased, I've decided that anyone who can say no can be erased, and I'm one of those. Our brains are built to recognize each other this way. They aren't built to guarantee it. A brain can refuse the recognition, and that refusal has a name. It's dehumanization.

There's a hole in this, and it's exactly where I need it most. Symmetry is a contract. Don't kill me and I won't kill you. A contract breaks the moment one side holds all the power and faces no risk back, and every system I write about is that situation. The cobalt miner can't kill back. The foster kid can't sue the file.

That's why Levinas leaps, and it isn't a silly reason. He reaches for the infinite to protect the one person a contract abandons, the one who can't hold up their end. He saw the hole in my answer before I did, and he patched it with heaven.

I patch it with people. The duty to the one who can't kill back gets held by the people watching. It stops being a deal between two people and becomes something a crowd keeps.

I've seen how that goes both ways. There's a clip of a comedian doing a set in a deep red state, the room cheering about getting the immigrants out, and then someone in the audience says they're an immigrant who just got their papers. The room claps before it can stop itself. That's the face landing faster than the room's politics could block it. What the applause turns into afterward is up to the room. It can spread, and the person changes the category. Or it can seal over into you're one of the good ones, and the category survives with one exception carved out. Same face, two outcomes. The face doesn't decide which one. What people have learned to do with it decides.

So the infinite was Levinas's way of protecting the powerless when the contract fails, and I wanted the crowd to be mine. It can't be. A crowd doesn't pick a hand. It multiplies whichever one it's dealt, the applause or the mob, with no more malice than gravity. To hold a duty past the moment the applause fades, a crowd has to become an institution, and an institution holds people by filing them. The only thing that can carry the duty is the thing that can demolish the soul.

Where he troubles me

I'm not going to clean him up either.

In September 1982, less than two weeks after the massacre of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila, a radio interviewer put the obvious question to him. You're the philosopher of the other, he said. For the Israeli, isn't the other above all the Palestinian?

Levinas said his definition of the other was completely different. The other is the neighbour. But if your neighbour attacks another neighbour, he said, then "in alterity we can find an enemy." And then, "There are people who are wrong."

Some critics read that as Levinas saying Palestinians have no face. The scholars who've gone through the interview line by line make a good case that he didn't, and that he was holding his own line between the person in front of you and the politics of judging between neighbours. In the same interview he said Israel was bound by responsibility for what happened whether or not it was guilty. That's to his credit.

It still troubles me. Asked about a specific people, two weeks after a massacre of them, the philosopher of the face reached for a category. The first concrete thing he offered was that the other can be an enemy. That's the third, the weighing between neighbours, and it's the exact spot where his own work says totality gets back in. The man who wrote the best account I know of people being filed under a role answered a question about real people from inside the file.

I don't think that refutes him. Even Levinas fell into the thing he named, which mostly proves he named it right.

I read him anyway, as a reader and not a believer.

What I keep

I keep Levinas the way I kept Weil. The diagnosis stays. Totality, the face, and ethics coming before everything else. The infinity he stood it on goes.

What's left has to come from people. Biology deals both hands. The same social brain that makes a saint makes a monster, love for your own and erasure for everyone else, out of the same machinery. Nothing in the brain picks between them, and the crowd doesn't either. It multiplies what it's been taught, and what's taught can be unlearned.

From my mom, I learned kindness with no heaven or hell attached. You're kind in front of cruelty, and usually not to change the cruel person, who isn't worth the chisel. You do it because other people are watching. Some of them carry it somewhere else, and there's a little less cruelty in the world than there was. I was in foster care for most of my childhood and saw her on visits. She was in a wheelchair by then and could barely move, and she was still kind to people who weren't kind to her, with me watching. Her kindness is Weil's grace with God taken out, something people hand to each other. It's also how a crowd learns which hand to multiply. The system was the gravity in my childhood. She was the grace, and she's part of why I'm still here.

I don't know if I'd hold to the face when it's dangerous. I'd like to think so. I won't know until I'm there, and I've stopped treating that as a weakness. The decent people who went along with the worst things in the last century were sure of their own goodness. The doubt keeps me checking. The practice is small, and it doesn't show up anywhere, but it counts.

Levinas would tell me I stopped one step short, the same thing Weil would say. I'd tell him the step up is the one that lets the world off the hook. It hands the weight people put on each other to heaven to sort out, and I'd rather keep it down here, where we can carry it.

I can't trust the crowd or the institution, and I can't do without either, the same way I can't quit the job that pays the rent. So you work the system and spend your life tearing out the parts that erase people, the ones where saying that's not who I am changes nothing. Every fix turns into another form. The appeal becomes a process, the exit becomes a checkbox, and you push the rock back up the hill like Camus's Sisyphus.

That's how to carry it. It still leaves me with the question I can't put down. Where do morals come from when the brain gives you both the saint and the monster, and there's no God to break the tie?

Sources

Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. First published 1961 as Totalité et Infini. Totality and war come from the preface, and the face and "you shall not kill" from the section on ethics and the face.

Levinas, Emmanuel, Alain Finkielkraut and Shlomo Malka. "Ethics and Politics." The 1982 radio interview, collected in The Levinas Reader, edited by Seán Hand.

Eisenstadt, Oona, and Claire Elise Katz. "The Faceless Palestinian: A History of an Error." Telos, 2016. The close reading of that interview.

Ashworth, Tony. Trench Warfare 1914-1918: The Live and Let Live System. 1980.

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Translated by Justin O'Brien. First published 1942 as Le Mythe de Sisyphe. The leap and revolt.