In considering Levinas’ ‘idea of infinity’, there is a sense in which it lies both at the very beginning, wholly prior to, the ‘revelation’ (Levinas, 1969:28) of being (with the Other), and also at the very end of his description of that same, re-visioned, ‘ontology’. For Levinas doesn’t begin with Being as such, as the project of phenomenology does before him, but uncovers the ethical relation that allows and epiphanously ‘culminates’ in the idea of infinity. “Metaphysics precedes ontology” (p.42). This is his radical project, in an opposition reaching as retrospectively far as Socrates (p.43), and within the metaphysical ground Levinas prepares, the idea of infinity is central. It is in this novel soil of being that Levinas discovers-plants the possibility for infinity, and so to know the one is to imagine the other: the reciprocal relation between being and the infinite is where any search for understanding the latter must begin.
It is at the very beginning of Totality and Infinity (hereafter T&I), in the Preface (and particularly chapters 3, 4 &5 of the first Section) that Levinas shows us the spread of this metaphysical garden, provides a philosophical context in which to position his own utterance. Where he largely takes exception to the limitations he sees in the Aristotelian, Socratic, Kantian, phenomenological projects preceding his own, out of this opposition he also finds some kinship in, notably, the Platonic affirmation of a “delirium that comes from God” (Levinas: 49), that is, the experience of a thought that comes from beyond, away-from the interiorised self-possession of he “who has his own head to himself” (Levinas quoting Plato, p.49), disturbs the economical thought of the Same, the constraining operation of possession of the other being founded in an ontology of intentionality, appropriation, power. The significant words in this Platonic reference – delirium, enthusiasm – are already preparing for the possibility of “noumenal” experience (p.50), or what he will call Desire. The appearance of the noumen here, in a philosophical study, is extraordinary, and bears directly on Levinas’ formulation of infinity, perhaps even philosophically equates with it, and will bear consideration as a kind of atavistic ancestor to Levinas’ metaphysics.
The other philosophical-historical precedent Levinas identifies as potential generator of his own account of the Infinite, comes from Descarte’s idea of Infinity defined as a thought which overflows my thinking of it (pps.49, 197). What does ‘overflow’ mean? It is a moment, a capacity that could be characterised as a going-beyond the self-cognizant generation of thought, partaking of both a groundedness in my adequation of the thought, with a being-taken, a seduction to the presence of a supra-subjective generation: the delirium of Plato, the transcendent principle in Descartes. (In T&I Levinas will only skirt around the word God which in his later work becomes more explicit).
For Levinas this idea (of infinity) initiates an openness to the Infinite, an escape from the domination of the Same (Robbins 1991:102), through the breach in totality that is the primordial relation to the Other. Within this movement of Levinas’ metaphysics a kind of circular, reciprocal cohesion finds emergence: so that the possibility for infinity, the relation with the Other, the encounter with the infinite alterity of the Face, all seem mutually interdependent eternals rather than linearly determined causes, a progression of conditions. Levinas’ Infinite is the backdrop against/within which the ethical relation can take place, where neither exist without the consummation of both, a both-and paradigm in his metaphysics which distinguishes it still further from the assumptions (of “most of…Western philosophy”, Levinas: 43) of ontology and Being as the proper subjects of first philosophy.
What is this counter-(pre-) ontological movement, Levinas’ primordial metaphysics in exact terms?
Levinas initiates his discourse with a placement of the existent (the self, the being, the subject) within an environment of ‘totality’, an historical-philosophical-social construct that has come to circumferentially house the existent in a closed system. Totality is the vision of the existent determined and bounded by the very thought of the existent itself. (Socratic maieutics sought knowledge as that which is brought-out of the self, not visited upon it by an outer, transcendent source). Levinas from the very beginning questions the conceptual nature of totality as a Western intellectual obstinacy or ontological view that reaches its culmination in Husserlian and Heideggerian ontology. But for Levinas something else is needed, that has in actuality always existed but not been given sufficient voice, that creates a space within this closed, eternally self-referential ‘vision outwards’.
Traditionally the eschatological project of theology provides this, man’s urge toward the divine, but Levinas wants to find in it a genuine philosophical identity, one that emphasises the transcendence in eschatology rather than its umbilical connection with ‘the known’. He makes this clear in a few very important words: “[Eschatology’s] real import lies elsewhere. It does not introduce a teleological system into the totality…[it] institutes a relation beyond history, and not with being beyond the past and present…” (p.22) This space, truly free, open, unbounded, undescribed (at risk of philosophical corruption one could conceptually liken it to the unnameable expanse of the Tao: the Tao that can be named is not the real Tao), can’t be defined by the existent (as Descartes attempts to do), is not subjective, is not relative to a thought of it: is absolute, beyond, utterly other. The infinite is not merely an idea – it overflows the thought-of the way the sky permeates but is separate from the ocean of circumstance – but always profoundly central, present in the idea of infinity itself: “The production of the infinite entity is inseparable from the idea of infinity…” (p.26).
The idea of infinity is then paradoxically ‘produced’ in a separated existent that nevertheless possesses that which it can’t possess in terms of its ‘owness’. Subjectivity contains the grace which exceeds all its potential containment qua subjectivity. In this metaphysic Levinas professes a clear belief in a transcendent function in man. Infinity finds its expression exactly in and of the relation with the Other; all that strangeness that defies adequation finds its ground in the idea of infinity, (as does the possibility of knowing, as intentionality, as well.)
We have seen how the genesis of this idea derives from a discussion of eschatology, as the conceptual-religious mode that points a way toward philosophical beyond-ness, a “primordial” capacity that unlike eschatology, does not arise within the totality of self-reflexion, but exists outside of it, beyond its bounds, and thence genuinely infinite. Levinas’ hermeneutic of traditional eschatology existing as “a relationship with a surplus always exterior to the totality” (p.22) by extension becomes a philosophical account that exists by virtue of its transcendence with regard to totality. Transcendence can here be seen as a vehicle of movement that opens out into the beyond-ness of infinity. Via the flight-path of transcendence, currents of exchange exist between totality and infinity, such that the experience of the former is graced with traces of the liberating function of the latter.
Later in Section 1 Levinas spells out the transcendence-infinity relation in more detail. He makes the nature of this relation plain in the words: “The rigorously developed concept of this transcendence is expressed by the term infinity” (pps.24-25). That is, the terms are mutually corresponding, and if so, what is the ‘rigorously developed concept of…transcendence’? Drawing on the Cartesian idea of the infinite as that relation between the thought-of and the Infinite itself – like the mouthful of sea-water that tastes like yet can never contain the whole ocean – Levinas details the metaphysic moving between transcendence and infinity. The ideatum of infinity, as the original of the idea, surpasses that same idea. The very space between ideatum and idea, the distance that lies between the two, is the substance of the ideatum of infinity. Infinity is in the nature of a transcendent being as transcendent. “The transcendent is the sole ideatum of which there can be only an idea in us; it is infinitely removed from its idea, that is, exterior, because it is infinite” (p.49). The transcendent and the infinite are congruent, insofar as the former as verb is a movement toward the latter as metaphysical space.
It is here that Levinas finds that this presence in thought of an idea whose ideatum overflows the capacity of thought is given expression in Platonic delirium. Delirium can be seen as one guise of the breach wherein infinity enters into totality. By way of this analogy Levinas extends the metaphysic of infinity: it has become the “noumenon” (p.50) already referred to to. Despite the nearness achieved by the idea of infinity, the fundamental infinite distance of the Other from the existent has to be described, or the infinite made concrete: infinity finds presence in the finitude of being as Desire: “a Desire perfectly disinterested – goodness” (p.50). Between the pure urging of Desire and the meeting with the Other, the self necessarily exists as separated even if still surrounded by the potential, transfiguring capacity of infinity: “To have the idea of Infinity it is necessary to exist as separated.” (p.79) Levinas wants to repeatedly emphasise the resistance to a totalising project that infinity posits, that the very “idea of infinity is transcendence itself” (p.80). Totality dies before infinity, and the only agent of that death is the Other: “It is not the insuffiency of the I that prevents totalisation, but the Infinity of the Other” (p.80). So infinity lives within the Other, is brought to presence in the encounter with the Face, finds its true consummation there. Behind the eyes of the Other stretches the horizon of unknowable, yet Enjoyable, otherness that finds itself immersed into the quality of infinity. Does Levinas tell us how infinity, thus engendered by the Other, feels? Herein would seem to lie the concretisation of the idea Levinas has cryptically moved towards in T&I. His words imply a surrender of the interiorised existent, a reception of the generosity of the Other, and a giving-towards the Other by the self. Infinity lies in giving. Levinas introduces the notion of responsibility, a simultaneous act of giving and generosity between the sentient beings of the encounter. Infinity is thus permeated and primordially stitched into the fabric of the ethical relation, as much a foundation as a part of that coming together. By reaching to the experience of the encounter with the Other, through the urge-towards of Desire, Levinas recasts the idea of infinity in a still further evolved form: “It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity” (p.51).
Infinity, from its metaphysical genesis in the presence of the Other making a ‘desirous’ breach in the totality, has in this statement come to a full flowering. The guise of infinity has like water filling vessels taken on the function of whatever relation it has been seen to fulfil: between ideatum and idea, as act of transcendence between the Infinite and being, as motion of congruence in Desire toward the revelation of the Other, in all these movements of the metaphysical prior to the assertion of ontology. The idea of infinity has acted as the kind of l’eau vital that, falling from a beyond, nourishes the garden that “non-encompassable within a totality” (p.23), nevertheless flourishes in primordial embrace of it.
(May, 1998)
References:
Levinas, E. trans. Lingis, A. (1969) Totality and Infinity Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh.
Robbins, J. (1991) Prodigal Son/ Elder Brother University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London.
Copyright © M. Kovan 2014
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