Like his teacher Martin Heidegger, Talmudist and philosopher Emmanuel Levinas frames his position with a thesis on the history of philosophy. Whereas Heidegger thinks that the whole Western tradition of philosophy has been oblivious to the meaning of being, for Levinas it is Otherness that philosophy has failed properly to conceive. On his view, in the attempt either to defeat or to defuse the threat of what is absolutely different, philosophy has inevitably eliminated genuine Otherness, thereby neglecting the fundamentally ethical significance of the relation to the Other. Levinas accordingly views the failure to concede alterity as a kind of violence that lies at the core of evil, or which indeed constitutes evil itself. We may understand his entire philosophical project as an attempt, bordering on paradox, to articulate a true transcendence that cannot be articulated without risk of distortion, and to attest to its ethical significance.
Although Levinas critically engages with figures from periods throughout the history of philosophy, Hegel epitomizes the thinking of totality in a special way. It is therefore illuminating to understand Levinas’s conception of the relation with exteriority as constituting a rebuttal of the all-encompassing power Hegel claims for the concept (see also Peperzak Reference Peperzak1986). Being itself the an-archic origin of consciousness and reason, transcendence in the Levinasian sense is both prior to and beyond conceptual comprehension.Footnote 1 It thus disrupts the totality that Hegel establishes through the figure of absolute negativity.
True to his phenomenological roots, Levinas spells out transcendence in a theory of subjectivity. The relation to exteriority becomes conceivable through a structure of subjectivity that allows for a rupture of totality (see Bernasconi Reference Bernasconi2002; Critchley Reference Critchley1999). Indeed, the subject itself figures as the effect of this disruption, of which it therefore also bears indelible traces (see Basterra Reference Basterra2015). For Levinas, what characterizes the human being is not self-consciousness and agency, but rather its vulnerability and exposure to the claim of the Other—a pre-originary openness at the core of subjectivity which precedes conceptual thought and consciousness and first enables them (NI: 146).Footnote 2
Hegel, by contrast, conceives subjectivity as the very principle of totalisation. At the core of his thinking we therefore find the logical structure of absolute negativity, constitutive of subjectivity, for it allows him to portray the concept as a dynamic totality, that is, as a totality that enjoys its all-encompassing nature not as a fixed entity, but as the systematic movement of self-differentiation (see Bowman Reference Bowman2013; Düsing Reference Düsing1995; Iber Reference Iber2000a; Kreß Reference Kreß1996; Schäfer Reference Schäfer2000). Because absolute negativity is self-referential, subjectivity is not to be thought of as standing in opposition to its other, but rather as encompassing it. Famously, Hegel describes subjectivity as ‘being at one with itself in the other’ (im-Anderen-bei-sich-selber-sein) or, equivalently, as the identity of identity and non-identity. This account of immanent transcendence entails the denial of radical exteriority. Hegel dismisses philosophical insistence on anything claimed to be absolutely other and incomprehensible as misguided romanticism.Footnote 3
Closer analysis of these contrasting conceptions of subjectivity promises both to bring Hegel and Levinas into fruitful dialogue and to tease out questions that take us to the very core of their respective philosophies. In the following, I will focus on a few of the central figures by which Hegel and Levinas characterize subjectivity, in order to flesh out their similarities as well as their fundamental differences. Strikingly, both appeal to the same notions or figures to describe subjectivity. Yet, as we have just noted, everything hinges on the very different meaning each of our authors assigns to the term transcendence. Therefore, I will start with the discussion of the concept of transcendence itself and then examine their respective notions of infinity, ‘ground’ (Hegel) as opposed to ‘an-archy’ (Levinas) and, finally, the Good. The goal of my analysis is to challenge the core logical assumptions of each of the conceptions. Ultimately, this amounts to the question of whether the dialectic of being and nothing is really all-encompassing or whether we are to understand their interplay as becoming possible only through a condition (or rather non-condition—see OB: 107) and a meaning that lie beyond their reach.
In pressing the claim of genuine Otherness and an unmediated encounter with absolute alterity, Levinas might seem to be in danger of falling back into the same errors for which Hegel criticizes “so-called ‘philosophies of reflexion” (see Houlgate Reference Houlgate2006; Peperzak Reference Peperzak2000). Yet Levinas is well acquainted with Hegel’s writings; we can thus hardly suspect him of naïvely neglecting Hegel’s conception of logic. The question therefore arises whether Levinas can find the means not to refute dialectics but rather to assert the possibility and need of a pre-originary, a-conceptual beginning that therefore escapes the concept’s all-encompassing character. Conversely, to Hegel we must address the question whether we must really accept the concept’s (logical) self-constitution as necessary and comprehensive, or whether on the contrary he may be forced to concede the indispensability of a figure on which his system depends for its very possibility, but which he cannot reintegrate into it even in principle—namely, the figure of an absolute passivity. For Hegel as for Levinas, what this ultimately amounts to is the question of how to understand first philosophy: as (a heavily revised) ontology or as (an equally heavily revised) ethics. As I will argue, this question is crucial not only within the context of philosophy, narrowly construed, but for our very understanding of humanity.
I. The experience of transcendence
My discussion opens with an analysis of the notion of transcendence in Hegel and Levinas, the aim of which is to bring out a striking similarity in their differential characterization of (human) subjectivity, while also addressing the main difference worked out in the remainder of this article. The analysis of transcendence thus prepares the ground for my subsequent examination of the other figures. To this end, instead of beginning with a general discussion of their respective conceptions of transcendence, I start from a rather specific instance that seems to be crucial for the characterization of subjectivity. In nearly parallel formulations, both Hegel and Levinas appeal to the notion of transcendence to distinguish human subjectivity from all forms of merely natural life. Both contend that a living being that is merely natural—animal and possibly also plant life—necessarily perishes when befallen by transcendence. Accordingly, transcendence cannot figure in the life of such a being, because for the latter to encounter something that exceeds its faculties in an absolute fashion is just for it to meet its death. Vice versa, conscious life or human subjectivityFootnote 4 is distinguished by its ability to undergo transcendence and survive the event—albeit in a changed state. Hegel and Levinas thus agree that human subjectivity is characterized by the capacity to experience transcendence. Yet they mean something very different by the term and the kind of change that it evokes has a completely different meaning for each of them. For Hegel, transcendence is a transient state, an experience undergone by (finite) consciousness that forces it to give up on its ‘truth’ and self-conception and consequently to assume a different shape, thereby overcoming transcendence. This process of accommodation on the part of consciousness is what Hegel calls ‘experience’ in a terminological sense (PhG: §§86–87, 55f.). For Levinas, by contrast, transcendence is an excess that self-consciousness can never recover and integrate into itself, but which retains its transcendent character over against self-consciousness as a ‘beyond’. He therefore refuses to call this event an experience or, to the extent that he does sometimes do so, he qualifies it as an ‘experience in the fullest sense of the word’ (TI: 25) or as experience par excellence, thereby indicating that it is not itself conditioned, but instead constitutes the condition of all other experience. As Levinas conceives it, the encounter with transcendence does not initiate a process of self-differentiation or learning; rather, it is an event that violently opens up the interiority of the being that undergoes this encounter. As we will see, the change the subject undergoes is not primarily epistemological; its significance is fundamentally ethical.
In the introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel writes:
Whatever is confined within the limits of a natural life cannot by its own efforts go beyond its immediate existence; but it is driven beyond it by something else, and this uprooting entails its death. Consciousness, however, is explicitly the Notion [Concept, A.C.] of itself. Hence it is something that goes beyond its limits, and since these limits are its own, it is something that goes beyond itself. With the positing of a single particular the beyond is also established for consciousness, even if it is only alongside the limited object as in the case of spatial intuition. Thus consciousness suffers this violence at its own hands: it spoils its own limited satisfaction (PhG: §80, 51).
Here Hegel contrasts natural life, the living organism, with conscious life or consciousness. His idea is that a living being is constituted by determinations that are specific to it and that, for it, these determinations are absolute. This means that by itself, it cannot transcend its own restrictions, for it cannot reflect and comprehend them. For such a being, there is no such thing as a beyond. Thus, it can only suffer transcendence from a source external to itself, and when it is thereby forced beyond itself, this entails its death. By contrast, self-consciousness has the logical structure of the concept, one that contains its own moments or particular determinations within itself. Consequently, it is never fixed in a particular determination within pure immediacy. Rather, by virtue of its very act of positing a particular determination, it simultaneously passes beyond it.
In the same vein, it is not possible to bind or censure consciousness in an absolute way, because in the moment of restriction it has already surpassed its boundary. Indeed, one could on the contrary say that far from arresting or fixating consciousness, restriction actually propels its development and furthers differentiation. Thinking becomes acute in the encounter with what resists it. Consciousness can thus survive the experience of transcendence because it is not a kind of violence that consciousness suffers from without, but one that is internal to its own nature and activity. Consciousness itself does not remain satisfied with its immediate truth. Its limitations become recognizable as contradiction, and the encounter with and dissolution of contradiction constitutes the conscious being as a vital process of self-development. This is precisely what ‘natural consciousness’ (as explored in the Phenomenology) neglects: its very fear of relinquishing its self-certainty closes it off to the possibility of adaptation. From its point of view, to desist from a ‘truth’ that has been proven wrong or insufficient is to lose itself, and so it struggles to shut out the doubts that threaten its self-conception. Nonetheless, in its effort to maintain identity with itself, it misapprehends its own principle. Paradoxically, consciousness can only remain at one with itself by transgressing itself.Footnote 5
This is the meaning of Hegel’s notorious principle of speculation: Consciousness has its identity in the identity of the identical and the non-identical. It is only by driving its oppositions to their extremes and keeping hold of the contradictions it encounters, thus suffering violence from itself, that consciousness comes to be restored to itself in a newly unified and actualized shape. Thus, consciousness emerges through the interplay of immanence and transcendence, of assimilation and accommodation.Footnote 6 ‘Experience’ is Hegel’s name for this working of consciousness on itself. And it is exactly what is lacking in the case of the merely natural living being: Being fixed in itself, natural life can only suffer transcendence as violence from the outside.Footnote 7
For Levinas, the experiences of consciousness, or the historical development of spirit as Hegel describes it, do not imply transcendence at all (Peperzak Reference Peperzak1986). From the Levinasian perspective, such dialectical emergence of consciousness through the various shapes of spirit is a case of pure immanence. But let us rather begin with Levinas’s own view of transcendence. In a passage that parallels Hegel’s distinction between natural life and consciousness, Levinas writes:
The living being per se, then, is not without consciousness, but has a consciousness without problems, that is, without exteriority, an interior world whose center it occupies, a consciousness not concerned with situating itself in relation to an exteriority, which does not comprehend itself as part of a whole (for it precedes all comprehension), consciousness without consciousness to which the term unconscious (which hides no fewer contradictions) or instinct corresponds. The interiority that, to thinking being, is opposed to exteriority, plays itself out in the living being as an absence of exteriority. The identity of a living being throughout its history contains nothing mysterious: the living being is essentially the Same, the Same determining every Other, without the Other ever determining the Same. If the Other did determine it—if exteriority collided with what lives—it would kill instinctive being. The living being lives beneath the sign of liberty or death. (IaT: 14)
Levinas thus appeals to the terms interiority and exteriority to reframe the distinction between natural life and a living being that can survive transcendence. He describes the merely natural being as one that lives in pure interiority, indicating that everything it encounters is totally determined by the being itself. Regardless of whether this being effects changes in its surroundings or is itself changed by them, these changes always correspond to its own needs and faculties. It will eat what is edible, avoid what is dangerous, and be indifferent to everything that it does not find to correspond to these categories. This is what it means for the Same to determine the Other without the Other ever determining the Same:Footnote 8 the living being cannot experience anything that does not already match its faculties; as in Hegel, for it to encounter genuine exteriority is for it to perish. An alterity that, in resisting assimilation to its categories of need, avoidance, or indifference, nevertheless forces itself upon the living being, thereby breaking up its enclosure, spells the death of that being. Transcendence cannot therefore mean anything to the merely natural being since, for it, there is no such a thing as an ‘afterwards’ that could follow upon this experience.Footnote 9 As long as it lives, it is encapsulated in its interiority.
Now it is only from the point of view of another, thinking being that its mode of existence can be characterized as pure immanence or interiority and the cited passage seems to suggest a connection between the relation to an exteriority and consciousness or thinking. Yet contrary to the Hegelian case, what is at stake here is not the self-actualizing nature of consciousness that allows for transcendence. Rather, Levinasian transcendence concerns the possibility of encountering a genuine exteriority that breaks open immanence and liberates the individual from its enclosure within itself. For Levinas, this fracturing of interiority is what constitutes the miracle or enigma of subjectivity (see PhE): the ability to encounter genuine transcendence and survive the event; or the ability to have metaphysical rather than merely physical needs. At its core, subjectivity is not self-consciousness, but an ultimate passivity which is the precondition for and the backside of self-consciousness and thinking.Footnote 10
For exteriority to present itself to me, it must, qua exteriority, exceed the ‘terms’ of vital consciousness, yet at the same time, qua present, it must not be fatal to consciousness. This penetration of a total system into a partial one that cannot assimilate it is miracle. The possibility of thought is the consciousness of miracle, or wonder. The miracle ruptures biological consciousness; it possesses an intermediary ontological status between the lived and the thought. It is the beginning of thought, or experience. Thought at its beginning finds itself before the miracle of fact. The structure of the fact as distinct from the idea resides in the miracle. Hence, thought is not simply reminiscence, but always consciousness of the new. (IaT: 16)
Like his teacher Heidegger and unlike Hegel, Levinas assumes that human subjectivity cannot be derived continuously from natural life and drive.Footnote 11 Levinas thus seeks to spell out this discontinuity through the absolute experience of transcendence, that is, through the possibility of an encounter with something that neither assimilation nor accommodation re-appropriate, but which instead breaks through the being’s immanence. (Human) subjectivity exists as the effect of this disruption (see Basterra Reference Basterra2015).
To resume: Hegel and Levinas agree in conceiving transcendence as a surpassing of a being’s faculties in a way it cannot assimilate. In contrast to Hegel, however, Levinas leaves no space in which consciousness could accommodate itself. Rather, subjectivity is defined through its relation to something it cannot appropriate. Transcendence for Levinas is thus not a moment in the process of the development of (self-)consciousness, but the whole possibility of the awakening of primitive consciousness from its absorption in itself.Footnote 12
For Hegel, the encounter with something that does not fit the truth or self-conception of the subject calls for a new order, necessitating accommodation to the new data, so to speak.Footnote 13 Transcendence provokes what Hegel refers to as sublation, the dialectical movement that simultaneously eliminates, elevates, and preserves the knowledge characteristic of the preceding shape of consciousness. Importantly, this movement is consciousness’ own initiative and doing. Levinas differs sharply in this respect: Rather than consciousness’s own doing, the fracturing of interiority is something that subjectivity undergoes purely passively and prior to achieving consciousness—in a sense of ‘priority’ that is equally temporal, logical, and axiological. It is by no means the being’s own activity. For the subject to be determined by the Other, rather than itself determining the Other, is for the subject to be absolutely passive.Footnote 14 Rather than calling for a new order, the encounter with transcendence is incommensurable with any and every order.Footnote 15 On this view, consciousness’s own self-transcending does not, in and of itself, imply any transcendence at all.Footnote 16 Levinas therefore does not recognize what Hegel describes as transcendence in the full and proper sense, which for Levinas is something absolute, implying a dimension of heights (or depth: see PhE). From the Levinasian perspective it appears instead as merely a kind of horizontal transgression—one that presumes a merely relative limit or boundary that is susceptible of trespass.Footnote 17 Instead of interpreting transcendence epistemically as consciousness’s ongoing process of accommodation and self-differentiation, Levinas articulates a diachronic transcendence (see PhE) that can never be integrated into an order, as it is instead the precondition of any order whatsoever.
Hegel conceives subjectivity as negativity at work. This is exactly what Levinas disputes. For him, by contrast, transcendence (or, for him, equivalently, metaphysics)Footnote 18 exceeds negativity:
The movement of transcendence is to be distinguished from the negativity by which discontent man refuses the condition in which he is established. Negativity presupposes a being established, placed in a side where he is at home; it is an economical fact, in the etymological sense of this adjective. […] Metaphysics does not coincide with negativity. (TI: 40f.)
Levinas thus calls into question the Hegelian thesis according to which the dialectic of being and nothing is the ultimate point of reference for meaning.Footnote 19 Like Heidegger (Reference Heidegger2007), Levinas rejects the all-encompassing power of negativity. But whereas Heidegger denies that Being (or Nothing, both opposed to beings) could be comprehended through negation, Levinas conceives of a meaning beyond Being itself. Inasmuch as subjectivity is constituted through its relation with transcendent exteriority, subjectivity exceeds the field of differential meaning and being.Footnote 20 Transcendence ‘can only signify the fact that the event of being, the esse, the essence, passes over to what is other than being’ (OB: 3). And this Otherness does not indicate a different being or a being-differently but rather an otherwise-than-being or a beyond essence.
Having laid out Hegel’s and Levinas’s respective conceptions of transcendence and addressed some of the differences that emerge in their respective understandings of subjectivity, I now turn to some related concepts that promise to illuminate further this most fundamental divergence.
II. The notion of infinity
Both Hegel and Levinas situate the concept of subjectivity in close proximity to the notion of infinity. Yet again, however, their divergent understanding of infinity is revealing. In this section, I address their differing accounts of infinity and draw connections to their respective conceptions of subjectivity and transcendence. Hegel’s critique of ‘bad infinity’ will offer us an immediate occasion to discuss these notions.
But, in the first place, why infinity? Infinity is apparently so fascinating because it is a paradoxical notion that points to something the human mind cannot grasp. Conceptual thought is unable to grasp that which has no limitations directly and in itself; to the extent that it can grasp it at all, it does so only ex negativo, as a negation of the finite, or in the infinite succession of finite entities. In German Idealism, the notion of infinity comes to figure as a crucial property of or indeed as a synonym for the absolute itself, that is, for the highest being or the principle of all being. For Kant and Jacobi, the absolute, God, is incomprehensible to human understanding, whereas Fichte and Schelling conceive the I itself as infinite in its positing activity. Hegel, in his critique of so-called ‘philosophies of reflection’, criticizes those who consider infinity to be incomprehensible in itself, conceiving of it only in opposition to the finite (see GW; PhG). He impugns such conceptions as rendering the infinite itself into a merely finite being, inasmuch as they delimit it by its opposition to the finite. On the other hand, neither does the infinite progress allow us to bring infinity into view since every position we reach is, taken in itself, merely finite, so that infinity forever eludes the mind’s attempt to grasp it. For Hegel, therefore, true infinity is to be thought as encompassing the finite, on the one hand, and, on the other, is also to be conceived as a circular figure, one that has always already attained closure. Hegel achieves this through the logical structure of self-referring (i.e., absolute) negativity: the infinite does not exist beyond finite being; rather it consists in its own process of self-differentiation. This notion of infinity is crucial for Hegel’s logic as a whole, the comprehension of its finite instantiations or moments being precisely what the concept of the concept realizes (Bowman Reference Bowman2013; Iber Reference Iber2000b).
Obviously, the conception of true infinity is closely related to the notion of transcendence spelled out in the preceding section. It is but one more perspective on the same immanent (self-)transcendence characteristic of the Hegelian concept. For Hegel to conceive of the concept as a totality is tantamount to an assertion of its infinity, for as totality it does not stand in any relation to a beyond that could delimit it and thus render it finite. Likewise, Hegel understands human subjectivity (especially human will) to be infiniteFootnote 21 —not because it absolves itself from and opposes itself to all determination (which is the misapprehension of the shape of consciousness he criticizes in the Phenomenology as ‘the beautiful soul’), but precisely because it comprehends its own determinations.
Here again, the contrast with Levinas could not be more stark. Levinas emphasizes the paradoxical character of the idea of infinity as a notion denoting a content the human mind is incapable of grasping. He appeals to Descartes, who in the Third Meditation describes the idea of infinity as one that exceeds the faculty of the thinking subject and must therefore be assumed to have been caused to arise in the finite mind by the infinite ideatum itself (God). Levinas interprets this figure as a reversal of the structure of intentionality—the production of the idea of infinity being in no way the subject’s initiative, but rather emanating from its object, infinity, itself. Levinas then seizes upon this figure as pointing toward genuine transcendence.Footnote 22 No intentionality or receptivity could ever encounter transcendent Otherness; what is truly transcendent is not something the subject grasps, but rather something that imposes itself on the subject. Thus, for Levinas as for Hegel, there is a tight link between the notion of transcendence and the idea of infinity. Following Descartes, Levinas describes infinity as a paradoxical figure in which the content exceeds that in which it is contained.
The idea of infinity is the mode of being, the infinition of infinity. Infinity does not first exist, and then reveal itself. Its infinition is produced as revelation, as a positing of its idea in me. It is produced in the improbable feat whereby a separated being fixed in its identity, the same, the I, nonetheless contains in itself what it can neither contain nor receive solely by its own virtue. (TI: 28)
Thus, for Levinas, infinity is neither an object nor a case of dialectical self-differentiation. Rather, he chooses to speak of ‘infinition’, a term designating the ‘astonishing feat of containing more than it is possible to contain’ (TI: 28). Infinity is an excess that takes place within the subject or rather institutes subjectivity as such.Footnote 23 It exceeds the cognitive faculties of the I and exists as an overflowing of thought in the overwhelmed being who is befallen by it in ultimate passivity. Instead of conceiving of infinity as encompassing the finite, Levinas understands it to be a paradoxical event in which the infinite is contained in the finite and—due to this incommensurability—forces it open (Bernasconi Reference Bernasconi1986: 327). In diametrical opposition to Hegel, Levinas refrains from associating infinity with totality, opting instead to pit them against each other. Infinity here figures as disrupting a totality which can never be all-encompassing precisely because it cannot comprise its other or infinity.Footnote 24
Now from the Hegelian point of view, Levinas’s conception of the infinite must appear highly suspicious. Even though his notion of the infinite is not that of a ‘something’ (Houlgate Reference Houlgate2006: 434), Levinas seems to fall back into the same errors of the finite understanding that Hegel admonishes in Kant, Jacobi, Fichte, etc. For, to begin with, to equate infinity with transcendence seems to entail an unacceptable dualism of two distinct realms or worlds. Furthermore, to oppose the infinite to the finite seems tantamount to limiting the former by the latter and thus rendering the infinite finite.Footnote 25 Thus the question arises of whether Levinas repeats the failures of the ‘unhappy consciousness’, so that his conception of the infinite falls short of ‘true infinity’ in the Hegelian sense.
As regards the first point of criticism, Levinas explicitly affirms the ethical as a separate order or rather as a non-order that does not accord with the laws of natural being. However, this does not mean that it is detached from reality. Levinas holds that the ‘beyond’ is ‘not to be described in a purely negative fashion. It is reflected within the totality and history, within experience’ (TI: 23). Thus, it is not justified to accuse Levinas of constructing a transcendental Hinterwelt or engendering an unhappy consciousness that vainly seeks satisfaction as it oscillates between incompatible worlds. Even though Levinas does not in fact think that ethical subjectivity can ever be wholly satisfied and at peace with itself, the disquietude does not stem from its restlessly alternating between conflicting realms, but rather from an alertness to the Other that can never be calmed.
Nor does the second point of criticism apply to Levinas, namely, the logical consideration that nothing can truly count as infinite if it is delimited by the finite. For to lodge that objection is already to presuppose precisely the notion of a common ground that Levinas questions. On Levinas’s conception, that the infinite is not delimited follows from the fact that it is not part of a totality and thus shares no border with something that it is not. Whereas delimitation and measure presuppose some common plane of comparison, the very notion of transcendence implies the ‘absence of a common plane’ (IaT: 32). Notions like the ‘Other’, ‘responsibility’, and ‘desire’ can be conceived of as infinite because they are not related terms within a totality but are thought to be absolute. It is precisely the non-totalizable that is infinite (OB: 11).
Conversely, Levinas criticizes Hegel’s notion of true infinity as failing truly to capture the infinite. He understands Hegel as effectively proposing to reduce the infinite to the interplay of being and nothing, and hence as denying the rupture between the realm of finite being and its ethical beyond: ‘To realize the eschaton would therefore mean that we could seize or appropriate God as a telos and degrade the infinite relation with the Other to a finite fusion. This is what Hegelian dialectics amount to, a radical denial of the rupture between the ontological and the ethical’ (D: 30). Viewed thus, Hegel’s true infinity remains finite because it does not allow for genuine Otherness and thus does not overcome the self-sameness of the concept.
By virtue of its participation in the totality, Hegelian subjectivity is finally supposed to overcome finite being. But Levinas sharply distinguishes between infinity and self-perpetuation. Indeed, true infinity requires that one breaks with oneself.Footnote 26 Thus, whereas Hegel conceives of infinity as the comprehension of the whole, Levinas understands it as consisting precisely in the rupture with totality and self-sameness. In the following section, I will spell out the logical concepts that I understand to form the basis of this divergence.
III. Ground and an-archy
The preceding discussion of transcendence and infinity has brought to light how Hegel’s and Levinas’s respective conceptions of them structurally diverge. In this third part of the paper, I address these basic structures explicitly, which I identify as the figure of ‘ground’ in Hegel and the notion of ‘an-archy’ in Levinas. As I will show, we may understand both to address the issue of autonomy and heteronomy. Both authors agree that subjectivity is conditioned or invested by something that precedes it, of which it can only retroactively gain consciousness. Hegel seeks to vindicate autonomy by construing it as a structure that sublates its own conditions, thereby absolving itself of them. In contrast, Levinas emphasizes the absolute withdrawal of subjectivity’s an-archic beginning. This pre-original passivity can never be appropriated, remaining instead as an open wound at the core of the subject. Levinas thus denies that closure could ever be possible. As we gain insight into this basic structural difference, we draw closer to the heart of the issue: namely, the question whether negativity is indeed all-encompassing or whether it is preceded and first enabled by something that escapes its grasp.
Hegel elaborates the figure of ‘ground’ in the Logic of Essence, where it follows immediately upon the so-called determinations of reflection (identity, difference, opposition and contradiction), which are the transitory determinations assumed by reflection, i.e., thought as self-referring negativity (SL: 354ff.). The last of these determinations, contradiction, is itself already ground, although still only implicitly, for it is a figure that effects the transition from the status of being conditioned to that of self-determination. Ground is absolute, not as a substrate, but as the very movement through which it posits itself as sublating its conditions. In a paradoxical structure of antecedence that cannot be spelled out in terms of succession, the ground absolves itself of its status as a posited term and conditions itself as self-determination. The figure that Hegel calls ground thus performs a kind of bootstrapping by virtue of which a conditioned term absolves itself of its conditions—not in one instantaneous act, but as an ongoing movement of absolution.Footnote 27 This structure provides a clue as to how Hegel can appropriate the notion of the causa sui as a model for conceiving autonomy. Paradoxically, he suggests that autonomy is achieved only retroactively, but is nonetheless conditioned only by itself.
In a well-known part of Totality and Infinity, Levinas advances a critique of theories of freedom that presume to be self-justifying (TI: 82ff.). For him, the very idea of freedom as self-conditioning misses the whole point. Freedom is not even conceivable without the relation to a transcendent Other. Consequently, he doubts that subjectivity could be described in purely ontological terms and he refuses to equate subjectivity with self-consciousness. Accordingly, he also rejects the apparent self-sufficiency achieved through the ‘sublation’ of one’s own conditions as a sham. For Levinas, the human being is not causa sui, but is a free, created being that is pre-originated in an ‘un-ground’ that he calls an-archy. The term ‘an-archy’ is intended to suggest a non-origin, a beginning that does not take place in and through consciousness. Playing on the notion of lawlessness,Footnote 28 an-archy points to a pre-original passivity in which the subject precedes itself ‘on the hither side of freedom and non-freedom’ (OB: 56) and undergoes constitution in an excess of transcendence. This passivity can never be taken up (OB: 54), and the event remains forever withdrawn within a past that is necessarily immemorial or irretrievable inasmuch as it precedes the presence of any self-conscious subject who could experience and thus remember it. Thus, the engendering of subjectivity figures as trauma, although we must be careful to understand the otherwise easily misleading notion of trauma here as signifying a pre-originary constitution that is only present in its effect, namely in the emergence of (ethical) subjectivity. Retroactively, the conscious subject finds itself answering to a demand for which it cannot account. In this way, Levinas comes to attribute ethical significance to the impossibility of self-transparency and closure.
The ultimate passivity at the core of subjectivity is thus tantamount to what Levinas calls responsibility. It is important to note that he does not understand ‘responsibility’ to signify a consciously assumed obligation on the part of subjectivity, but rather the impossibility of absolving oneself of the Other. On Levinas’s view, it is precisely this impossibility that characterizes the subject, which is constituted as and through a responsibility that is ‘older than any commitment’ (OB: 52) and that can never fully appropriate itself. For Levinas, then, subjectivity at its core is heteronomy. However, this does not mean being at the Other’s command. As I see it, the absolute passivity and heteronomy at the core of subjectivity instead enable a kind of qualified freedom and autonomy at the level of self-conscious subjectivity, even though this kind of autonomy must never be confused with self-sufficiency.Footnote 29
Both Hegel and Levinas agree that subjectivity is conditioned by something that is neither under its control nor at its disposal for the very reason that it precedes the subject’s self-sufficient existence and is what first enables thought, judgement and action. Obviously, this belatedness of self-conscious subjectivity poses a serious threat to autonomy. Autonomy becomes problematic, to say the least, because its very preconditions equally seem to preclude it (Khurana Reference Khurana2017; Khurana and Menke Reference Khurana and Menke2011). Yet the two authors deal very differently with this threat. Hegel’s concept of ground represents a structure that absolves itself of its conditions. He thus arguably provides the means to preserve autonomy in a conditioned being (Khurana and Menke Reference Khurana and Menke2011). Levinas, on the other hand, emphasizes the heteronomous beginning of subjectivity. When he demands that freedom go back before its own beginning to justify itself, he insists on the acknowledgement of an Otherness that can never be appropriated. He therefore rejects what he sees as Hegelian bootstrapping, emphasizing instead subjectivity’s an-archic beginning—a beginning that he also calls subjectivity’s un-condition because it forever defies integration in an order. Passivity remains as subjectivity’s open wound that enables self-consciousness and a kind of belated autonomy, even as it continuously threatens to unsettle it again. For Levinas, this permanent possibility of unsettlement and disturbance of self-contained subjectivity is what makes ethics possible; indeed, it constitutes the ethical as such. This brings me to my fourth and final point: the notion of the Good and the differing order of priority that Hegel and Levinas accord to knowledge and the ethical.
IV. The absolute and the Good
In the last section of this paper, I bring my argument full circle by spelling out and contrasting what Hegel and Levinas respectively understand to constitute the highest concept or ultimate value. As I will show, Hegel conceives the absolute as a kind of knowledge that coincides with freedom. In marked contrast, Levinas situates the Good beyond the distinction between freedom and unfreedom; or rather, he understands the goodness of the Good to be such as to compensate for its formal structure of non-freedom (OB: 11). Now, this is not to suggest either that the Good does not matter to Hegel or that Levinas is unconcerned with truth and freedom. My thesis is rather that their respective conceptions accord a different order of priority to the good and the true.
In the Science of Logic, Hegel introduces the idea of the Good by way of the concept of purpose (SL: 729–34). As here the relevant purpose is that of the concept in its drive toward self-realization, the idea of the Good is the idea of the concept’s coincidence with the totality of its own constitutive determinations, which in turn make up the complete content of the system of logic. The Good is thus effectively identical with the True, that is, with the agreement between the concept and the reality or objectivity that is the totality of conceptual determinations. However, despite the fact that the Good coincides with the True, the True nonetheless has priority over the Good in Hegel’s system, in that the Good is defined exclusively in terms of the concept’s cognitive purpose, namely complete self-knowledge. Levinas reverses this order of priority: for him, truth can only evolve from a prior orientation towards the transcendent Good. The basic issues dividing them, then, are whether to affirm the primacy of the ethical over knowledge or vice versa, and whether the ethical and knowledge belong to the same realm or whether they constitute two mutually irreducible dimensions.
In Hegel’s system, the highest notion is that of “absolute knowledge”, as he calls it in the Phenomenology of Spirit, or the “absolute idea”, as he refers to it in the Science of Logic. In absolute knowledge, consciousness is represented as having achieved a position that is purged of all one-sidedness and particularity and from which it is therefore poised to think pure thought itself. The absolute idea, in turn, concludes the developmental series of conceptual determinations in the Science of Logic, for here finally a figure is reached that fully comprehends itself, thereby bringing the dialectic to a halt. In both cases, the absolute emerges as the result of a dialectical progress and as a kind of knowledge that Hegel understands as coinciding with freedom as such inasmuch as the absolute idea, in its absoluteness, is not determined by anything other than itself. This emphasis on knowledge and freedom does not mean that it is devoid of ethical or axiological significance. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, a variety of shapes of moral consciousness are integral to the pathway that finally culminates in absolute knowledge. And, as we just saw, in the Science of Logic, the ‘Idea of the Good’ is the penultimate thought-determination and thus the immediate precursor to the absolute idea. By way of conclusion, I will briefly consider each of these and hint at the broad outlines of Hegel’s practical philosophy, and then turn to Levinas’s opposing account of the good.
As I mentioned above, in the third part of the Science of Logic, the ‘Logic of the Concept’, Hegel determines the Idea of the Good as the concept’s self-determination or its being-for-itself (Fürsichsein) (SL: 689ff.). In contrast to the ‘Idea of the True’, its direct precursor as the concept’s being-in-itself (Ansichsein), the Idea of the Good does not refer to anything other than itself. Rather, in so far as it constitutes its own origin, it overcomes the contingency that renders theoretical knowledge merely finite. At the same time, since it is conceived as a practical idea that immediately entails action, it also represents the higher determination, for it implies actuality rather than mere universality. Nonetheless, the Idea of the Good is still defective in that it lacks the moment of truth. As the merely formal side of the Absolute Idea, it does not acknowledge the moment of reality’s independence. Accordingly, Hegel holds that it thereby fails to recognize the assumptions underlying its own activity, namely the persistence of reality. The logic of action itself demands that the Idea of the Good undergo transformation into the absolute idea. We may therefore understand the latter as the completion of the Idea of the Good, in that it takes into account a reality that is itself effected by action. Thus, because Hegel understands the Good as the actualization of practical interests, he also affirms it as a—necessary—moment in the development of knowledge or freedom. Yet it is not itself absolute, but rather serves a subordinate function in the dialectical development.
That Hegel’s understanding of the Good is basically functional is even more palpable in his Realphilosophie. In The Elements of the Philosophy of Right, in the course of his attempt to resolve what he sees as an unacceptable opposition between particularity and abstract universality, Hegel attempts to reconcile subjectivity and universality by spelling out their interdependency (cf. PR, §§ 24–26, 54–57). One of the project’s milestones is the dissolution of the opposition between nature or inclination, on the one hand, and obligation, on the other. Hegel believes this to be achieved in a system of Sittlichkeit that can form, integrate, and actualize all particularity. Ultimately, then, Hegel conceives the Good as universally mediated necessity and interest.
Now, Levinas clearly intends to rescind this step and to reinstate the abyss between nature and moral obligation as well as between nature and moral goodness. The Good that is beyond being is not phenomenal, indeed, has no existence except in so far as it manifests itself as the goodness of a subject—a goodness that Levinas, here similarly to Kant, associates with disinterestedness and unconditionality. Unlike Kant, however, Levinas does not conceive this goodness as arising through self-determination of the will. Rather, disinterestedness and unconditionality are immediately implied by the subject’s absolute passivity in the encounter with the Other—an encounter in which its natural self-assertion and intentionality are inverted. Here, then, the Good does not figure as one pole within an opposition, nor does it make essential reference to an order of values. Rather, as a value it is uniquely singular as well as absolute.
Let us look more closely at Levinas’s conception of the Good as beyond being and consider how it relates to the notions of transcendence, infinity and an-archy we discussed above. Levinas distinguishes the spheres of need (besoin) and desire (désir). While need belongs to the natural order, desire is understood as a kind of metaphysical striving for the Good. Prima facie, the notion of desire seems to be at odds with the passivity and disinterestedness he claims for ethical subjectivity. However, while Levinas always refers ‘need’ to a lack or deficiency in the being, by ‘desire’ he understands the paradoxical need of ‘him who lacks nothing’ (TI: 62); it is ‘the misfortune of the happy, a luxurious need’ (TI: 62). In the case of desire, rather than striving for satisfaction, the subject instead sacrifices its satisfaction for the sake of the Other. Desire, then, is not simply a further—perhaps more sublime—need, but rather the inversion of the very order of need as such. Desire is thus the correlate of Levinas’s idea of infinity and what he calls goodness.
The infinite in the finite, the more in the less, which is accomplished by the idea of Infinity, is produced as Desire—not a Desire that the possession of the Desirable slakes, but the Desire for the Infinite which the desirable arouses rather than satisfies. A Desire perfectly disinterested—goodness. (TI: 50)
From the Levinasian perspective, then, the Hegelian system of needs, civil society, and even the state itself belong to the realm of need. On this view, they remained rooted in interest and self-preservation despite the fact that they function to mediate needs and shape them according to necessity and the universal satisfaction of needs. On his view, furthermore, although the sublation of primary drives may give rise to a subtler and societally adjusted regulation of needs, it nevertheless remains perpetually in the realm of being that Levinas associates with natural self-preservation. Desire, by contrast, does not effect the sublimation of need, but rather an unnatural or contra-natural inversion of need that points beyond being. Contrary to Hegel’s conception of the Idea of the Good, Levinas understands goodness as requiring the absence or interruption of precisely the self-conscious, intentional subject, his reason being that ‘[t]he “for itself” as a mode of existence designates an attachment to oneself as radical as a naïve will to live’ (TI: 87). Levinas’s conception of goodness is thus exactly the reverse of Hegel’s, for it entails a radical exposure: the relation with the Other interrupts the Hegelian cycle of return or reflection-into-self and the Levinasian subject is constituted by a going-forth toward the Other that rules out the possibility of a return. In none of this does the subject have a free choice.
On this account, therefore, the Good refers neither to an abstract law or principle, nor does it consist in the mediation of particular interests. Instead, it manifests itself in a subject who cannot even in principle absolve himself of the transcendent Other and who therefore—contrary to all natural expectations—forfeits his own needs to give to the Other. Levinas thus affirms “an-archic non-indifference” at the core of subjectivity, which he identifies as the true ground of consciousness, law and the state. To divorce these from their an-archic un-condition is to court the danger of rendering them violent and despotic. Levinas therefore warns us against conflating the political with the ethical or—in his terminology—the ontological with the metaphysical. That is what he means when he famously claims that ethics is first philosophy.
V. Conclusion
In the philosophies of Hegel and Levinas, subjectivity is an equally pivotal notion. Yet each philosopher pursues a very different aim. Whereas Hegel claims to lay out the nature of spirit and to perform the thinking of thinking itself, Levinas undertakes the paradoxical attempt to think, within the bounds of thought itself, the ethical impossibility of thought’s closure. According to him, this ethical ‘failure’ of totalization does not stem from reason’s shortcomings, say from a failure to think with sufficient rigour. Rather, the failure of totalization is the very precondition and core of subjectivity itself. This claim is at the heart of Levinas’s insistence that we must not conflate subjectivity with self-consciousness, and it allows him to deny that negativity and the dialectic are comprehensive doctrines without rejecting them unconditionally. By implication, the movement of the concept itself presupposes a genuine transcendence for which it does not and indeed could not account.
In this paper, I have tried to shed some light on the question of subjectivity and transcendence, together with some further notions relevantly associated with them. I cannot claim to have decided the matter. However, in Levinas’s account of subjectivity I do see a very successful attempt to pose the question of what it means to be human.
