Cont Philos Rev (2011) 44:165178 DOI 10.

1007/s11007-011-9175-8

The question of the other in French phenomenology

Francoise Dastur

Published online: 30 April 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Abstract I would like to show how with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, we have to do with three different ways of understanding the experience of the other. For Sartre it is a visual experience, the experience of being looked at by the other, so that the experience of the other is understood as a confrontation; for Merleau-Ponty, the experience of the other necessarily implies coexistence and what he calls intercorporeality, so that for him the other is never to be found in front, but instead beside me, in reciprocity with me; for Levinas, the experience of the other is the experience of a non-reciprocity, of an assymetrical relation, because the experience of the other is for him an ethical and not an ontological experience, and because this experience of the face of the other is the experience of a speaking and not in the rst place corporeal presence. There are consequently three different ways of nding an access to the other : the look for Sartre, intercorporeality for MerleauPonty and the face for Levinas. Keywords Sartre Merleau-Ponty Levinas The other The face Intercorporeality Our experience is at rst experience not only of the world but also of the others, in the sense that in daily life, we are always already involved in a relation with the others and we consider that their existence goes without saying. But as soon as we try to think the experience of the other, we are confronted with problems. With the experience of the other, we are in the same situation as we are with the experience
F. Dastur (&) Archives Husserl, ENS Ulm, 45 rue dUlm, 75005 Paris, France e-mail: dastur@club-internet.fr Present Address: F. Dastur La Blache, 07580 St Pons, France

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of time, as Augustine pointed out: We think that we know what is time and what is the experience of the other, but as soon as we try to dene time and the experience of the other, we get into trouble, we fall into aporias. The other is an I, a self, an ego, like me and he appears to me as the prolongation of my own self, as another I, as an alter ego. However, he or she is an I that I am not. How is that possible? The experience of the self is purely immanent: I am not for myself a thing situated in the world, I have an immediate and intuitive access to myself. But the other is an I who is situated outside of myself in the world. How is that possible? If I experience my own self in pure interiority, it means that the outside world can only be understood as being a non-I or a non-Ego, as Fichte said. What is at rst other for me is the world, the realm of objects, and it seems impossible to nd a consciousness similar to mine in the objective sphere, so that the expression of alter ego seems contradictory. In other words, if the other is really other than myself, he has to be situated in the world and he cannot therefore be considered as an ego; and if the other is really considered as an ego, then he cannot be different from myself and he has therefore no real alterity. We are confronted here with an aporia, with a dead end. Modern philosophy and especially Cartesian philosophy cannot account for the experience of the other because it is based on the denition of the ego as pure interiority. Another kind of philosophy is therefore needed, which remains on the level of the lived experience itself and does not try to reconstruct experience with intellectual categories. This philosophy, which remains faithful to what shows itself, to the phenomena, is phenomenology. This name appears in modern philosophy already with Kant, but mainly with Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger for whom the relation to the others has become a major philosophical problem. Their different interpretations of the experience of the other constitute the basis upon which other phenomenological interpretations of the same phenomenon have been developed, especially in contemporary French philosophy, which is for a large part a phenomenological philosophy. I would like to show how with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, we have to do with three different ways of understanding the experience of the other. For Sartre it is a visual experience, the experience of being looked at by the other, so that the experience of the other is understood as a confrontation; for Merleau-Ponty, the experience of the other necessarily implies coexistence and what he calls intercorporeality, so that for him the other is never to be found in front, but instead beside me, in reciprocity with me; for Levinas, the experience of the other is the experience of a non-reciprocity, of an asymmetrical relation, because the experience of the other is for him an ethical and not an ontological experience, and because this experience of the face of the other is the experience of a speaking and not in the rst place corporeal presence. There are consequently three different ways of nding an access to the other: the look for Sartre, intercorporeality for MerleauPonty and the face for Levinas. For Sartre, the experience of the other is the experience of the encounter of the other: We encounter the other; we do not constitute him.1 The problem is not for
1

Sartre (2001, p. 336).

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him to explain how the knowledge of the other is made possible, but to interpret the meaning of the encounter of the other. There is for Sartre a cogito, which is related to the other, a consciousness, which immediately gives me the existence of the other in the same manner as the Cartesian cogito immediately reveals the existence of my consciousness. But it does not mean that the relation to the other is a relation of knowledge. Consciousness does not mean necessarily knowledge. We do not have to choose between, on one hand, the merging of two consciousnesses which would be the negation of the otherness of the other, and on the other hand, a relation to the other as a mere object. It is only when consciousness and knowledge are identied that the only possible relation to the other has to be understood as a relation with an object. But for Sartre, to say that the other is referred to my consciousness means that my consciousness is affected in its own being by the other, so that it has to nd in itself a dimension by which it can be understood as being opened to the exteriority of the other. Sartre explains that the situation is here the same as it was for Descartes in his afrmation of the existence of God. Descartes was able to show that the transcendence of God could be found in the immanence of the cogito, because man cannot be by himself the origin of the idea of the innite which he nds in himself as a nite being; in the same manner, Sartre wants to show that the transcendence of the other can be found in the heart of consciousness itself. The other is not me. But it does not mean that he is a substance which remains separated from me, in an insurmountable distance. The alterity of the other is not an external alterity, but an internal one, i.e., an alterity which is mine, a dimension of my consciousness. The other is another subject: It cannot therefore be frontally given like an object. The other cannot appear in front of me. But if my experience of the other is really the experience of another subject, it means that I can nd an access to the other only in becoming an object for him, in being looked at by him. The experience of the other, of the alter ego, is the experience of the look. Sartres analysis begins with a question: What is the meaning of the ordinary appearance of the other in the eld of my perception?2 He gives an example: I am in a public park I see a man. I apprehend him as an object and at the same time as a man What does that signify? The description which follows is quite convincing. The appearance of the other is for me the experience of the decentralization of my world: I can no longer put myself at the centre of the relation between this particular object and the other objects of the world.3 As Sartre says in a striking manner: Thus suddenly an object has appeared which has stolen the world from me.4 I am experiencing the loss of my universe, which means that the experience that I have now of myself is the passive experience of being seen by the other: Being-seen by the other is the truth of seeing the other,5 so that the other is on principle the one who looks at me.6 The only possible experience of the other is the experience of my being for the other: It is a passive
2 3 4 5 6

Sartre (2001, p. 341). Sartre (2001, p. 294). Sartre (2001, p. 394). Sartre (2001, p. 345). Sartre (2001, pp. 345346).

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and not an active experience, the experience of becoming an object for the other. But in becoming an object for the other, I remain a subject, because I remain conscious of my being seen by the other. I am experiencing my becoming an object for the other through the fact that he is looking at me, so that my becoming an object remains my own experience. Sartre explains that the look is not necessarily connected with the appearance of a sensible form in our perceptive eld. The experience of the look is not an empirical experience: Far from perceiving the look on the objects which manifest it, my apprehension of a look turned towards me appears on the ground of the destruction of the eyes which look at me.7 Sartre remarks that when we apprehend the look, we cease to perceive the eyes, and that it is impossible to notice the colour of the eyes that are looking at you, because the others look seems to hide his eyes. I cannot at the same time see the eyes of the other and see his look. This means that for me it is impossible to situate the source of the look in the world: If I try to do it, I become for myself a look and I can nd only objects of the world and no longer the look of other subjects. The experience of the look can therefore only be the experience of my being looked at. The look cannot be understood as an empirical event, but as the modality of the appearance of the other as a subject. Sartre names shame the experience of the discovery of the other as looking at me. For Sartre, shame is the mode of consciousness which immediately gives the existence of the other. Shame realizes an intimate relation of myself to myself. But shame is not a reective experience, in spite of the fact that it is a selfconsciousness, because I can be ashamed of myself only before someone. In shame, the other is the indispensable mediator between me and myself, in the sense that I can only be ashamed of myself as I appear to the other. Sartres description is again here quite convincing: I am ashamed only when I see my behaviour in the eyes of the other, because I am put in the position of passing judgment on myself as on an object. But this process of self-objectication is something that happens in myself, so that in shame I recognize that I am as the other sees me. I am not comparing myself as I am for myself and myself as I am for the other, because such a comparison between my being a subject and my being an object is impossible, but the other reveals me as a new kind of being that I am now for myself: Shame is shame of oneself before the other. The two structures are inseparable,8 which means that in shame I have a relation of being with the other. Sartres understanding of the problem of the other is convincing, especially because of the descriptive value of his analysis. But it is also what makes it susceptible to criticism, in the sense that he succeeds in describing one particular experience, the experience of shame, but there is no given certitude that this particular experience is the essential experience of the other as such. Sartre wants us to understand that shame is not so much a particular experience as the very structure of our experience of the other, an original reaction by which I recognize the other.9 But in the experience of shame, we nd something negative, which
7 8 9

Sartre (2001, p. 346). Sartre (2001, p. 198). Sartre (2001, p. 387).

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represents an extreme possibility of the relation to the other which can also be harmonious. It is true that the other cannot appear as an object, but does it mean that he can appear only as a pure subject which has the power to make of me an object? The question can be raised: Is Sartres phenomenology of the other really a phenomenology or a psychological description of the empirical experience of shame? Can therefore this description of shame really give us the solution to the problem of the other? But another question can also be raised about the status of the other itself as a being which cannot appear in the world. I quote Sartre: Every look directed toward me is manifested in connection with the appearance of a sensible form in our perceptive eld, but contrary to what might be expected, it is not connected with any determined form.10 If we follow here what Sartre is saying about the absence of connection between a sensible form and the experience of the other we may wonder if the experience of being-seen is really the experience of the appearance of the other. It is true that, as far as the other is a subject, he cannot identify himself with his sensible appearance, with any determined form. Consequently, it is not because I perceive a form that I nd an access to the experience of the other, but on the contrary only because I experience shame that I can consider this form as the manifestation of the other in the world, as his living body. But should we conclude, as does Sartre, that the fact of being-looked at can not therefore depend on the object which manifests the look?11 Sartre explains that the act of being-looked at is not bound to the others body, so that we must consider the appearance of certain objects in the eld of our experience, such as the convergence of the others eyes in my direction, as a pure monition, i.e. as the pure occasion of realizing my beinglooked at. It is true that the experience of the other does not depend on any sensible form, as if it were the cause of this experience, but it does not mean that this experience has no relation with perceptual experience. If the experience of the other really does not take place in the world and has no relation with our perceptual experience, how is it still possible to speak of the experience of the other? In other words, if the access to the other is identied with the experience of my being-looked at, there is no real experience of the other, because there is nothing that is really experienced in it, and in that case the experience of being-looked at is only an experience of my own self, the experience of a structure of my consciousness. We could object to Sartre that shame, instead of being the experience of the other, is rather the experience of the self, i.e., experience of ones own nitude. In fact that is what Sartre himself acknowledges when he writes: Being-for-others is a constant fact of my human reality, and I grasp it with its factual necessity in every thought, however, slight, which I form concerning myselfTo withdraw, to approach, to discover this particular other-as-object is only to effect empirical variations on the fundamental theme of my being-for-others. The other is present to me everywhere as the one through which I become an object.12

10 11 12

Sartre (2001, p. 346). Sartre (2001, p. 369). Sartre (2001, p. 373).

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It seems therefore that Sartre, who wanted to make explicit the meaning of the encounter of the other, is nally led to consider the experience of the other as the experience of a mere dimension of consciousness. There is a choice to be made: On the one hand, if this experience of the other is identied with the experience of shame, then it does not seem to be a real experience of the other; on the other hand, if we want to describe a real experience of the other, it cannot be solely the experience of my objectication and alienation. If shame is a factual event, as Sartre stresses, it must manifest itself in my perceptual eld through the appearance of determined sensible forms. Shame does not dene the experience of the other, but it is rather the contrary. The sensible appearance of the other in the world gives rise to shame. In other words, if I feel being looked at, then I need to see that I am looked at and that something in the world is connected with my feeling of alienation. My shame can have a meaning only if I can connect it with some determined phenomena taking place in the world. It is therefore necessary to situate the experience of the other in the world and not, as Sartre does, beyond it. It seems therefore that Sartre was not able to overcome what he himself called the idealism of phenomenology, because he remains caught into the opposition of the subject and of the object which takes in his philosophy a radical form. By dening the subject as the transparency of a pure consciousness which is immediately self present, he is led to exclude all possibility of the appearance of the other in the world. It means that the other can never be a person looked at by me, it can be only an object. And on the other hand, my being looked at can have only the meaning of an alienation and not the meaning of the recognition of the person I am. It means in fact that for Sartre there is no possibility of a real encounter between two different consciousnesses. Sartre wanted to remain close to the phenomena. But he remained caught in the abstract opposition of the subject and of the object. If I want to nd the other in the world, then I have to leave aside this opposition and develop the idea of a relation between human beings which cannot be considered as a relation between pure consciousnesses. This is exactly what Merleau-Ponty tried to do. We have seen that Sartre could not really understand the fact of the appearance of the other in the world and that he decided to situate the other beyond the world. But we know that in fact the other does appear in the world, as Husserl tries to explain it in his Cartesian Meditations by showing that between my body and the body of the other a kind of pairing takes place, which is not a reasoning, but a real experience of a lived analogy between me and the other. But Husserl could not really develop this point because he remained in an idealistic position, which considers the relationship between me and the other as a relation between subjects who cannot have an intuitive access to each other; thus, for Husserl, the experience of the other remains a negative experience, the experience of what cannot be a phenomenon. Merleau-Ponty, in his own conception of the perception of the other, developed the Husserlian idea of a pairing between my own body and the body of the other by showing that since we do have the experience of the other, the subjectivity of the other has to be understood as being part of his body. This implies a new comprehension of the body as a non objective phenomenon and a new comprehension of the appearance of the other as immediate expression in his body

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and his behaviour. It means that if the other can appear to me, it cannot be in a face to face relation, but only laterally in his behaviour. The other is neither in front of me as is an object nor is he identied with me as a subject, he is on the same side as myself, he is in a way a prolongation of myself, because I am not myself a pure subject, but an embodied consciousness, which is always already out of itself, in the world and with the others. Merleau-Ponty remains nevertheless in agreement with Sartre, when he insists on the fact that I cannot look into the face of the other without making of him an object: my relation with the other is oblique, he is in a way my twin, my accomplice, somebody who is at the same time familiar and foreign, who participates in my familiarity with the world, but toward whom I cannot turn. Merleau-Ponty understands my relation to the other as Heidegger does, as a relation of community, a relation which can be described with the preposition with and not as a face-to-face relation, but as a being-together with the other, based on the fact that each of us is open to the world. The world, which is at the same time a natural and cultural world, shows the presence of the other human beings, it immediately shows my co-presence with the others, because the cultural object or the instrument immediately refers to a possibility of use which is common to everybody. As soon as I make use of a cultural object, and this is valid also for the very rst cultural object that is language, I am projected outside myself and originally situated in an intersubjective dimension. This means, as it is also the case for Heidegger, that I am not originally an isolated being, but that which I experienced in solitude is only the deciency of my being with the others, which constitutes my original belonging to the intersubjective dimension, a dimension that can be experienced in two different modes, the presence or the absence of the others. Merleau-Ponty shows that, if a certain solipsism is insurmountable, in the sense that I cannot transfer myself into the thinking or the feelings of the others, a solipsist philosophy is nevertheless inconsistent, because it cannot account for the fact that even the most theoretical consciousness is deeprooted in an universe of coexistence with the others. Merleau-Ponty cannot be in agreement with Sartre because Sartre understands the relation with the other only in terms of competition and duality, which is a simplication of the factual experience of the plurality of the others. In a long note in his last unnished book, The Visible and the Invisible,13 Merleau-Ponty takes as an example a novel from Simone de Beauvoir, She Came To Stay, which is the story of a couple being disturbed by the arrival of a guest who does not want to leave. Merleau-Ponty explains: The problem of the others is not reducible to that of the other, and so much the less so in that the most strict couple always has its witnesses in third parties.14 Merleau-Ponty stresses, as Levinas also does, the necessary standpoint of the third party in all dual relations, and he suggests that perhaps it would be necessary to reverse the customary order of the philosophies of the negative(this means of course Sartres philosophy of nothingness)and say that the problem of the other is a particular case of the problem of others, since the
13 14

Merleau-Ponty (1969, p. 81). Merleau-Ponty (1969, p. 81).

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relation with someone is always mediated by the relationship with third parties.15 He mentions as a proof the fact that even in the beginnings of life, the Oedipus situation is still a triangular one. However, he does not want to remain only on the psychological level, but to show on the philosophical level that we may have one principal other, from which are derived many secondary others in our life, but that the sole fact that he is not the unique other obliges us to consider him not as what contests our life, but as what forms it, because he is a sort of cipher or symbol of the other and therefore can be considered as the preferred variant of many others. But here, the limits of the Merleau-Pontian perspective appear. If the other is always the symbol of the others in general, it means that the encounter of this particular other cannot really be explained. It is true that Merleau-Ponty does not pretend that we can really understand others, since we do not have access to their living experiences, but nevertheless the discovery that we share the same corporeality can be understood as the negation of the difference between me and the other. We could say that Merleau-Pontys solution to the problem of the other is too radical of a solution, because it seems nally to suppress the terms of the problem itself, namely the experienced duality between me and the other. Merleau-Ponty does not describe the encounter between myself and the other, but merely brings to the fore a pure coexistence with the others on the anonymous level of the they, where communication seems to be always harmonious and without conict. Merleau-Ponty is certainly right against Sartre when he argues that the experience of the other is not an experience of conict and alienation, but an experience of harmony and community, but we may wonder if he does not go too far in that direction by stressing the fact that the experience of others is the experience of the sharing of a common existence and corporeality which is anonymous, so that it seems that nobody meets nobody. It is true that the experience of the other cannot only be the experience of conict and this is precisely the reason why Sartres description of shame, although convincing, could not be accepted as the description of our structural experience of the other. But on the other hand, Merleau-Ponty seems to dissolve the experience of the other in a harmonious coexistence in the world from which the dimension of conict is absent, or at least does not seem to be a real menace for our common being in the world. It is true that we all live in a common world, that in daily life we have the same relations with our surroundings and that we are always in this respect with others, that our daily Dasein is always a Mitsein as Heidegger would say. But with this description of our daily existence is the experience of the other entirely explained? Should we not try to ground this daily experience of the other on a deeper level, where the alterity of the other can be preserved? This is precisely the question addressed by Levinas to Heidegger and to the Heideggerian description of Mitsein. In the rst book where he deals with the question of the other, Time and the Other, which was published in 1947, Levinas declares that he hopes to show, for his part, that it is not the preposition mit that should describe the original

15

Merleau-Ponty (1969, p. 81)

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relationship with the other and he speaks of going back to the ontological root of solitude.16 Is this a return to the Sartrian perspective? We will have to raise the question. It is necessary to dene again the terms of the alternative to which we have come after the analysis of the Sartrian and the Merleau-Pontian conceptions of the relation with the others. On the one hand, with Sartre, we can preserve the idea of a difference between me and the other, but in remaining in the face-to-face relationship, it seems that we maintain the traditional idea of subjectivity understood as interiority, so that the other can be understood only either as an object or as what makes of me an object. On the other hand, with Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, we remain on the factual level of the daily coexistence with the others in the world, but this implies a denial of all real difference between the other and me and the dissolution of the alterity of the other in the anonymity of das Man, the they. If we want to get out of this alternative, on the other hand we must try to redene consciousness in order to show that it is not only a power of objectivation, and on the other hand we must show that the face to face relationship is something other than a relation of knowledge. This is precisely what Levinas wants to do in showing that the face to face relationship is an ethical relation. It seems therefore that with Levinas the problem of the other has been understood in a more radical manner than before. All the preceding philosophers have remained on the level of a philosophy of intuition, a theoretical philosophy which cannot make a real difference between the being of the other and the being of the world and of things. Levinas on the contrary wants to show, against Merleau-Ponty, that the other is radically transcendent to the world, and against Sartre, that he can be given to a radically passive I which cannot be alienated by the look of the other, but on the contrary must respond to it. But the problem is here the radical passivity of the I. Is it possible to found ethics upon a responsibility which is not freedom? In Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, a book published in 1974, Levinas even goes so far as to say that I am the hostage of the other. It seems, then, that the ethical attitude here is not a free response to a situation, but the experience of alienation. Levinas breaks here with the traditional conception of freedom and explains that responsibility is not the result of a free choice, but the originary dimension of the subject in so far as it is constituted by the appearance of the other. It seems therefore that the ethical level of the encounter of the other is not fundamentally different from the ontological level of the encounter of objects. On the ontological level of the perception of the object, there is also no freedom and no choice, as it is the case in the ethical experience for Levinas, where I do not have the choice of the non-response. We could go back to Kant here in order to show that there are other possibilities of understanding ethics. Kant distinguishes in a more radical manner the ethical level and the ontological level. For him it is not possible to dene the other by remaining on the level of experience, because there we can nd only things, not persons. The alterity of the other comes from the fact that he is a person, and to be a
16

Levinas (1990, p. 41).

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person means to possess a will, and to be free. A person can only be an end in itself, whereas a thing is and can only be an instrument. The ontological difference between thing and person is in fact based on an ethical difference: the difference between the end and the means. In moral obligation, by submitting my own will to a rule, to a universal law, I recognize the other as such, since I recognize the right of another will that is other than my own. In the very fact that I experience the obligation, I recognize implicitly the existence of the other. For Kant, the moral obligation implies that I have to treat at the same time the other and myself never as an instrument, but always as a person, i.e., as an end in itself. By submitting the other and my own self to the categorical imperative, we become persons, i.e. members of the realm of ends. This means that I do not have to consider the other as absolutely higher than myself, but as belonging with me to the same humanity. I have to follow with regard to myself the same moral law that I have to follow with regard to the other. It is clear that for Levinas, such an ethics, which is based on a strict reciprocity between the moral subjects, cannot be accepted, since it denies the innite transcendence of the other. The other cannot be the theme of a moral discourse for Levinas; he can only be the one to whom I speak and never the one about whom I speak. It means therefore that it is not possible to elaborate a philosophical discourse on the other. This was Derridas objection in the rst text that he wrote in the sixties on Levinas philosophy under the title Violence and Metaphysics. In this text he puts the emphasis on the opposition between Husserls and Levinas approach of the other. Husserl recognizes the transcendentality of the other, which can never be present as such to the ego, but because he still thinks that there is a kind of reciprocity or coupling between the other and the self, he can speak about the other, he can elaborate a philosophical discourse on the other. On the contrary, Levinas, who does not want to acknowledge any reciprocity or symmetry between the other and the self (because it would be a violent or totalitarian act, a denial of the innite transcendence of the other), does not in fact allow himself to speak about the other and cannot elaborate a philosophy of alterity. This brings me to the most important objections that can be raised against Levinas. Levinas opposes the ethical level to the cognitive level and considers that the experience of the face is the very experience of the alterity of the other. But is this absolute alterity really experienced? Is not the other experienced at rst as the alter ego, as somebody similar to me, somebody with which I share the world, somebody who is familiar and not a complete stranger? Is the other always a stranger? Levinas sees the other at the same time as innite transcendence and as complete destitution. There is here a coincidence of the extremes: What is the mosthigh can only be experienced as destitute, or as Levinas says: The transcendence of the face is at the same time its absence from this world into which it enters, the exiling of a being, his condition of being stranger, destitute or proletarian. The strangeness that is freedom is also strangeness-destitution () Existence kathauto is, in the world, destitution.17 Levinas sees the gaze of the other as a gaze that always supplicates and demands at the same time. Such a gaze can only be
17

Levinas (1969, p. 75).

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the gaze of a destitute or, as Levinas points out, of those who are in a situation of distress: The other who dominates me in his transcendence is thus the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, to whom I am obligated.18 Levinas insists on the necessity of understanding subjectivity as welcoming the other, as hospitality,19 because to recognize the other is to recognize a hunger.20 The other presents itself to me in his utmost weakness and nakedness, the other is for Levinas always unprotected and defenceless as are the widow and the orphan. We can here raise the same question that we already raised concerning the Sartrian analysis of shame: Is not Levinas elevating here one particular experience of the other to the general structure of all possible encounter of the other? Is the ethical attitude towards the other the only one possible? Levinas, as a Jew, has been greatly affected by what happened to the Jews during the Second World War and by the Holocaust, and one can consider that all his reection on the face of the other was provoked by this terrible episode of the twentieth century. But can an historical event reveal an essence? And is it not necessary to consider the other also from another point of view than from the point of view of somebody toward which I am obligated? There is a paradox in fact in Levinas conception of the other. Because the other is understood as innite transcendence, the emphasis is put on the I, as the one who has to respond to the innite demand of the other. Levinas showed that ontology is egology, or egoism; but ethics remains nevertheless egocentred, in spite of the fact that it breaks with egoism. Levinas wants to elaborate a pluralistic philosophy, but he remains caught in a relation of face to face, in a dualistic relation with the other. But the other is not only other than me: I am also other than him. Is it possible really to think alterity without thinking reciprocity at the same time? The alterity of the other can only make sense if, as Merleau-Ponty does, it is situated in a phenomenal eld where reversibility and reciprocity are made possible. In other words the transcendence of the other requires the phenomenal world in order to appear, whereas for Levinas, as it was already the case for Sartre, the transcendence of the other transcends the world and breaks totality. This brings me to the last and perhaps most important objection that can be raised against Levinas. By dening the other as innite transcendence, Levinas cannot really account for the alterity of the other human being, because he identies the alterity of the other human being with the absolute innity of God himself. It is true that Levinas does not intend to hold a religious discourse in Totality and Innity, and that he gives a new meaning to the word religion by understanding it as the relation of separation with the innite transcendence of the other. Levinas thought does not belong to the theological domain and Levinas explicitly maintains the identity of metaphysics and atheism. Atheism is necessary in order to break with the violence of the sacred.21 There is for Levinas a violence of the sacred because the very notion of the sacred implies the idea of a totality into which the sacred manifests itself and into which it becomes possible for the human being to have a
18 19 20 21

Levinas (1969, p. 215). Levinas (1969, p. 27). Levinas (1969, p. 75). Levinas (1969, p. 77).

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relation of participation with the divine being. Levinas opposes to the violence of the sacred the transcendence of sanctity which can only present itself as absolute separation. We can therefore understand why Levinas says, in a paradoxical manner that faith purged of myths, the monotheist faith, itself implies metaphysical atheism and that Atheism conditions a veritable relationship with a true God kathauto.22 Such a God does not appear, does not manifest itself into the world, but reveals itself by speaking. It is not a mythical god, who can be identied with the natural phenomena, but an invisible and personal God. This means for Levinas that the only dimension into which the true God can be found is not the phenomenal world, but the other: The dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face.23 As Levinas explains: The comprehension of God taken as a participation in his sacred life, an allegedly direct comprehension, is impossible, because participation is a denial of the divine, and because nothing is more direct than the face to face, which is straightforwardness itself.24 God as a personal and invisible God is accessible, but only in the ethical attitude, which means for Levinas that he cannot be approached outside of human presence. God is not an object of knowledge, he is not, insofar as being means identity and not alterity: There can be no knowledge of God separated from the relationship with men. The other is the very locus of metaphysical truth, and is indispensable for my relation with God.25 But this does not mean that the other plays the role of a mediator between myself and God, as it is the case of Christianity, where God made himself human in the person of the Christ: The other is not the incarnation of God, but precisely his face, in which he is disincarnate, is the manifestation of the height in which God is revealed.26 The other can be the revelation of God only because through his face he no longer belongs to the realm of phenomenality, to the sensible world. There is therefore a primacy of the ethical, of the relationship of man to man, over the theological: It is our relations with men () that give to theological concepts the sole signication they admit of.27 And Levinas concludes: Everything that cannot be reduced to an interhuman relation represents not the superior form but the forever primitive form of religion.28 But if the experience of the other is the true experience of the divine, is it still possible to account for the specicity of the experience of the other human being? We have seen that for Merleau-Ponty, because there is a plurality of others, each of them can be considered as a sort of cipher or symbol of the other in general, so that it meant that the encounter of this particular other could not really be explained. Merleau-Ponty, because he considered the other as similar to myself, could not account for the alterity of the other. We are here with Levinas in the inverse but also
22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Levinas (1969, p. 77). Levinas (1969, p. 77). Levinas (1969, p. 78). Levinas (1969, p. 78). Levinas (1969, p. 79). Levinas (1969, p. 79). Levinas (1969, p. 79).

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similar situation. If the alterity of the other, that Levinas wants to preserve of all reduction to the same, i.e., to the I, is at the same time the alterity of God, it means in the same manner that the alterity of the other human being cannot be really preserved. Too much symmetry between myself and the other on the side of Merleau-Ponty leads to a denial of the alterity of the other; but too much asymmetry on the side of Levinas leads also to a denial of the alterity of the other which is there identied to God. Levinas criticises the phenomenological way of thinking, because in his view it still belongs to the philosophy of identity and is unable to think alterity as such. But Levinas presupposition is here a very denite idea of alterity, as absolute and innite alterity, which he found in the religious discourse of the Bible. So that Levinas, like Sartre, presupposes abstract concepts and does not open himself directly to the phenomena, to the things themselves. If we want to remain in the philosophical tradition, and in the phenomenological one that means to obey the principle of the absence of all presuppositions, it is not enough to be an atheist in the Sartrian or in the Levinassian sense, it is also necessary to criticise our ontological preconceptions as well as our religious ones. Sartres preconception is the dualistic opposition of the initself and of the for-itself, of the subject and of the object; Levinas preconception is the dualistic opposition of the same and of the other. It is true that Levinas, in opposition to Sartre, intends to elaborate a pluralistic philosophy, but we may wonder if he can really succeed in his project, since he remains at the same time in a dualistic and in a monotheistic perspective. Both Sartre and Levinas situate the other outside the world and outside the perceptual and bodily experience. Neither for Sartre nor for Levinas, is there a possibility for the human being of sharing something in common. On the contrary, Merleau-Ponty develops a conception of an intersubjective community on the basis of the perceptual and bodily experience, but the price to pay for that is the denial of the absolute alterity of the other, which is maintained, in a different manner, both by Sartre and Levinas. At the end of our inquiry, we can by no means declare that we have a denitive answer to the question of the other, which remains an ontological and ethical problem. But some important indications have been given to us, which can allow us to meditate further upon the enigma of the other. From Sartre, we can retain the idea of the always possible relation of alienation to the other and the necessity of thinking the relation to the other from an ontological and not only epistemological point of view. From Merleau-Ponty, we learned that we have to search the other in the world and not beyond it, and that the community that we share with him is principally a community of esh. And Levinas gave us the very important warning that a true relation to the other cannot only be ontological, but is also ethical and that there is always a possibility of violence in reducing the other to the same.

References
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and innity: An essay on exteriority (Trans: Alphonso Lingis). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

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Levinas, Emmanuel. 1990. Time and the other (Trans: Richard A. Cohen). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1969. The Visible and the invisible (Trans: Alphonso Lingis). Evanston: Northwestern Univeristy Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2001. Being and nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology (Trans: Hazel Barnes). New York: Citadel Publishing Corp.

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