Ethics as Aesthetic World: Levinas and Heidegger on Art

The Lithuanian-born French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. For Levinas nothing is more serious and deserves more attention than ethics, which, for him, is our highest individual and collective vocation, that, which makes us human and that, which, according to him, we have become forgetful of.  Levinas, who is most renowned for his powerful critique of ontology, declares ethics as “first philosophy” and not simply as a branch amongst others. Philosophy, according to Levinas, is not limited, as has been traditionally understood, to a discipline primarily devoted to the search for truth and knowledge, but should rather be understood as a process of knowledge. Levinas has contributed, along with philosophers such as Bernard Williams and Jacques Derrida, to reversing the axis of ethics, leading to an ethical “Copernican Revolution” by no longer assimilating the ethical experience of an “other” under the notion of the same or a universal category of the self. According to Levinas, his German predecessors and teachers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger reproduce the suppression of alterity characteristic of Western philosophy as both thinkers subsume the Other under the authority of the Same, which is consciousness in Husserl’s case and Being in Heidegger’s.

The two alternatives that have opened up since Immanuel Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason[1] is the ethical or the aesthetic as a route beyond the limits of knowledge. Levinas’s vision in response to this demand is nothing less than a fundamental reorientation of Western philosophy in the light of the demands of ethics. Even though interest in his philosophy has been continuously growing, misconceptions of the complex and challenging relationship between ethics and aesthetics within Levinas’s thoughts have dominated the debates to date and require further analysis. This paper sets out to explore the parallel that exists between ethics and art in his body of work, illustrating how ethics and art are essential to one another in Levinas’s philosophy.

Levinas’s sporadic writing on art, primarily his early and only essay dedicated to a direct reflection on art, “Reality and Its Shadow,” has received widespread and even vicious criticism, particularly from literary theorists.[2] The greatest consensus in this literature on Levinas is the position that he believes art and ethics to be incompatible. Scholars who hold this position have frequently accused Levinas of being a Platonic moralist who rejects art on the basis of being of lesser importance and value than ethics. However, this prevalent position on Levinas will be rejected, as it confuses his critique of artistic representation with a critique of art’s failure to represent, which in turn fails to distinguish the ontological impossibility from an ethical impossibility within the writing of Levinas on art.

In contrast to this hitherto prevalent position, it is the work by Levinas translator and scholar Richard A. Cohen, which I will draw on, as he provides a radically new perspective on Levinas’s theory of art. Cohan rejects the traditional criticism levelled against Levinas, as he argues that Levinas is neither misrepresenting art nor that he is hostile to art or that his theory of art is self-contradictory in view of his ethical writing. On the contrary, Cohen sets out to show that Levinas values art highly, a position which will be investigated, in order to tease out the ways in which art and ethics can enrich and challenge one another.

This paper argues that Levinas does not separate ethics from art or art from ethics, while also not collapsing them into the same, which would result in the expense of one for the other. This paper is split into two sections, the first of which is looking at Levinas’s writing on ethics and aesthetics in relation to the question of responsibility and criticism, whereas the second much shorter section explores how his writing on art and ethics can bring a new perspective to the debate of film-philosophy.

ART

Even though a considerable volume of scholarly attention has been given to Levinas’s ethical philosophy, little attention has been paid to his views on art and the precise relationship between ethics and aesthetics in his work. However, this lack of examination calls for a contextualization of Levinas’s theory of art within the framework of his ethical metaphysics, in order to evaluate the criticism that has been proposed about his theory of art and more importantly the significance of his idea of art for our current times.

Starting with “Reality and Its Shadow,” as the title already indicates, this essay is primarily aimed at the relationship art has to epistemology and ontology. In order to encounter Levinas’s thought on the relationship of art to ethics, one would need to turn to Totality and Infinity[3] and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence.[4] Levinas’s perceived problem has wrongly been attributed to art rather than to aestheticism, the notion that life is art, or that art is first philosophy, or that art is the essence of all things. Due to his inherent commitment to ethics, it is precisely this notion of aestheticism that he attacks in “Reality and Its Shadow.” 

Levinas is not asking, in his view the too narrow, ontological question of “What is art?”, but rather the more open ended and ethical question of “What is the value of art?”. For he believes that the “What is ….?” question can too quickly fall into Heideggarian abstraction, separating the worth of art from an ethical demand for a limited epistemological or ontological account of it. In fact, Levinas is not interested in the signification of art but turns critically to its significance, not because he wants to denigrate the arts to a lower level, as has been frequently argued, but in order to hold it to a higher and arguably ethical standard, while appreciating the unique and invaluable contribution art can, if not should, make to an ethical life. Therefore, it is possible to go a step further than Levinas himself and argue that a theory of art must not only stand in an essential relation to ethics but that ethics must be understood as a higher discipline, which demands a moral responsibility of the artistic discipline, the artist, his/her artwork, the critic and the viewer. For Levinas, ethics itself does not have an essence, but is defined by its absence of essence. Its identity, so to speak, is to give essence, substance and height to other domains, to undo previous identities and to be more than being. Ethics, therefore, disturbs the question of being. The consequence thereof is not only a reorientation of ontology to ethics, but Levinas thereby justifies philosophy itself.

RESPONSIBILITY

It is important to note that, to Levinas, responsibility is neither freely chosen nor freely contemplated, but a subject’s obligation to the other’s suffering, which can never be cleared. In line with his notion of substitution, the subject is chosen to be responsible, while not having chosen it, yet this very responsibility precedes the very freedom of every individual. Therefore, from a Levinassian perspective, Sartre’s famous assertion that “We are condemned to freedom” should be replaced by “We are condemned to responsibility.” However, according to Levinas, this “crushing charge [and] divine discomfort”[5] is still better than the freedom of choice. This finitude of freedom is caused by and situated within the field of infinite responsibility – not because the other limits the subject’s freedom, but because the other always remains absolutely other and his call to responsibility can accuse the subject to the point of persecution. 

For Levinas the origin of signification and the beginning of philosophy is the responsibility of one self for another self and not a responsibility for being as such.[6] Responsibility for the Other precedes any self-consciousness of the subject and transcends any claim to freedom prior to being. From the beginning, a past infinitely older than any origin, and till a future which will never arrive, the face-to-face, the other’s calling my being into question, reveals in our eternal responsibility to the other an infinite temporality.

CRITICISM

Cohen illustrates Levinas’s view of art through his analysis of Levinas’s writing along the lines of disengagement and engagement, which allows Cohen to re-read Levinas in a new light. Cohen articulates this pivotal differentiation as follows:

artworks have an inner tendency toward self-closure, disengaging in a centripetal movement from the larger world for the sake of their own world, centering on themselves to the exclusion of all else, and at the same time, in a centrifugal movement, art and artworks are inextricably engaged in the larger world, engaged via what Levinas calls “criticism,” meaning both art criticism and philosophical exegesis. These two aspects, disengagement from and engagement with the larger world, are both essential, both necessary, and together comprise in a nutshell Levinas’s theory of art.[7] 

Therefore, according to Cohen, every artwork contains an aspect of ‘disengagement’, which is an artwork’s own internal logic independent of the world, referring only back to its own core or gravitational field. In contrast, Cohen argues that for Levinas every artwork is also engaged with the history of art and the world at large. Whereas art critics focus on the attachment of an artwork to the history of art, it is philosophers who focus on an artwork’s relation to the social-economic-political world through philosophical exegesis, as it is in here that art’s relation to ethics, moral obligation and a struggle for justice emerges. 

However, the question this raises is what the inherent relationship is, according to Levinas, that binds art to criticism. Cohen argues that for Levinas it is through art criticism and philosophical exegesis that art can be understood as being essential to life, contra the criticism leveled against him. For Levinas, ethics is expressed in and depends on language as an ethical structure which in turn enables the relationship between a subject and an other. In contrast, for art to find its proper place, which for Levinas is always an ethical relation, it must open up to an other and take responsibility, which, according to Levinas, it can only do by means of criticism and not through the artwork itself. Whereas art criticism establishes a relationship to the history of art and evaluates the aesthetic aspects of a work, philosophical exegesis, Levinas argues, “integrates the inhuman work of the artist into the human world . . . It does not attack the artistic event as such, that obscuring of being in images, that stopping of being in the meanwhile.”[8] In fact, art requires both forms of criticism, which are inherent to itself and without which art could not, according to Levinas, exist. As the task of philosophical exegesis is to open, or in Cohen’s term engage, the artwork with the world outside of itself, it has to engage an artwork with the temporality inside and outside of it. Arguably, it would be possible to understand philosophical exegesis as an answer to Levinas’s question of an artwork's temporality, as the philosopher frees the artwork from the “instant” and introduces it, time and again, to a new external context, which is no longer frozen or destined.

If we accept the premise in Levinas’s ethical framework that the source of all intelligibility derives from placing the other before oneself, or from the acknowledgement of the anteriority of the Other over the self and the latter’s indebtedness to the former, we arrive at responsibility, as well as the alleviation of the other’s suffering. It can be argued that an ethical life requires art, if and only if art can be seen, or in fact if a demand on art can be placed, of alleviating the suffering of the other, thereby serving ethics rather than itself or its creator, understanding the artist to be an individual with the responsibility of any other, if not a higher obligation. The result would be nothing less than the possibility of thinking the ethical and the aesthetic together.

FILM-PHILOSOPHY

As previously alluded to, philosophy has displayed a hostility towards the arts since Plato rejected poets from his ideal city in The Republic. In some sense, though not all, philosophy and the arts have been understood as standing in competition for a claim to knowledge. Philosophers, who believed that only pure philosophy is the true heir to truth, have dismissed the arts as deceived by a shadow of reality, mistaken the illusion of knowledge for a real claim to it. This ‘Platonic prejudice’ against art, which Levinas, as I have shown, has been accused of, is what the American art theorist Arthur Danto called the ‘philosophical disenfranchisement of art’ (1986), the idea that art has to be subsumed by philosophy, as it enables philosophy, thought of as the higher discourse, to subordinate art to pure theoretical concerns of its own.

However, philosophers concerned with the medium of film have often argued and tirelessly tried to illustrate that films, in fact, can be a source of knowledge and articulate their own truths and therefore, can, if not should, be seen as a contender to the highest of philosophical aspirations. Stanley Cavell can be singled out as the most prominent defenders of this view and his contribution to the field of film-philosophy cannot be overstated. Cavell, alongside Gilles Deleuze, articulated how film and philosophy respond to problems both disciplines share, as for Cavell film is presenting “a moving image of skepticism” (Cavell 1981: 199-9). But Cavell did not stop at the notion that film and philosophy share a common ground, but went one step further in arguing that film has the possibility to provide philosophical thoughts and insights of its own. However, if we were to pose this position to Levinas, it becomes apparent that Cavell’s idea is some sense nonsensical, as it isn’t film that has to do the ‘hard work’ of philosophy but it is the philosopher who engages the artwork by means of philosophical exegesis or in Levinas’ words “integrates the inhuman work of the artist into the human world”.

In addition, what is most striking in taking this notion of the relationship between film and philosophy in light of Levinas’ thought is the lack of the importance of ethics, especially as my previous remarks on film and philosophy can be remodelled along the lines of art and ethics. It is possible to think philosophically informed film theory, along with the humanities in a broader sense, as confronting or even already undergoing an ethical turn, - arguably also inspired by Levinas - therefore having to reflecting upon “cinema as a distinctive way of thinking through ethical concerns” (see Choi and Frey, Cine-Ethics). Instead of primarily being concerned with establishing film as a sub-discipline within the aesthetic tradition, we have to turn to ethics and evaluate what relationship film holds to it, how it can, if not should, inform film and what an absence thereof introduces and negates.

Thus far, documentary films have received the most direct engagement and treatment with ethics. Documentaries have been shown as having an ethical potential, Sarah Cooper’s Selfless Cinema? is one such wonderful example, but what we have to do now is to show, in a Levinassian spirit, that film has also an ethical obligation. And by this I do not think of the three most common ways ethics has been used within reflections of film (and I am grateful here for Robert Sinnerbrink recent article ‘Film and/as Ethics’), which is 1. Ethics in film (narratives, portraying ethically complex realities and fantasies); 2. The ethics of cinematic representation; or 3. The ethics of cinema as a cultural medium. In contrast, or, in addition, I am proposing in line with Levinas’ philosophy, and my reading thereof, an ethico-aesthetic consideration of film, both its production, as well as its reception, or I might say a new demand that ethics poses to film, a call film cannot escape but to answer if it is an artform in any way that can be taken seriously. An aspect of this ethico-aesthetic framework is a consideration of the inescapable ideological-political dimension of cinema, a particular body of work and a specific instance – and in addition and through a Levinassian perspective, an inescapable demand for responsibility, a way of responding to the suffering of the other. It is of vital importance to understand how ethics and aesthetics are intricately related to one another and how this is manifested in cinema, asking ‘how does ethical meaning communicate via aesthetic means as it unfolds in time’? What we require is a new ethical inquiry into the cinematic medium, including the responsibilities of directors, as well as critics, theorists and academics.

We need to further strengthen the field of the ‘ethics of the moving image’ or the ‘ethics of film’. Such a way would contribute in a new light to the creative and critical possibilities of cinematic thinking outside the established way of conceiving and receiving film as philosophy, the philosophy of film or film-philosophy and open it up to the possibilities of cinema as a medium of ethical experience, responsibility and demand. Ethics enables a broadened, yet more specific question, of philosophical engagements with film beyond questions of ontology, metaphysics, epistemology and aesthetics. We cannot, at this historic moment we find ourselves in, afford to further ignore or downplay the sheer importance of establishing a relationship between the moving image and ethics, as we have to articulate a new form of ‘cinematic ethics’.

CONCLUSION

In summary, it is important to note that according to Levinas’s own writing, art is neither prior to ethics, nor ultimate or absolute in relation to all other disciples. Yet, this paper has tried to highlight that it is conceivable that art, even if not measured by truth, should be thought of as being in an inherent relation to the ethical responsibility within its frame of disengagement on the site of the artist and the ethical exegesis of the philosophical critic. In my reading of his philosophy, Levinas’s aim is to save art from itself by raising it to its proper aesthetic status through elevating it by means of ethics. Therefore, Levinas’s philosophy should be seen as encouraging both artists and philosophers to challenge the hitherto perceived nature of art and re-connect it to the world at large and through the demand of ethics. From a Levinassian perspective it is necessary to draw attention to the question of what is art’s right to be, as to him, this is the question to address, in order to move away from a focus on essence and a way to evaluate its significance. Because the identity of ethics is to give essence, substance and height to other domains and to undo previous identities, as defined by Levinas, ethics brings to art not essence but a way of shaping it.

[1] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Penguin, 2007).

[2] In addition to the works listed, a noteworthy contribution is that of literary theorist Robert Eaglestone, who argues in Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas (1997) that Levinas’s work shows his antipathy and hostility to art.

[3] Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (M. Nijhoff Publishers, 1979).

[4] Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (M. Nijhoff, 1981)

[5] Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (M. Nijhoff, 1981). p. 111-2

[6] “For Husserl this source increasingly became the representational intentionality of an absolute transcendental ego; for Heidegger it would be being (Seindes) as the manifestation of history and the verbality of language; for Sartre it was the unalloyed freedom of consciousness projecting meaning; for Merleau-Ponty it would be the flesh, the incarnate intertwining of meanings given and meaning giving” (Cohen, Ethics, Exegesis, and Philosophy, 59)

[7] Richard A. Cohen, ‘Levinas on Art and Aestheticism: Getting “Reality and Its Shadow” Right’, Levinas Studies, 11.1 (2016), p. 161 <https://doi.org/10.1353/lev.2016.0020>.

[8] Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, Phaenomenologica (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 1987),  p. 12 <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4364-3>.