Also by John Llewelyn and published by Macmillan

BEYOND METAPHYSICS?
The Middle Voice of
The Hermeneutic Circle in Contemporary Continental Philosophy

DERRIDA ON THE THRESHOLD OF SENSE

Ecological Conscience

A Chiasmic Reading of Responsibility

in the Neighbourhood of Levinas,
Heidegger and Others

John Llewelyn

M
MACMILLAN
© John Llewelyn 1991 In memory of

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Llewelyn. John
The middle voice of ecological conscience: a chiasmic
reading of responsibility in the neighbourhood of Levinas,
Heidegger and others.
I. Ethics
I. Title
170
ISBN G-333-5444&-X

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That the respiration by which entities seem to affirm themselves
tri�phantly in their vital space would be a consumption, a

Contents
denudeation of my substantiality, that in respiration I already
open myself to subj ection to the whole of the invisible other, that
the beyond or the liberation would be the support of a crushing
charge, that is indeed astonishing. It is this astonishment that has
been the object of the book proposed here.

Que la respiration par laquelle les etants semblent s'affirmer triomphale­ Preface viii
ment dans leur espace vital, soit une consumation, une denuc/eation de
ma substantialite; que darts la respiration je m'ouvre deja a ma sujetion a 1 Introduction to Metaphysics 1
tout /'aufre invisible; que I' au-dela ou la liberation soit le support d'une
charge icrasante - est certes itonnanf. Cest cet ifonnement qui a ete 2 Anarchic ·Responsibility 27
l'objet du livre ici proposi.
Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence 3 Who is my Neighbour? 49

4 Critical Responsibility 68
all behaviour with regard to entities is under the sway of
obligation . Obligation cannot be explained in terms of objectiv­ 5 Post-Critical Poiesis and Thinking 89
ity, but the reverse.
6 Ontological Responsibility and the Poetics of
alles Verhalten zu Seiendem ist durchwaltet von Verbindlichkeit. Wir
Nature 114
konnen uns Verbindlichkeit nicht aus Gegenstandlichkeit erklaren,
sondern umgekehrt.
Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics 7 The Responsibility of Saving the World
through Song 146

And where th�re is the perilousness of being moved by terror, only 8 The Absolute Master 174
there is the blessedness of astonishment - that wakeful rapture
9 The Feeling Intellect 197
··

which is the breath of all philosophizing . . .

Und nur, wo die Gefiihrlichkeit des Enfsetzens, da die Seligkeit 10 Something like the Middle Voice 225
.des Staunens - jene wache Hingerissenheit, die der Odem alles.
Philosophierens ist . . . Postface 245
Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics
Notes and References 278
Bibliography 294
Index 297

vii

Preface
Warum schweigt die Erde bei dieser Zersforung?
Martin Heidegger, Beifriige zur Philosophie
The motivation, perhaps mouvance, behind this essay in philosophical
ecology is a desire, perhaps Desire, to speak for those that cannot
speak for themselves. To this end I adapt and attempt to adapt as far
as possible to each other the philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and
Martin Heidegger, a rash project given that so much of the former's
writings are directed at exposing what he considers to be short­
comings of the latter's. Where this adaptation has not been possible I
have tried to make it plain where I take leave of the one or the other
or both.
Those familiar with Levinas's. publications, in particular with the
one entitled Du sacre au saint, will charge m e with reversing the
transition indicated in that title and urged in the lectures collected
under it. What I plead guilty to is not simply reversing the order of
priority of the sacred and the holy but seeing the second of these in
the first, independently of whether the hand at the top of the apsidal
mosaic in the basilica of Sant' Apollinare in Classe is reaching down
even toward the birds and flowers and rocks at the bottom or (Fehl
GoUes, as Heidegger says, or, as Levinas says, God's anachoresis)
drawing itself away. Sacrosanctity is only one of many such chiasrnic
alterations proposed in the following chapters. The chiasm between
Levinas and Heidegger which these chapters effect, affect or explore
is not a totalizing synthesis or bland reconciliation. It is a setting out
of each from the other, an Auseinandersetzung in which each is in some
respect the supplement of the other and each is in turn one step
ahead. A chiasrnic exchange as spelled out by Jacques Derrida
responds to and supplies a ne�d which is met not just by external
addition or by logical inference of what is internal to the essence of a
term. It supplies an externality to which the term is essentially
exposed, demonstrating that the terms of the exchange are not really
terms of a simple opposition and that what is inside and what is
viii
Preface ix
outside must sometimes remain undecidable. When I call something a
chiasmic exchange it may not always be one that can be spelled out
in this way. I sometimes use the word chiasmus more loosely, as it is
used when Levinas speaks of crossing Derrida's path at the heart of a
chiasmus (NP 89). There is convergence and divergence.
Nor, for reasons which will gradually emerge in the text, do I
stipulate a strict definition of what I mean when I use the phrase
'middle voice'. Greek and Sanskrit grammars do not manage to come
up with a definition that is both strict and helpful. The following
definition by Jan Gonda is unstrict but helpful as a place from which
to start:
the 'original' or 'essential' function of the medial voice was ... to
denote that a process is taking place with regard to, or is affecting,
happening to, a person or a thing; this definition includes also
those cases in which we are under the impression that in the eyes
of those who once used this category in its original function some
power or something powerful was at work in or through the
subject, or manifested itself in or by means of the subject on the
one hand and those cases in which the process, whilst properly
performed by, or originating with, the subject, obviously was
limited to the 'sphere' of the subject.1
The crucial words here are 'power', 'process', 'through', 'by' and
'subject'. We need a notion of power which does not merely pass
through the subject, and a notion of subject which is neither merely a
conduit or passage (the 'through' of pure passivity) nor the conductor
entirely in charge of a performance (the 'by' of pure agency) but is
performed by as much as it performs the process - or the procedure,
Verfahren, to employ the term Kant applies to the schematism of the
imagination which Heidegger takes as a point for a new departure in
a manner which we shall in some of the following chapters describe.
Heidegger's problem, and ours, is to avoid the metap�ysics of
subjectivity, which may seem to be threatened by the last part of
Gonda's characterization of the middle voice, without falling into the
metaphysical denial of metaphysics by positing a power that has at
most a contingent need of human or other beings. This latter may
appear to be threatened by the first part of Gonda's characterization
of the middle voice and by Heidegger's thinking after the from
'turn'
the philosophical style of Being and Time. For example, in 'Building
Dwelling Thinking' (1951) he writes: 'Man ads as though he were the
X Preface Preface xi

shaper and master of language, while in fad language remains th� come from Tina Chanter, Alphonso Lingis, Adriaan Peperzak, David
master of man. Perhaps H is before all else man's inversion of fhrs Wood and Robert Bernasconi - the relation of Robert Bernasconi's
relation of dominance that drives his nature into alienation (in das forthcoming book Between Levinas and Derrida to my own arbitration
is
Unheimische)' (VA2 20, PLT 146). However, man's contribuHon here between Levinas and Heidegger may we!J turn out to be as good
acknowledged by the statement which ends the same paragraph : an example as any of chiasmic supplementation: a chiasmus of a
'Among all the appeals (Zusprnch en) that we human beings, on our chiasmus.
ere
part. can help to be voiced, language is the highest and everywh I might have described Derrida's work in the words Levinas uses in
er and we need to escape both extremes of the preface to Totality and Infinity of Franz Rosenzweig's The Sfar of
the first.' What Heidegg
of self-inter est and that of the total absorptio n of self Redemption, as 'a work too often present in this book to be cited'.
domination, that
and its interest in a totalizing Self, is a characterization of the middle However, although there is discussion of an aspect of his work only
voice which adjusts each part of Gonda's description to the other. in Chapter 10, I have been unable to avoid making passing references
Gonda speculates on the reasons why many forms we would to his writings throughout. I make no apologies for now reciting at
for
expect to be medial are in fact active and why there is a tendency length the sentences, already cited in my Derrida on the Threshold of
middle voiced forms to become assimilat ed in their function to Sense,4 that sowed the seed from which so much in what follows has
bifurcati on, which we could call deponen ce in a sense sprung:
passives. This
extended beyond that of the grammar books, illustrates what
­
Heidegger calls falling or fallenness, Verfallen, an existential-ontolo In a conceptuality adhering to classical strictures differance would
gical presuppo sition of falling from grace more origina ! than ori �inal be said to designate a constitutive, productive, and originary
sin. There may be something to be said for endeavounng to retneve causality. the process of scission and division which would
the middle voice or translate it from the Greek. Heidegger's writings, produce or constitute different things or differences. But, because
the later ones especially, can be read as an attempt to do just this. it brings us close to the infinitive and active kernel of differer,
More difficult to sustain is the suggestion that Levinas's writings too diffirance (with an a) neutralizes what the infinitive denotes as
may be read in this way. Can the middle voice express the emphasis simply active, just as mouvance in our language does not simply
on absolute passivity in them? Here is a sentence to encourage us not mean the fact of moving. of moving oneself or of being moved. No
to abandon too soon the thought that it can: What verbs like
"to more is resonance the act of resonating. We must consider that in
deliver oneself', "to consume oneself', "to exile oneself' (se livrer, se the usage of our language the ending -ance remains undecided
r, s'exile�;) suggest by their pronom inal form is not an act of between the active and the passive. And we will see why that which
consume
reflection on oneself, of concern for oneself; it is not an act at all, but lets itself be designated diffirance is neither simply active nor
a modality of passivity which in substitution (in one's non-selfpositing simply passive, announcing or rather recalling something like the
176:
and one's being for the other] is beyond even passivity' (AEAE middle voice, saying an operation that is not an operation, an
OBBE 138). operation that cannot be conceived either as passion or as the
I was introduced to the writings of Levinas through two important action of a subject on an object, or on the basis of the categories of
2 as I am agent or patient, neither on the basis of nor moving toward any of
essays on them by Derrida. I am indebted to both authors,
ional de Cerisy­
also to Jean Greisch and the Centre Culture! Internat these terms. For the middle voice. a certain intransitivity, may be
la-Salle for the ten days of discussions of Levinas's philosop hy at the what philosophy, at its outset, distributed into an active and
chateau in· Normandy where the participation of Levinas himself passive voice, thereby constituting itself by means of this
r­ 5
provided an opportunity to keep down the number of mis�de repression.
whose sometim es
standings that may remain in my chapters on work
small
(dare one say?) .poetic density, richness and intricacy present no Conversations and correspondence with Charles Bigger have
n against which he
risk of inducing in its readers the unsober fascinatio helped me distinguish the various tones of the middle voice. and
3 e in time of need has the interest I share with him also in the doctrine of schematism in
would have them be on guard. Further assistanc
xii Preface
Kant, its antecedents going back beyond Plato and its still continuing
fecundity make me impatient for the publication of his Kant's
Methodology: A Concluding Hermeneutical Posfscripf, forthcoming from
Ohio University Press. My hearing has been improved too by
Charles ScoH's papers on the middle voice referred to in my notes.
I recall with pleasure the day he, Thomas Pepper and I met in Perugia
on a sunny terrace overlooking Assisi during a session of the
Collegium Phaenomenologicum and discovered that we had each
been separately cultivating thoughts on different applications of what
Derrida, who was also there, refers to as 'something like the middle
voice'.
The doctrine of schematism as it develops in Kant's three Critiques,
his phenomenology of respect and the remarks about the great chain
of being made in Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone and
elsewhere serve, through Heidegger's post-critical treatment of these,
as a base from which to launch a comparison of this last with
Levinas's reaction to the deontology of Kant. The investigation of
rationalist deontology and of Levinas's super-rationalist dis-ontology
is preceded by some reflections on sentimentalist, utilitarian and other
teleological theories in Chapter 1.
A briefer version of Chapter 3 was read at the Levinas conference
organized by Robert Bemasconi and ·David Krell at the University of
Essex in 1987 and appears in Re-Reading Levinas, a collection based on
the proceedings edited by Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley. I
thank them and Indiana University Press, for allowing me to use that
material here. Chapters 4 and 5 include sections of a paper which was
read at the Conflict of Faculties conference at the University of
Alabama in 1987 organized by Richard Rand and is to be published in
the volume of the proceedings entitled Our Academic Confracf. I thank
him and the University of Nebraska Press for permission to use those
sections here. For permission to use as my Chapter 6 an expanded
version of an article included in the Heidegger centenary number of
Research in Phenomenology, XIX (1989) I thank the editor, John Sallis.
My thanks are due to him too, and to David Krell, for forcing me by
their example to be more micrological in my reading of the great
texts in the neighbourhood of which this book is written.
I am grateful for the assistance given me by the staff of the
University and New College libraries at Edinburgh and the Director
and librarian of the Institut Fran�ais d'Ecosse. I count myself fortunate
to have been a member of the Department of Philosophy at
Edinburgh with chairmen and other colleagues more than ready to
Preface xiii
accommodate my philosophical predilections in the arrangements
made for teaching. not least through a programme of cooperation
promoted by Alan Steele and his successors in the Department of
French. I thank all my colleagues for encouraging and facilitating my
acquisition of the word processor on which this book was composed,
and in particular Dory Scaltsas and Mark Bedau who with nothing
short of the infinite patience of which Levinas writes taught me the
skills required for the use of this wonder of wonders of the
technological age. Also for their patience, and for their inspiration,
I thank my students.
For preparing the index I thank David Gandolfo. I thank Frances
Arnold and Keith Povey for putting at my service so unstintingly
their editorial expertise.
I am indebted to Timothy Sprigge for reading and commenting on
the Postface thereby enabling me to raise its argument toward the
standard of rigour I admire in his 0\1\'Tl philosophizing. I thank Robert
Gibbs for cooperating in the mouvance of this book and for helping
me see that the ecological extension of responsibility it seeks by
following clues in the works of Heidegger may already be at hand in
the work of which Levinas says that it is too often present in his book
to be cited - unless the lines cited as the first epigraph of my book, as
well as being a more complete citation of Dostoevsky's monk Markel
than Levinas sometimes gives, is also already a citation of the icrifure
du dis-astre in which Rosenzweig says:
Thus the neighbour is . . . only locum tenens. Love goes out to
whatever is nighest to it as to a representative, in the fleeting
moment of its presentness, and thereby in truth to the all-inclusive
concept of all men and all things which could ever assume this
place of being its nighest neighbour. In the final analysis it goes
out to everything, to the world . .6 .
It goes out to my nighest, my wife Margaret, along with gratitude
for her collaboration. She and l are of one mind that royalties from
the sale of the product of this work should go to Greenpeace and
Friends of the Earth.
}OHN LLEWELYN
 1
Introduction to Metaphysics

This source of anxiety may, perhaps, be thought to resemble that

of the philosophers of Laputa, who feared lest the sun should be
burnt out.
John Stuart MilL Autobiography

The subject has no recourse in itself that does not dry up under the
intelligible sun.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity

The fountains of vanity and ambition seemed to have dried up

within me, as completely as those of benevolence.
John Stuart Mill, Autobiography

John Stuart Mill records in his Autobiography that in the autumn of

1826 he asked himself: 'Suppose that all your objects in life were
realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you
are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very
instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?' To this
question, he also records, 'an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly
answered "No!"'

At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which

ii my Ufe was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have
been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased
i to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the
i means? I seemed to have nothing to live for.
1
l
I Such dejection, Emmanuel Levinas would say, is only to be .expected

If: where the good life is conceived as the pursuit of an end and the
ethical as totalization. The ethical is misconceived when conceived as
I 'an ideal calculus' (Tl 192; 216), and this is how Mill continued to
I 1
2 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
conceive his utilitarianism even after he had champfered the sharp
edges of Bentham's quantitative calculus by insisting that we take
quality into account. It 'remains defenceless against totalization' (TI
l95; 220) because it remains systematically egological. This is not to
say that it remains egotistical. Utilitarianism is universalistic. It is
concerned with the maximization of the happiness of the maximum
number of sentient beings. However, although this concern embraces
others as well as myself, it is a concern whose centre and centre of
gravity is the agent's freely intending will. As Mill puts this
distinction, 'though my dejection, honestly looked at, could not be
called other than egotistical, produced by the ruin, as I thought, of
my fabric of happiness, yet the destiny of mankind in general was
ever in my thoughts, and could not be separated from my own'.2
What according to Mill's utilitarianism largely determines the moral
worth of an act is whether it tends to an improvement of the welfare
of mankind, not whether it advances the welfare solely of the agent.
However, the agent's welfare is a component of the welfare of
mankind. But this appears to pose the following dilemma.
Although Mill's personal happiness is not the criterion of the
morality of his acts, he will not be completely happy until the
happiness of mankind is complete. No wonder he says he felt that the
Aaw in his life must be a flaw in life itself. Mill came to consider that
the flaw was only a flaw in his life, since until he came through the
'melancholy winter' of 1826-7 he had not come to realize that
utilitarianism need not limit itself, as Bentham mostly limited it, to
problems that. can be dealt with by legal, economic and political
reform. Mill came to believe that there was 'some better hope' than
the securing of the basic needs of life by such social reform.·But Mill
is deceiving himself in thinking that the following of this better hope
will suffice to end his dissatisfaction. That the appearance of a flaw in
life arises from a flaw in his thinking is indicated by his remark 'that
the question was, whether, if the reformers of society and govern­
ment could succeed in their objects, and every person in the
community were free and in a state of physical comfort, the pleasures
of life, being no longer kept up by struggle and privation, would
cease to be pleasures'. What this suggests is that, quite apart from the
dissatisfaction arising from not seeing that as well as the hope of
reforming institutions there is a higher hope, Mill is dissatisfied at the
thought of complete satisfaction. He believes that to find satisfaction
is to lose pleasure and hence the happiness he defines in terms of it,
because he believes pleasure depends on the consciousness of the
Introduction to Metaphysics 3
bject of our hope not being securely within our grasp. Pleasure is
?
�
k�p up .b � stru �g e and privation'. This belief is the deeper source of
�
Mill s spmtual cnsis. And it is this belief which he does not think out.
What precisely does it amount to? It can hardly mean that because
members of parliament and local government officers succeed in their
ambitions for the community they serve, other members of the
community will thereby cease to enjoy the basic goods that have
been secured for them. On the hypothesis of abundance that satisfies
all needs, assuming this hypothesis makes sense for mortal beings,
there may be, as Hume points out, no room for rules of distributive
ju �tice a�d institutions to enforce their observance, but people still
enJOY milk and honey. One may enjoy something more when it is in
short supply, but one does not cease enjoying it altogether when it is
not and when one has no fear that it may become so. This holds even
when allowance is made for the fact that in a democracy the citizens
themselves as voters participate in the endeavour to bring about what
.
they consider to be the most satisfactory social, economic and
political arrangements. If that end is achieved, they will not be
deprived of the pleasure of enjoying the goods they have secured or
of the bonus of pleasure of reflecting on their achievement. Nor
indeed will they be deprived of the pleasure of struggle if beyond the
satisfactio � of the social, economic and political sort that preoccupied
Bentham 1s set what Mill is thinking of when he speaks of 'some
.
>
high er hope hop � the importance of which had been brought home
to him by his readmg of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Marmontel, this
importance being the importance of the cultivation of the feelings
with regard to the natural world and fellow human beings. But if, in
the words Mill cites from Coleridge, 'hope without an object cannot
live', does not hope die with the attaining of that object? So, although
he does not see this, does not the original ground of Mill's malaise
remain? If he is dissatisfied with the satisfaction of the aims he shares
with Bentham should he not be dissatisfied with the satisfaction of
those aims for which Bentham appears to give no or too little room?
For it is satisfaction as such with which he is dissatisfied. And perhaps
�
he �o d be less than human if he were not. That is why in
.
.
Wllttanamsm he is careful to distinguish satisfaction or contentment
from happiness, why it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a
satisfied fool or pig.
The happiness of humanity is fraught with what some would call a
divine discontent. Levinas's name for this is Infinity. He also calls it
Desire, where this is not to be understood as a conative drive toward
4 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscie1ue
Introduction to Metaphysics 5
an object the attainment of which is, in both senses of the word,
that to which at least human being must belong, that which it
desire's end. Desire in Levinas's special sense of the word is infinitive,
overhears; not just outside and alongside being, but chiasmically and
condemned, as he sometimes says, to infinition. Where on the
intriguingly involved with it; not aggregatively added from outside,
classical utilitarian account desire is a psychological concept on the
but in Derrida's sense supplementary, that which makes being good;
basis of which ethical concepts are explained, Desire as defined by
epekeina tes ousias, radically exterior to being, like the Platonic Good
Levinas is an ethical or, more strictly, proto-ethical notion to which
beyond Being, yet called for by being and calling to it.
the psychological and indeed the physical are corollary and ancillary.
Because infinitive desire is proto-ethical it is metaphysical, over and
beyond phusis, the outside of nature and being.
.
Why do we hesitate between saying that this infinitive desire �s
Il
ethical and saying that it is proto-ethical? And why do we say t h�t tt
is the outside rather than that it is outside of nature and bemg7
A further clue to the unnatural nature of this strange relation of
Levinas himself regularly describes this infinity or Infinity and this
exteriority in which proximity and distance are no longer opposed
desire or Desire as ethical. But, in a manner to be later explained, the
can be elicited by asking how Levinas might respond to another
adjective as thus understood qualifies not an ethical system, practice
statement made by Mill. Surely, Levinas would say, having reminded
or code, but the minimal condition or, as he sometimes risks saying,
us that the golden rule of the New Testament is already laid down in
the essence of the ethical and the essence of ethical justice: that
the Old, Mill is overlooking a crucial difference when in the second
without which ethics would be violence and justice injustice, some­
chapter of Utilitarianism he says that 'In the golden rule of Jesus of
what as Kant is not occupied directly with specific ethical practices
Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility'. As we
but with what he calls the fundamental principles of the metaphysics
have already noted, utilitarianism is universalistic. In one of its
of ethics - somewhat only, because what Levinas is directly occupied
classical versions it is often described as universalistic hedonism.
with is prior to principles that found. This is why when speaking
That is to say, the good upon the production of which the rightness
strictly we shall often prefer the adjective proto-ethical. For when
of an act or rule depends includes the good of the agent or promoter
philosophers have spoken of the ethical they have rarely kept this
�t
proto-ethical condition in mind. And this is why we shall o en spe�
of the rule. It may happen that a disposition to put the other person's
welfare before one's own will lead to greater good over all. Where
also of primary justice rather than justice. This is because m Totality
however this contingent circumstance does not obtain, and when I am
and Infinity at ;least Levinas is concerned to direct his readers'
presented with a choice between an act that ·will produce a good (or
attention to what is the condition of the justice of systems of justice
reduce a bad) of a certain amount and quality for another and one that
as these are usually understood. ln his later writing, including
will produce a good (or reduce a bad) of the same quantity and of the
Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, he tends to use the word in
same quality for myselt it will be ethically indifferent which act I
the usual way. In that book too, though the translator responsible for
perform. The Christian ethic, on the other hand, assuming it goes in
its English version does not follow the original in this, Levinas
for the arithmetic of goods and bads, requires that I always put my
attempts to say what he says with as little recourse as possible to the
neighbour's interest first. The Reverend Richard Price is not preaching
verb 'to be'. In the earlier book his syntax is less syntactically strange.
the Christian ethic therefore when in the Review of the Principal
But it is still logically bizarre. This is precisely because he has
Questions in Morals he writes:
recourse to constructions with the verb 'to be' in order to treat that
by which being is deconstructed. This is why the metaphysical is the
it will be strange, if any one can avoid acknowledging that it is
outside of being or essence or nature. lt is, at least where human
right and fit that a being should, when all circumstances on both
nature and human beings are conc�rned, the other than nature and
sides are equal, prefer himself to another; reserve, for example, to
being that nature and being require in order to be themsel�es. The
himself, a certain means of enjoyment h e possesses rather than part
Exterior to being is the exterior of being. It is in a paradoxtcal way
with it to a stranger, to whom it will not be more beneficial.3
6 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
Introdt-tciion to Metaphysics 7
This is not the Christian ethic even if all Price means when he says 'it
Decision based on the tossing of a coin in a fifty-fifty situation is
is right and fit' is that it is all right rather than that it is the right
thing to do. What the golden rule of both Testaments says is not t at � not a decision guided by the principle of neighbour love. This
principle, whether understood in the context of the New Testament
preferring myself is all right or the right thin � to do when, as Pnce
or read solely in the context of Leviticus 19: 18, is not involved in
intends the phrase, all circumstances on both s1des are equal, but that
. the very meaning of the principle of utility. Each of these principles
all circumstances on both sides are never equal. Th1s does not of
course mean that it is not all right to love oneself. One does that all is consistent both with self-love and with love of one's neighbour.
And each of them requires the agent to take the spectator's point of
right. But what one is required to do is also to love one's neighbour
view. The difference is that the spectator whose point of view the
as oneself.
, . Biblical commandment requires the agent to take is the Spectator
There is room for more than one interpretation of the os seauton m
who commands me to be partial in favour of my neighbour. And this
Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself'. In calling this the golden
is the difference that distinguishes Levinas's notion of proto-ethical
rule of Jesus of Nazareth, Mill equates it with the injunction to do as
primary justice from both the principle of utility and the Biblical
you would be done by. If as a matter of fact I would, when
principle of neighbour love. For although the principle of utility is
circumstances on both sides are equal, have others put me before
a principle of impartiality and the Biblical principle of neighbour
themselves, I should as a matter of morals in such circumsta�c�s put
love a principle of partiality when I hear it addressed to me, it
them before myself. This is not a principle of eth1caJ Impartiality or
� �
justice. It is a principle that calls for partiality, pa� t ality towar my
becomes a principle of impartiality, of impartial partiality, so to speak,

�
neighbour. It is not a principle that expresses the spmt of the e h1cs of
once it is conceived from the Commanding Spectator's point of view.

� � �
utility. Mill is mistaken when he says that the spiri whic i spue� the
The essence of Levinas's ethics beyond essence is that primary justice

principle of utility is the spirit of justice and 1mpar h ahty s nctly � becomes injustice and ethics totalitarian violence unless priority is
given to my hearing the command addressed to me over my
understood, whereas the spirit which inspires the golden rule IS the
conceiving it as a universal principle addressed to ruy neighbour as
spirit of self-denying love. Mill is correct when he says in Chapter 5
well as to myself. In this sense, because, unlike the Cartesian ego of
of Utilitarianism, in words that have been among the most contested
in the entire book, 'That first of judicial virtues, impartiality ... t e � Meditation Three, the proto-ethical subject is denied 'a point of view
exterior to itself from which it can apprehend itself (Tl 186; 210), it
highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice . : . IS
cannot be an ethical agent unless i t is first a proto-ethical patient,
involved in the very meaning of Utility, or the Greatest Happmess
suffering unassumingly a passivity that is more passive than the
Principle' and 'That principle is a mere form of words withou _t rational
passivity of interaction.
justification, unless one person's happiness, supposed equal m degree
(with proper allowance made for kind), is counted for exactly as much
as another's.' As he has already said in Chapter 2, when someone has
to choose between his own happiness and another's, 'utilitarianism
lii
requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and
benevolent spectator'. Now a truly disinterested spectator has no
Mill offers another explanation why. the meaning of life seemed to
reason for preferring the happiness of the one over that of �he other
_ evaporate. Although he claims that 'the destiny of mankind in general
where it is assumed that, first, the benefit is to be quanhtabvely and
was ever in my thoughts', he admits that his dejection, 'honestly
qualitatively equivalent whichever of the two receives it; second, the
looked at, could not b e called other than egotistical, produced by the
benefit cannot be divided between them; and, third, it is granted that
ruin, as I thought, of my fabric of happiness'. Instead of 'my fabric of
if the two people in question find themselves in relevantly simil�r
happiness', he could have said 'the fabric of my happiness', as is
circumstances in the future the one who does not receive the beneftt
evident from his asking himself 'would this be a great joy and
now will receive it then. The spectator can toss a coin. And so can the
happiness to you?' and from his assertion 'All my happiness was to
agent, for the agent is to ad as though he were a spectator.
have been found in the continual pursuit of this end', this end being
 Introduction fo Metaphysics 9
8 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience

Were there no appetite of any kind antecedent to self-love, that

the happiness of mankind in general. But this end comes to be
propensity could scarcely ever exert itself; because we should, in
regarded as a means, a means to his own happiness. This is borne out
that case, have felt few and slender pains and pleasures, and have
by the way he seeks a remedy in what he refers to as 'the anti­
little misery or happiness to avoid or pursue .6
selfconsciousness theory of Carlyle'.

Hume also sharpens Butler's distinction by contrasting primary and

I never, indeed, wavered in the conviction that happiness is the test
secondary passions, a primary one having for example fame, power or
of all rules of conduct, and the end of life. But I now thought that
the welfare of others as its direct object, a secondary passion having
this end was only to be attained by not making it the direct end.
as its object the satisfaction of a primary passion which is pursued 'as
Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on
a part of our happiness'. This phrase of Hume's is one Mill employs in
some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of
Chapter 4 of Utilitarianism where, though without mentioning Hume,
others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or
he adapts his distinction between primary and secondary passions to
pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end ....
the task of eliminating alternatives to happiness as candidates for the
Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The
status of original ends in themselves. This logical distinction is what
only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it,
makes possible the psychological theory and practice of anti-self­
as the purpose of life.4
consciousness he adapts from Carlyle.
However, the distinction between the logical and the psychological
The happiness referred to in this last sentence is Mill's own, not 'the .
ts not a fundamental one according to Mill. His System of Logic (1843)
happiness of others' referred to earlier, for 'the only chance' offered
argues that the logical is reducible to the psychological or, employing
by Carlyle's theory is not needed to enable me to break a
the word which has misled so many readers of the tenth paragraph of
psychological barrier in the pursuit of the happiness of others.
the fourth chapter of Utilitarianism, to the metaphysical. One might
Others do not cease to be happy. when l ask myself whether they
v.:ell ask how in advancing this argument, hence in pronouncing a
are. Carlyle's recipe is anti-selfconsciousness, not anti-otherconscious­
discourse that appeals to normative principles, Mill can simultan­
ness. It is only when people's minds are fixed on their own happiness
eously consider those normative principles of logic to be no more
that Carlyle's psychological technique is required. This does not mean
than matters of psychological fact. One might also wonder, assuming
that whether I make someone else's happiness or my own the direct
he subscribed to this psychologism in 1826, whether the mental crisis
end I can do this without being aware of the logical truth that this
into which he was thrown in that year had among its causes this
end is attainable' only if I concern myself with the various things in
refusal to distinguish the logical and the psychological, and the
which their or my happiness consists. As Joseph Butler puts this, in
mental confusion that could be expected to ensue upon that refusal.
the wake of Aristotle, Seneca and Cicero, and anticipating Price,
What his crisis needed was logical analysis to supplement both the
Hume and Nietzsche, but without making the distinction between
psychological technique applied to it by himself and the psycho­
happiness and satisfaction insisted upon by Mill: . .
logical analysts and psychoanalysis applied to it so copiously since by
others.
Happiness or ·satisfaction consists only in the enjoyment of those
Levinas, distrustful of the pretensions of psychoanalysis and as
objects which are by nature suited to our several particular
fierce an opponent as his mentor Husserl of the psychologistic
appetites, passions, and affections. So that if self-love wholly
analysis of logic, phenomenology and ontology, wouJd say that the
engrosses us, and leaves no room for any other principle, there
treatment demanded both by Mill's crisis and by his choice of a cure
can be absolutely no such thing at all as happiness, or enjoyment of
is a reestablishment of the distinction between psychology and
any kind whatever, since happiness consists in the gratification of
metaphysics and the recognition that the metaphysical is the
particular passions, which supposes the having of them.5
� �
im easura le distance of ethical proximity, the infinition of proto­
ethlcal deme beyond the desire described by psychology, but also
Hume makes this logical point still more pungently:
10 Tlte Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
beyond the categorial and existential structures of logic, phenomeno­
logy and ontology, including the fundamental ontology of Being and
Time. An-archic desire without end.
Mill was suffocating, Levinas would say. Does he not write in his
Autobiography that he was like someone who has a ship furnished
with a rudder and all the other usual gear 'but no sail; without any
real desire'? That was one item with which his father and his other
teachers had omitted to fit him out. His so-called mental crisis is a
crisis of spirit. The sail he needs is one that can be inflated only by
the breath of another human being. The desire he lacks is not simply
the desire for an end chosen by himself. but a desire inspired by the
human Other who is so radically other that he is not an alter ego
analogically posited by me or by the Husserl of the Fifth Cartesian
Meditation. It is not enough that, as Mill writes, 'the destiny of
mankind in general was ever in my thoughts, and could not be
separated from my own'. I must recognize my separation for what it
is: insurmountable by any amount of the sympathy with others that,
with Scheler, and following Comte here more than Bentham, Mill
would have us cultivate. So-called natural love or benevolence has a
non-natural - which need not mean super-human - presupposition.
This, Levinas would say, is what Mill might have seen if he had
meditated certain of the Biblical references in Bishop Butler's Sermons
that are not reproduced by Hume or Mill. And this is what is in
danger of being concealed by Martin Buber's teaching that a personal
relationship is a relationship between an I and a Thou. These
pronouns reflect an intimate interrelation, but such being-with, as in
erotic love, is coinp!emented or supplemented, as Derrida would say,
accomplished, as Levinas says, by metaphysical desire originating in
the relation of all relations in which the other as a You is face to face
with a Me that is always in the accusative. The good which is to be
maximized according to the principle of utility is accomplished by a
good that is exterior to totalization and teleology, beyond both
satisfaction and non-satisfaction, outside the discontent that can be
ended by the fulfilment of a need, and foreign to happiness. The
teleological productivity of utilitarian and all other moralities of
economic welfare is infiltrated by a de-ontological and dis-ontological
pro-duction of being. 'To posit metaphysics as Desire is to interpret
the production of being - desire generating Desire - as goodness and
beyond happiness; it is to interpret the production of being as being
for the Other' (TI 281; 304). The optimal productivity of goods that
ultimately defines what Mill understands by the rightness of an act or
Introduction to Metaphysics 11
rule is pro-ductively defined and de-limited by the goodness of the
infinite rectitude of the face to face.
The term 'production' designates both the effectuation of being
(the event 'is produced', an automobile 'is produced') and its being
brought to light or its exposition (an argument 'is produced', an
actor 'is produced'). The ambiguity of this verb conveys the
essential ambiguity of the operation by which the being of an
entity simultaneously excels itself (s'everfue) and is revealed. (TI
XIV; 26)
The ambiguity of this production is not altogether unlike that of
the word 'realization' as used in Sartre's Being and Nothingness with
both ontological and, as he says, gnosiological force.7 However, when
Levinas says here that the being of an entity is revealed he does not
mean that there is some kind of cognitive or phenomenological
perception. Here too the ontological disclosure of Being and Time is
exceeded and excelled by ethical epiphany, 'transascended', as Levinas
puts it, making use of Jean Wahl's neologism, through the irruption
into being of the invisible trace of the Other's face.8 This revelation
of the invisible and noumenal is an accession to a reason presupposed
by and exterior to the rationality of traditional formal logic, which
judges it to be folly, exterior to the reason of Hegel's phenomeno­
logical method and system, as well as to the subjectivity that is truth
according to one of Hegel's harshest critics. 'The I is conserved then
in goodness, without its resistance to system manifesting itself as the
egoist cry of the subjectivity, still concerned for happiness or
salvation, as in Kierkegaard' (Tl 282; 304).
Derrida doubts that Kierkegaard is as far from Hegel as Levinas
supposes in saying this. But in reproducing this sentence in 'Violence
and Metaphysics', his first essay on Levinas, he omits the commas
from this sentence and so may be exaggerating the distance between
Kierkegaard and Hegel that Levinas here supposes. Levinas writes of
le cri egoiste de la subjecfiviti, encore soucieuse de bonheur ou de sa/ut, de
Kierkegaard. Derrida's citation drops the commas and in Alan Bass's
translation becomes 'the egoistic cry of a subjectivity still concerned
with Kierkegaard's happiness or salvation'.9 This, despite the
substitution of an indefinite for a definite article, does not obviously
misrepresent what Derrida takes Levinas to say, namely, it seems,
something about the subjectivity that Kierkegaard marks when he
says '!' or signs his name. After mentioning Levinas's warning against
12 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
the confusion of his teaching with that of Kierkegaardian existential­
ism, and after citing his explanatory statement 'It is not I who set my
face against the system (me refuse au systeme), as Kierkegaard thought,
it is the Other', Derrida asks 'Can we not wager that Kierkegaard
would have been deaf to this distinction? And that he in his turn
would have protested against this conceptuality?' Kierkegaard would
have been Hegelian enough to admit that he himself and Hegel were
both egos. But perhaps Levinas would be Hegelian enough to admit
that he himself and Hegel and Kierkegaard - and Caius and so on, are
all egos. His statement about subjectivity can be read as evidence that
he would. Read thus, i t says something about Kierkegaard's
philosophy of subjectivity, rather than being an attempt to say
something regarding Kierkegaard's subjectivity that does not hold
for the subjectivity of anyone else. On this reading Levinas is no less
aware than Kierkegaard of the ever-to-be-repeated defeats destined to
be suffered by the ever-to-be-repeated attempts to say the paradox­
ical doxically, an 'ever reopening laceration' (dechirement toujours
recommen�ant) which Kierkegaard, for the first time in European
philosophy, recognizes as itself evidence of the possibility of arriving
at truth (NP 114, cp 103-4). Of course, what Kierkegaard's philosophy
of subjectivity says about subjectivity says something about Kierk­
egaard himself, and one does not have to look far to find evidence of
Kierkegaard's concern for his own salvation. In the Concluding
Unscientific Postscript one finds him stating 'When an individual
abandons himself to lay hold of something great outside him, his
enthusiasm is aesthetic; when he forsakes everything to save himself,
his enthusiasm i� ethical':10 When the disinterested pathos of the
aesthetic and the' intere�ted pathos of the ethical give way to the
pathos of religion the absolute telos is salvation. Levinas himself
comes perilously close to speaking in this way of the passivity of
'religion' in his special sense when he writes: 'we are not going to
find in the subject the means of its salvation. It can only come from
elsewhere, while everything in the subject is here' (EE 159; 93).
Whatever we may think about the proximity of Levinas and
Kierkegaard and Hegel on the question of the subject's salvation -
and Levinas is usually careful to leave his readers in no doubt that the
centre of gravity lies elsewhere - there is a moment of agreement
between Levinas and Kierkegaard which is a moment of agreement
with Hegel on the fatedness of what is said in statements with token
reflexive expressions to systematic ambiguity deriving from the way
token reflexives or so-called shifters like personal pronouns may
Introduction to Metaphysics 13
switch their reference as the context in which they are used is
changed. But Levinas and Kierkegaard are agreed in disagreeing with
Hegel in their underlining · the importance of leaving a place for
'signification without a context' (TI XII; 23). However, Levinas does
not look in the same direction as Kierkegaard for this place - or non­
place, as Levinas prefers to say. He does not like the way
Kierkergaard handles this almost intangible point, the manner in
which he treats this wound in the flesh of Hegelianism. The word
'manner' is particularly apposite here because Levinas uses the phrase
maniere d'itre with Heidegger's Seinsweise in mind. He also writes of la
maniere kierkegaardienne de la veri ti. The Kierkegaardian manner in
question is a modificatory manipulation, turning, twist, chiropractice,
Kehre, tropos or production, 'a new modality of truth' that Kierkegaard
must be credited with introducing into philosophy, though in ·
prophecy there has always been this manner of being and truth
which in logic would be condemned as mania, 'seed of folly' (AEAE
116, OBBE 91).
Kierkegaard mishandles the introduction of this new modality
because he is so committed to the Spinozistic principle 'Every
thing, so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persevere in its being'
(Ethics, Pt. !11, Prop. VI), that it governs his thinking of what is for
itself, leading him, despite himself, to persist in thinking of the for­
itself of subjectivity as an interior, inward in-itself, preventing him
from recognizing that before I am a self-identical for-itself I am before
and for the other. Whether with Spinoza one names the object of this
endeavour blessedness, whether with Kierkegaard one names it
salvation, or whether with Mill one names i t happiness, the
perseverance toward it for its own sake would be the perversity
that Luther names curvitas, a curvature of the self inward upon itself,
even when the object of the self's conatus i s not its own but another's
blessedness, salvation or happiness. In other words, it would be a
mistake to suppose that the object of Levinas's endeavour is to make
out the case for ethical altruism as opposed to ethical egoism. It is not
a specific ethical positiqn for which he is arguing. His chief aim is to
question a predominant and dominant philosophical account of human
being and to describe an alternative which is an alternative to, for
example, the account Heidegger outlines to Jean Beaufret i n the
'Letter on Humanism' and which leaves open the alternatives both of
ethical egoism and ethical altruism and of psychological egoism and
natural benevolence addressed by Hobbes, Butler, Hume and Mill.
What Levinas has t o say is not irrelevant to what these philosophers
 Introduction fo Metaphysics 15
14 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience

assertions it would seem appropriate to put him well over toward

have to say for and against 'the selfish hypothesis', but Levinas's
what it will be convenient to call the dark end of the scale. However,
criticisms are directed less at egoism than at the egologism that
he would have to be put well over toward the bright end on the basis
characterizes most philosophical defences both of egoism and
of the agility he displays at one point in the De Docfrina Chrisfiana
altruism. Levinas's topic is not that of Thomas Nagel's book, the
where he turns dilectio tua, 'your self-love', into dilectio tui, 'your self's
possibility of altruism. 1 1 It is the impossibility or non-possibility of
absolute alterity. We must therefore tread carefully if we compare
:
love , that is to say, the self's love of God, this translation being
lubncated by the ambiguity this phrase enjoys as between objective
what Levinas calls droifure, uprightness (which, linked to the idea of
and subjective genitivity, that is to say, as between our love of God
looking up, is sometimes proposed as a root meaning of anthropos)
with what Luther calls the recfifudo of the man that loves his
� §
and God's love for us, � speculati:'e amb g�ity that Au ustine plays
on also when he somehmes substitutes d11J1na for Dei. 1
neighbour as himself and contrasts with the deformity of curviias
Calvin would be near the dark extreme with Luther, one might
that afflicts the person whose love is self-centred and of whom he
suppose, in a grey zon� remote from the bright extreme near which
would say 'You are completely turned in upon yourself', curvus es
12 would be Butler, Price and Mill who, it will be recalled, equates the
fotus in te et versus in tui amorem. We must also therefore be
principle of neighbour love with the golden rule as stated at Matthew
circumspect in considering what, if anything, Levinas could contribute
to our understanding of the os seaufon or the tanquam teipsum or, as
7: 12, Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do
to you, do ye even so to them', an apparently negative version of
perhaps we should here say, ktimoklui, of the injunction Thou shalt
which is the precept in which according to Hillel the entire law is
love thy neighbour as thyself.' The consideration of this question will
comprehended, That which is hateful to you, do not do unto your
be the main task of the next two sections of this chapter. It will serve
neighbour'. Calvin says: 'As we are naturally inclined to love
as an introduction to the consideration of Levinas's answer to the
ourselves, that this feeling overcomes all others, so love of our
question Who is my neighbour?' which will be the main task of
neighbour should so rule in us, that it governs us in every part, and
Chapter 3 and a leading question throughout the rest of this book.
be the principle of all our purposes and all our actions. 1 4 There is
.

nothing in this that Luther would not accept. His view of the 'as
thyself' is that although it is wrong to love ourselves and we cannot
be commanded to love ourselves as with our natural sinfulness we do
IV
love ourselves above others, we can be freed from this evil by loving
others as we love ourselves. In that case the command will have
How we undersfand the il'ljunction to love one's neighbour as oneself
become irrelevant. He adds: 'Nor will it be necessary for you to love
will depend on v,vhether we hold a high or low opinion of loving
oneself, and this will depend on whether, following Rousseau's yourself as you do your neighbour, inasmuch as by this very fact you
most truly love yourself, and all in turn love you'. This seems to
distinction, we understand loving oneself as amour de soi or as amour
mean that not only is the original commandment no longer
propre, as self-respect or, in Butler's phrase, cool self-love. One way of
apphcable, because we are freed from the evil way of loving
discovering how Levinas understands the injunction would be to ask
where, if anywhere, his understanding of the 'as thyself would appear ourselves, but that there is no place either for the commandment to
love ourselves as we love our neighbour, since orice it is granted that
on a scale showing the rating self-love receives from others who have
we love our neighbour it follows that we do love ourselves in the
commented on the Levitican injunction or its parallels in Matthew 19:
good way.
19 and 22: 39, Mark 12: 31, Romans 13: 9, Galatians 5: 14, James 2: 8,
This last idea is close to, if not identical with that expressed in one
etc., where Jesus is reported to have judged this second of all in
of Aquinas's discussions of Leviticus 19: 18, where he says that 'Thou
importance in his own commentary on the items in the Mosaic list.
shalt love thy friend as thyself' can be reconciled with Gregory's
This would be a complicated if not frivolous exercise given that some
statement that charity is not possible where there are less than two,
commentators evince different degrees of esteem in different places in
their commentaries. For instance, on the basis of some of Augustine's with Aristotle's statement that friendship implies an equal return of
16 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
love, and with Paul's statement that love of oneself is culpable
whereas charity i s not.15 Aquinas resolves the difficulty Paul's
statement presents by distinguishing, as Luther also does, between
love for oneself as a sensible being (secundum nafuram sensibilem) and
true love of oneself as a rational being (secundum naturam rationalem).
Because in neither case does Aquinas say 'only' it has to be asked
whether loving one's neighbour or friend as one loves oneself allows
for a love of one's neighbour or friend that is secundum naturam
rafionalem where this phrase is taken to mean that that love is
rational, rather than to mean that the object of that love is nothing
other than the loved person's rationality. That it does allow for this is
suggested by Aquinas's assertion a few lines earlier that man may
properly love himself qua creature belonging to God. On this basis
Aquinas would keep company at the bright end of our scale with
Augustine as represented in the passage cited above from the De
Doctrina Christiana. Indeed Aquinas himself cites this passage and so
might be ready to say that since my and your body belong to God it
would be proper to love them so long as they are loved rationally.
This idea of a rational love of the sensible compels us to
acknowledge another oversimplification n i this project of locating
philosophers and theologians at points along a scale according to
how high or low an opinion they hold of self-love. For just as the
notion of the rational love of the sensible requires us to distinguish
questions about the value of the sensible in isolation from questions
about the value of the sensible in relation to the rational (as the
latter's vehicle, e�pression or whatever), so too must an analogous
distinction be m?tde between questions regarding self-love. Depend­
ing on whether or not self-love is considered in its connection with
rationality, wher·e the rational may be understood ethically or
theologically, and depending on whether a humanist or non-humanist
point of view be adopted, a particular commentator's estimation of
self-love may have to be located toward one end of the scale or the
other. No single positioning may be possible. This becomes especially
evident when we ask about the position of Karl Barth. With him
darkness and brightness, pessimism and optimism coincide. According
to him the commandment to love thy neighbour as thyself announces
that we are sinners and that there is no love in us. Is this an
announcement of good news or of bad? If what it says about self-love
is taken in isolation it reads like very bad news. Deeper pessimism
regarding human nature would be hard to imagine. But Barth goes on
to say immediately: 'The one who commands us accepts this, as it
Introduction to Metaphysics 17
were, on his own responsibility'. That sounds like very good ne :§
However, what is optimism and what is pessimism here? He amplifies·
as follows:
No reflection of ours could put it better or more strongly or
radically than this critical 'as thyself'. It is rather to be feared that
our reflections would end optimistically, which would poison our
supposed obedience to the commandment at the very root, because
we would then rely on ourselves rather than wholly and absolutely
on the promise. Or else they would end pessimistically, and we
would regard ourselves as dispensed from all further attempts to be
obedient because too much is required of us in word and deed and
attitude. The 'as thyself tells us that a priori our obedience is
thought of only as the obedience of sinners, and in that way it cuts
off both these false paths. For this annihilating 'as thyself' invites us
e,
to ut our trust simply in the fact that the commandment is given
us.
Not only our self-love but the justification of our love of the
neighbour is to be left to God. 'The justification of our activity,
the acceptability of the little praise we offer to God, the truth of the
love we give our neighbour, we really have to leave to God.' God is
the centre of gravity. We are already judged.' The same tone of voice
is to be heard in Kierkegaard when he says in the Journals and Papers
'God's requirement is that love shall be sacrificial. but how this is to
be interpreted more specifically in the particular case, God, again,
�
must determine', 7 and when he says in Works of Love:
The sign of childishness is to say: 'Me wants, me - me'; the sign of
youth is to say 'I,' -and 'I' -'!'; the sign of maturity and the
introduction to the eternal is to will to understand that this 'I'
signifies nothing if it does not become the 'thou' to whom eternity
unceasingly speaks, and says: 'Thou shalt, thou shalt, thou shalt.'
The youth wishes to be the only T in the whole world; maturity
consists in understanding this 'thou1 for itself, even if it is not said
to any other single man. Thou shalt, thou shalt love thy neighbour.
0 my hearer, it is not you to whom I speak; it is me, to whom
eternity says: Thou shalt.'18
Kierkegaard's hearers may hear not only the same tone of voice
that they hear when they listen to Levinas. They will recognize too a
18 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
similarity in what is being said. Despite Levinas's earlier noted
� �
judgement that Kierkeg ard remains �reoccupied a ove all with the
question of his and or:te s own salvahon, and desptte, v;e m�y now
add his strictures on wha� he takes to be Kierkegaard s belief �hat
fh
sel ood and its salvation originate in commitment and the either-or
of choice, the sentences from Kierkegaard just reproduced reveal
agreement between him and Levinas that the me (mig, moi) of
immersion in self and the I that recognizes others only as servants
of its own needs becomes adult only when it recognizes that it is
addressed unceasingly - incessamment, as Levinas continually says -
by eternity as Kierkegaard here says, or by infinity or Infinity as
Levinas usually writes, alluding to the Third Meditation of Descartes.
Levinas's allusion to Descartes is not made in order to establish an
ontological or theological foundation. It is made however in order to
assist him in his attempt to persuade his reader that the self's centre
of gravity is exterior to its own initiative. How difficult this is to
show is apparent from what we have just been saying about
.
Kierkegaard. But this is also apparent in the words we have etted
from Barth. Although on the one hand Barth says that he who
commands 'Love thy neighbour as thyself' accepts our sinfulness 'as it
were, on his own responsibility', on the other hand he says that 'this
annihilating "as thyself" invites us to put our trust simply in the fad
.
that the commandment is given'. That is, the question of the relabon
of love of one's neighbour to love of oneself appears here to be
implicated with the question of the relation between faith and gr�ce.
We shall have to return to the consideration of a non-theologtcal
version of this �econd question, as we shall to the question of how
the ethics or proto-ethics of Levinas relates to such traditional
philosophico-theological interests as those with which the Th rd
.
Meditation is concerned. Our concern in the present chapter IS wtth
the first of these three questions only, and in particular with what
�
asking it may tell us about what Levinas means y metaphysi�s.
Love of one's neighbour, Kierkegaard tells us, tS the begmnmg of
19
sobriety (aedru). Levinas's word for this is degrisement, a word whic
. .
conjures up the image of arousal from the grey ltght of the vtgtl
between being asleep and fully awake which he refers to as the 'there
is', il y a, and describes so graphically in From Eristence to Exisfents in
pages (first published in 1946) that bear comparison with those where
Roquentin describes his malaise in Sartre's La Nausee (1938} and those
in which Mill's Autobiography describes his. Not that these are
descriptions of the same malaise. The word 'nausea' is indeed
Introduction to Metaphysics 19
mentioned between inverted commas at one point in From Existence
to Existents as though to underline that what in it is called the if y a is
not to be confused with what was described in the book whose date
of publication is separated from its own by the experience of the
Second World War. There is an analysis of nausea in De !'evasion, an
essay originally published in 1935. There the anguish of nausea is
described as the malaise of not being able to be what one is and yet
being stuck with oneself, rive a soi-meme, stuck to oneself as Sartre
would say (DE 90}.
When Levinas writes of the i/ y a he is responding to Bergson as
well as to Heidegger and Sartre. In explaining what he means with
the help of Blanchot's analogy of someone in the next room
relentlessly moving the furniture about all night he is saying that
nothing new is created here, any more than it is in Bergson' s idea of
creative evolution as artistic generation and of nothingness as a
derivative of being, so that there is not even the possibility of
novelty through non-being, and possibility too is a modality of
being's plenitude, hence no escape from ontological ennui (TA 86, TO
91-2; DE 72). Newness does not come into being through artistic
creation, however inspired by the muses it may be. Newness comes
from the other in ethical 'inspiration to the end, even to expiration'
(AEAE 229, OBBE 182).
What might be referred to as the experience of the i/ y a is the
experience of the night, except that the notion of experience is
incompatible with the absolute exclusion of light (EE 94; 58).zo Light
is the condition of the appearance of objects. The 'there is' precedes
objects or existents of any kind, yet is not the nothingness which is
opposed to being by Sartre and Heidegger in their different ways.
� The anxiety before nothingness which they describe is not what
Levinas means by the horror of the 'there is'. The 'there is' is the
neither simply nothingness or absence nor simply being or presence,
but the excluded middle of these, the presence of absence, the
existence of nothingness, without being its dialectical opposite, prior
� to lexis, but mutely armouncing another excluded middle, calling for
the call that Levinas will call Dire. The i/ y a fills the void left by the
negation of being' (AEAE 4, OBBE 4), but without any sense of the
abundance and generosity implied in Heidegger's es gibt (EE 10; 10).
Il y a is an impersonal form, like in 'it is raining' or 'it is warm'. Its
anonymity is essential. The mind does not find itself faced with an
apprehended exterior. The exterior - if one insists on this term -
20 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
remains uncorrelated with an interior. It is no longer given. It is no
longer a world. What we call the I is itself submerged by the night,
invaded, depersonalized, stifled by it. (EE 95; 58)
An escape from this suffocation is promised when what we call the
I (le moi) overcomes this impersonal and inhuman neutrality by
positing a personal identity for itself. That thi� promise is not yet
.
kept is the message Mill is beginning to recetve m 1826. It cannot be
kept if the human being is no more than a hypostatic unity, no even �
if to that unity is added union with others through compassiOnate
love, as Mill's account of utilitarianism adds to Bentham's. So-called
human being is still not human if its being is the monotony of the
identity of a subjectivity caught up in the self-referential circularity of
the satisfaction of need, even if that need is self-salvation outside this
world or the need to satisfy the needs of others in it. Even then,
hypostasis would be apostasis. This may well seem an outrageous thing
to say. One can understand why Andre Gide should not want to
climb on board a raft (or an ark. See Chapter 3) when there are so
many others left struggling in the sea. But what complaint can
Levinas have about someone who out of compassion for his fellows
�
spends his life trying to save them? Is he so det�rmined to :eak he � then cites Nicomachean Ethics 1166a: 'Friendly relations with one's
circle of Heideggerian care (Sorge) and the .mtegnty of Dasetn s bemg
towards its own death that he is ready to deny that one should care
for one's neighbour?
The apparent outrageousness of what Levinas says can be
mitigated if a provisional comparison is made with Kant's c�ticism
of philosophers like Hurne, according to whom the foundation of
ethics is natural benevolence. However, Kant's grounding of ethics on
the moral law does not escape Levinas's criticism. Although the
Kantian account is not, like the sentimentalist account on his view,
vulnerable to the charge of making moral choice contingent upon
complex and conflicting information as to what different people enjoy
and hate, with the consequence that making the right choice is often
if not always a matter of luck, it, no less than accounts of ethics based
on natural general benevolence or 'humanity', still fails to see that the
primary ethical or proto-ethical relation between myself and another
is one of absolute dissymmetry. My neigbour and I are not equals.
Hence, it would seem Levinas must say, if I should love my
neighbour, l cannot love him as myself. The Levinasian construal of
love of my neighbour must be otherwise than Levitican.
Introduction fo Metaphysics 21
V
If lo:e of my neighbour is, as Kierkegaard says it is, the dawning of
sobnety, then what he calls earthly love must be intoxication. He
opposes earthly love to Christian love, and wagers that the poet will
search ni vain in the New Testament for inspiration on the subject of
earthly love or friendship.21 Whether or not the poet would be better
advised to consult the Old Testament is not without relevance both
to Levinas's view or views of the poet (to which we shall return in
Chapter 5) and to his analysis of erotic love in which the preservation
of the separateness of the lover and loved one is stressed, whereas
Kierkegaard stresses union (Forening). Earthly love according to .
Kierkegaard is pagan, and the analysis he gives of it follows the
pagan �istotelian account on which Aquinas bases his interpretation
of cantas broadly understood. Strictly speaking, Aquinas says,
referring to Dionysius the Areopagite, we do not have friendship
for ourselves, since amicitia is a union (unio) between at least two
persons, whereas in relation to himself man is a unity (unitas): 'as
unity is presupposed to union, so our love for ourselves is the model
�nd root of friendship; for our friendship for others consists precisely
m the fact that our attitude to them is the same as to ourselves'. He
neighbours, and the mark by which friendships are defined, seem to
have proceeded from a man's relations to himself.' This 'root' is
poisoned, Levinas seems to say. Erotic and in general earthly love
conceived in this way is misconceived. So too is carifas as conceived
by Aquinas. Thus conceived caritas would be a curvifas, a being bent
back on oneself. even when it is a desire for the blessedness, salvation
or happiness of the neighbour. It is precisely in this inclusion of my
.
ne•ghbour within the orbit of my projected schemes, however
benevolent they may be, that my failure to stand upright before
him consists. This interpretation of caritas. Fursorge or care conceals
the truth that it is my neighbour who encircles and concerns me,
where the word 'concern', con-cerne, connotes a reversal of intentio­
nality: obsession, but an obsession which is the antitype of the
.
obsess1on of the false exterior presented by the resounding silence of
the darkness that encircled the infant Levinas and has returned on
sleepless nights throughout his life since, le revenant, like Banquo's
ghost, being the very element of the horror of the 'there is'. This
horror is not the horror of death, described by Heidegger as the
possibility of impossibility of being. It is the horror of irremissible
22 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
existence even after death, the impossibility of final death and
therefore the unendingness of responsibility (EE 11, IOD-2; 61-2).
Levinas cites Macbeth: 'The times have been, that when the Brains
were out, the man would dye, and there an end; But now they rise
again . . . and push us from our stools. This is more strange than such
a murther is.' He cites Phedre and says of her that she 'discovers the
impossibility of death, the eternal responsibility of her being . . .'.
How can Levinas speak here of responsibility as something before
which one stands horrified, yet go on to see in it the wonder of
wonders of the face to face with the Other which is the exit from
being for which Macbeth and Phedre seek in vain? The answer to this
question has to be pieced together from what Levinas says elsewhere.
First, although he sees philosophy as the wisdom or witness of
love and not simply as the love of wisdom or wit (AEAE 205-7,
OBBE 161-2), and although he sees the beginning of philosophy not,
as Heidegger does, in the wonder before being but in the wonder of
wonders of the face to face, my responsibility before the Other, while
it frees me from the burden of the bad infinity of incessant being,
does not free me from the burden of the incessant Infinite 'Thou
shalt'. The ontological burden, the burden of existence, is released
from my shoulders only to make room for the burden of ethical
necessity.
Second, whereas the responsibility to which reference is made
when Levinas cites Macbeth and Phedre is responsibility for a
particular criminal ad of will, what in Barth's terms would be a sin
that 'the one who commands us would accept . . ., as it were, on his
own responsibilify', the proto-ethical responsibility that frees me from
the claustrophobia of the 'there is' also frees me from condemnation
to the freedom of ads of self-will by placing this in the non-place of a
responsibility that is not a culpability for any particular crime that I
have committed or derivative from any historical contract undertaken
by me. Heidegger says in the Prolegomena to the History of the Concept
of Time: 'As an active being-with with others and as such, Dasein is eo
ipso guilty, even when - and precisely when - it does not know that
it is injuring another or destroying him in his Dasein. With the choice
of being willing to have a conscience, I have at the same time chosen
to have become guilty' (G20 441, HCT 319). Macbeth's and Phedre's
responsibility is a guilt that goes back to a deed they chose to
perform at a given dated moment in the past. That responsibility, that
guilt and that date have behind them according to Heidegger the
choice of a way of being. According to Levinas they have behind
Introduction to Metaphysics 23
them a past which was never present, chosen or assumed, a past
which is immemorial because it is not the past of my time as passive
synthesis in which the Augenblick is only a collecting and recollecting
of light, but, more passive than that, the past of the time of the other
whose approach interrupts my being toward my undated death,
tuming senescence, which says this overcoat will see me out, into
juvenescence, 'absolute youth', which says there is still always time
for me to give the coat to save someone else from the cold or to
serve him or her as a shroud, after or before my time has come (Tl
212, 259; 23.5, 282. HAH 95, 101). Furthermore, whether I donate it
to the other or not, there is always time to be pardoned, the
discontinuous time of filial filiation with the others that follow after
the time of my being toward my death. This time is not the time of
possibility but the time that suspends power. It suspends power
because what approaches is unknown; because the time of the
approach is not a time of knowledge or ignorance or of the ekstasis
of understanding, but the metaphysical time of ethical infinity. Like a
wave flowing up the beach, the posthumous time in which I am
pardoned by the other interrupts the ebb of my time, introducing into
it retroactively another beginning which is also an utterly fresh start
(TI 257-6 1; 282-5). However, we must here interrupt these remarks
on filiation until in Chapter 9 our remarks on paternal love pick up
this cast-off thread.
Levinas maintains that there is an element of eros in all love. Taken
strictly, this would hold for the agapeistic love to which the erotic is
usually opposed, unless one is even more strict and refuses to
translate agape by 1ove'. True, he sometimes uses the phrase 'love
without eros' to refer to the notion of Desire without desire, that is to
say, proto-ethical Desire in which the intentionality of telic desire is
reversed. When toward the end of his genealogy of relationships
'beyond the face' he reaches the relationship of fraternity, he has
passed through the forms of love and returned to the proto-ethical
responsibility of the face to face which was his topic before he
embarked on his analysis of the prototypes of the biological concepts.
Therefore, although the remark is made in the course of interpreting a
rabbinical text, we can assume that Levinas is speaking his own mind
when he writes:
The formula 'Love thy neighbour as thyself' still presupposes self­
love as the prototype of love. Here, ethics signifies: 'Be responsible
for the other as thou art responsible for thyself'. We avoid the
24 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
presupposition of self-love - of amour-propre which pretends to
- It is however to a chiasmus in the Levinasian ventricle of this heart
be the very definition of the personal. (ADV 105)
That is to say, our heuristic hypothesis of a scale of self-love and
our question as to the point on it at which should be placed the
interpretation of the commandment to love one's neighbour given by
different commentators lead us to the conclusion that Levinas is so
pessimistic over the chances of love of self being part of a principle of
ethics that for an understanding of his notion of ethics we can forget
about this scale and look elsewhere to the notion of immeasurable,
incalculable, anarchic responsibility. It is to this that we shall look in
the next chapter, but not before noting a complication.
The conclusion we have just reached in this chapter gives us an
apparently unambiguous answer to the question as to whether
Levinas puts self-love at the dark extreme or the bright extreme of
the scale. Have we not just seen that it is because his view of self-love
is so dark that he looks for an arche or cmarche of ethics in which love
of self does not figure? However, what if we take seriously an
alternative 'extremely audacious' reading of the Levitican verse which
Levinas proposes? On this reading the last word of this verse,
kamokha, 'as thyself', is separated from the beginning of the verse
to give the translation 'Love your neighbour; this is yourself' or 'this
love of your neighbour is yourself' (DDVI 144). In this way is
removed any suspicion that a residue of return to self is carried over
from the voluptuosity of erotic love to responsibility for oneself. If I
am love of my neighbour, my responsibility for myself is respons­
ibility for my nei�hbour. But in this case, through love of love of my
neighbour, love of my self will be love of and responsibility for my
neighbour, since on this 'audacious' reading of Leviticus the personal
is redefined as love of my neighbour. If my self is love of my
neighbour my love of myself cannot be such a bad thing. Somewhat
as with Aquinas, Luther and Barth, so with Levinas, self-love gets
located both at the darker and at the brighter extremes of the scale.
To paraphrase Pascal, whose words about the physical sun Levinas
frequently cites ('"That is my place in the sun". That is how the
usurpation of the whole world began'), magnanimity and agility of
soul are demonstrated not by being at one extreme but rather by
touching both extremes at one and the same time, and by occupying
the space between: occupying, to cite Levinas and Heidegger, the
place (Ort) or non-place at which there is contact at the heart of a
chiasmus.22
Introduction to Metaphysics 25
that we must see we have been brought in the final paragraphs of this
chapter. From the opening pages we have been concerned with an
injunction of Judaic and Christian ethics. In the course of the chapter
we have discovered that Levinas reflects on this injunction in order to
articulate the asymmetry of the face to face. We have also discovered
that this articulation is neutral with respect to the distinctions
between ethical egoism and ethical altruism. Levinas himself says
that it is 'beyond egoism and altruism' (AEAE 150, OBBE 117). But is
not 'Love thy neighbour' an ethical principle, as Mill takes it to be
when he mistakenly equates it with the principle of utility? Is it not a
prescription of ethical altruism? It is, but we have just seen that it is
not as such that Levinas invokes it. Rather as for Kant the moral law
is descriptive of rather than prescriptive for the holy will, for Levinas
the Levitican formula is turned to tell us something about personality.
Does this mean then that it is interpreted not as a prescription of
ethical altruism but as a description of human nature, a statement of
psychological or existential-ontological altruism, a defence of what
might be dubbed the unselfish hypothesis? No, Levinas answers, for
the proximity of the face to face breaks with the spiritualism of
consciousness which is the main tradition of Western philosophy. The
signification of the for the other 'allows us to understand goodness in
another way than as an altruistic inclination to be safisfied' (AEAE
175, OBBE 137-8). This brings out why Levinas finds reference to
responsibility rather than love more suited to explaining what he
means by goodness here and why he says, recalling Kant's distinction
between 'pathological' love and practical love or the duty of
beneficence (for example in §27 of The Metaphysical Principles of
Virtue), that this goodness is not the goodness of good will.23 We
shall examine this last contention in our last two chapters. At the end
of this first chapter we note that in familiar senses of the terms one
can be responsible for one's neighbour, whether one is conscious that
one is or not, and whether one loves one's neighbour or not. The
notion of responsibility thus lends itself more readily to any
ontological principle one might want to affirm about the ipseity of
the self, whereas the notion of love lends itself more readily to the
affirmation of a principle of ethics. In Otherwise than Being or Beyond
Essence, Levinas's primary topic is neither prescriptive ethics nor, as
the title of the book makes plain, descriptive ontology. It is the
chiasmus of these for which he reintroduces the paleonym metaphy­
sics: 'the religiosity of the self', meaning by that that the ego is bound
26 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience

to the other prior to ethical and ontological principles; prior to any

2
principles at all. 'Goodness in the subject is anarchy itself', anarchic
responsibility.
Anarchic Responsibility

comparaison dece qui est en principe incomparable

Emmanuel Levinas, 'Philosophie, justice et amour'

When Levinas writes: 'Here, ethics signifies "Be responsible for the
other as thou art responsible for thyself"' from the context it can be
inferred that by 'here' is meant n i the Torah. Taking Levinas to be
endorsing this interpretation of ethics presents two difficulties, neither
of which is removed when the sullied or compromised (galvaude)
word 'love' is removed from the formulation of what ethics or the
ethical signifies (El 51; 52). We might refer to these difficulties as the
predicament of predication, which we shall discuss in section 11, and
the predicament of taking oneself too seriously, which we shall
discuss forthwith.

Apparently, even when the Levitican injunction is reformulated we do

not escape the reference to the self as though it were the benchmark
in relation to which our responsibility toward others is in some way
to be determined. But this would seem to contradict the Levinasian
doctrine according to which the centre of gravity is outside the self.
How can this difficulty be resolved?
This difficulty would not arise for Levinas if we took him to
endorse only the first part of the injunction. Retention of the revised
version of the second part no longer runs the risk he associates with
self-love, but this advantage is purchased at the cost of resurrecting
the problem some philosophers have had with the idea of responsi­
bilities or duties to oneself. One traditional solution of this problem is
to allow such duties but to limit them to indirect duties, duties one
has to oneself on account of direct duties one has to others. This
solution appears to be available to Levinas. I cannot give the other

27
28 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
bread unless I have worked to earn the bread I must eat to keep my
body and soul together in order that I may be there to aid my hungry
neighbour. I have responsibilities for myself because I have responsi­
bilities for others. In this sense, the other could be said to be
responsible for the responsibilities I have to myself. If we do say
this, however, the sense in which he is said to be responsible is a
logical or explanatory one. It is not in this sense that I am responsible
for the other, to the extent even, according to Levinas, of being
responsible for his responsibilities. Here my responsibility for the
other is the anarchic 'condition of possibility' of ethics. It is where
ethics begins - or, speaking strictly, turns out not to have a
beginning, any more than do I, ethically understood. For to say, as
Levinas does, that ethics begins with me is to say that it does not
begin with the self that persists in its identity and aspires to realize
ends, but in the other by whom I am ad- and in-spired (AEAE 228,
OBBE 180-1). The self that is encumbered by its body is the self
upon which responsibility for the other is incumbent. And its soul is
its being animated by the other. The other is the very pneuma of the
soul. what, no less than bread, keeps body and soul together. Bread of
heaven, so to speak. Or God's breath, as expressed in the parable
Levinas cites according to which Moses, 'whom the Lord knew face
to face' (Deuteronomy 34: 10}, gave up his soul 'on the mouth of
God', as though the kiss of life were not to be distinguished from the
kiss of death with him who dies for the other. 'The absolute
expiration - in the kiss of God - is death on order - in the
passivity of obedience - in inspiration by the Other for the other'
(AEAE 229, OBBE 200). So the ipseity of the identity of the self is
that of a displaced person. I am in exile in myself (AEAE 134, OBBE
107). I am one, a subject, because I have got the other under my skin;
because I am subjected to the other's command, but without being
dominated or enslaved by it, for the other and I are not in correlation,
which would be necessary if we were to be in a relation of power.
The other is not my other dialectically. in such a way that we become
fused together as a we. My autonomy is made possible by
heteronomy. Auto-affection is conditioned by hetero-affection. The
other is in the same, where the paradoxicality of Levinas's dans,
'within' without within, matches that of Blanchot's sans, 'without'
without without, and pas, negation without denial, as analysed by
Derrida in Pas and Survivre. 1 ]e est un autre. Before I am a moi I am a
soi. But in an exceedingly odd sense of 'before'. This conjunction
marks a disjunction, yet not a straightforward division. It marks an
Anarchic Responsibility 29
alterity which is constitutive of the self, and an alterity such that if we
say that I am the same and the other at the same time, this second
'same' must be in its turn understood in such a way as not to exclude
the other. The simultaneity is not simply that of coincidence in one
time. If there is simultaneity in that sense there is also a diachrony, a
difference of times instead of a difference of time. The coincidence is
the coincidence of prophecy, speaking for another, 'returning in which
the perception of an order coincides with the signifying of this order
performed by him that obeys it' (AEAE 190, OBBE 149). This
returning is not that of Husserlian retention, Hegelian self-certainty
or of the predicative or pre-predicative reflection of the Kantian
threefold synthesis of self-consciousness in which experiences from
one's past are remembered and integrated in one time continuous
with that of the present and with time to come. For the past that is
thus resumed is a past that was itself at one time a present. Prophetic
retournement is the return of the other, his diachronous revenir, not the
se souvenir in which I recollect my past. Prophetic second coming is
the revenience of an immemorial past, a coming which is plus and
minus one, absolutely second and absolutely prior in that it is an
unfinishing coming of what never had a first coming and will never
arrive, but will be going on coming for ever, immer unterwegs, a uenir.
None of this is easy to comprehend. It is no easier to comprehend
than how freedom of choice can be synthesized with the rational will
in the philosophy of Kant. Levinas would say, as the title of his book
Difficile LiberU suggests, that we should not expect freedom to be
anything other than difficult, and that philosophical synthesis and
comprehension are inevitably disrupted by prophecy because pro­
phecy surpasses synthesis and comprehension. This very surpassing
of comprehension and of thematization is their reversion to the
immemorial past, the intrication of what is said, dit, philosophically
and the otherwise saying of prophecy's infinitive dire. Hence, like
Heidegger when in his inaugural lecture he affirms propositions
regarding what a proposition cannot contain, Levinas is, wittingly,
hoist with his own petard as soon as he tries to explain to his readers
what they are to understand when he writes of 'this returning in
which the perception of an order coincides with the signifying of this
order performed by him that obeys it'. If synthesis is out of the
question - or, rather, cannot get us out of the question, which is
where we are trying per impossibile, through im-possibility, to be, to
calling the question into question - so too is analysis, except up to a
certain point. For there are no ultimate elements at which analysis
28 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
bread unless I have worked to earn the bread I must eat to keep my
body and soul together in order that I may be there to aid my hungry
neighbour. I have responsibilities for myself because I have responsi­
bilities for others. In this sense, the other could be said to be
responsible for the responsibilities I have to myself. If we do say
this, however, the sense in which he is said to be responsible is a
logical or explanatory one. It is not in this sense that I am responsible
for the other, to the extent even, according to Levinas, of being
responsible for his responsibilities. Here my responsibility for the
other is the anarchic 'condition of possibility' of ethics. It is where
ethics begins - or, speaking strictly, turns out not to have a
beginning, any more than do I, ethically understood. For to say, as
Levinas does, that ethics begins with me is to say that it does not
begin with the self that persists in its identity and aspires to realize
ends, but in the other by whom I am ad- and in-spired (AEAE 228,
OBBE 180-1). The self that is encumbered by its body is the self
upon which responsibility for the other is incumbent. And its soul is
its being animated by the other. The other is the very pneuma of the
soul, what, no less than bread, keeps body and soul together. Bread of
heaven, so to speak. Or God's breath, as expressed in the parable
Levinas cites according to which Moses, 'whom the Lord knew face
to face' (Deuteronomy 34: 10), gave up his soul 'on the mouth of
God', as though the kiss of life were not to be distinguished from the
kiss of death with him who dies for the other. 'The absolute
expiration - in the kiss of God - is death on order - in the
passivity of obedience - . i n inspiration by the Other for the other'
(AEAE 229, OBBE 200). So the ipseity of the identity of the self is
that of a displac.ed person. I am in exile in myself (AEAE 134, OBBE
107). I am one, a subject, because I have got the other under my skin;
because I am subjected to the other's command, but without being
dominated or enslaved by it, for the other and I are not in correlation,
which would be necessary if we were to be in a relation of power.
The other is not my other dialectically, in such a way that we become
fused together as a we. My autonomy is made possible by
heteronomy. Auto-affection is conditioned by hetero-affection. The
other is in the same, where the paradoxicality o f Levinas's dans,
'within' without within, matches that of Blanchot's sans, 'without'
without without, and pas, negation without denial, as analysed by
1
Derrida in Pas and Survivre. ]e est un autre Before I am a moi I am a
.
soi. But in an exceedingly odd sense of 'before'. This conjunction
marks a disjunction, yet not a straightforward division. It marks an
Anarchic Responsibility 29
alterity which is constitutive of the self, and an alterity such that if we
say that I am the same and the other at the same time, this second
'same' must be in its turn understood in such a way as not to exclude
the other. The simultaneity is not simply that of coincidence in one
time. If there is simultaneity in that sense there is also a diachrony, a
difference of times instead of a difference of time. The coincidence is
the coincidence of prophecy, speaking for another, 'returning in which
the perception of an order coincides with the signifying of this order
performed by him that obeys it' (AEAE 190, OBBE 149). This
returning is not that of Husserlian retention, Hegelian self-certai nty
or of the predicative or pre-predicative reflection of the Kantian
threefold synthesis of self-consciousness in which experiences from
one's past are remembered and integrated in one time continuous
with that of the present and with time to come. For the past that is
thus resumed is a past that was itself at one time a present. Prophetic
refournement is the return of the other, his diachronous revenir, not the
se souvmir in which I recollect my past. Prophetic second coming is
the revenience of an immemorial past, a coming which is plus and
minus one, absolutely second and absolutely prior in that it is an
unfinishing coming of what never had a first coming and will never
arrive, but will be going on coming for ever, immer unterwegs, a venir.
None of this is easy to comprehend. It is no easier to comprehend
than how freedom of choice can be synthesized with the rational will
in the philosophy of Kant. Levinas would say, as the title of his book
Difficile Liberti suggests, that we should not expect freedom to be
anything other than difficult, and that philosophical synthesis and
comprehension are inevitably disrupted by prophecy because pro­
phecy surpasses synthesis and comprehension. This very surpassing
of comprehension and of thematization is their reversion to the
immemorial past, the intrication of what is said, dit, philosophically
and the otherwise saying of prophecy's infinitive dire. Hence, like
Heidegger when in his inaugural lecture he affirms propositi ons
regarding what a proposition cannot contain, Levinas is, wittingly,
hoist with his own petard as soon as he tries to explain to his readers
what they are to understand when he writes of 'this returning in
which the perception of an order coincides with the signifying of this
order performed by him that obeys it'. If synthesis is out of the
question - or, rather, cannot get us out of the question, which is
where we are trying per impossibi/e, through im-possibility, to be, to
calling the question into question - so too is analysis, except up to a
certain point. For there are no ultimate elements at which analysis
30 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscil!llce
could arrive. How can there be a percepfion of an order, where the
order is not the order of a world but an imperative which is older
than any such order, such synthesis? To perceive a command is to
transform it into an object of the theoretical understanding, hence to
neutralize its categorial imperativity. This is why Levinas says that
where an order is at stake the perception or 'epiphany' of its
imperativity, as against perception of it as such, must take the form,
or non-form, of the performance of saying on the part of the
recipient. It is an epi-phany in that it is epiphenomenal: what at
one stage of his reflections on how in uttering words we perform
various deeds John Austin would have called a performative speech
ad, which in this case is in the neighbourhood of a constative one. In
the present case this so-called performative act is the signifying of the
order, the endorsing or countersigning of it by obeying it in advance
of hearing it, as though the command were, to use the image
favoured by advocates of natural law, inscribed upon one's soul.
This deed is less like the countersigning of a blank cheque than like
the endorsement of one on which what is due is traced out in
invisible ink. What is due is that 'thou shalt be responsible for thy
neighbour as thou art responsible for thyself'. Although there seems
to be no reason why Levinas should deny that I am responsible for
myself because otherwise I should not be able causally to go any way
toward meeting my responsibility for my neighbour, the endorsement
we are assuming he gives to thjs command derives from the way in
which through the oddly tensed proto-logic of ipseity I am not
responsible for myself except in so far as I am responsible for my
neighbour, because my neighbour is the other who calls me in my
own voice, the voice of conscience which is mine and yet not mine
since it is already obeyed before there is any consciousness on which
the law can be written and before there is any being-there. An
obeying (ob-oedire, ob-ar�dire) that is before hearing (audire, enfendre)
and therefore before understanding (audire, enfmdre) can hardly be one
speech act among others. It can scarcely be an ad. It must be prior to
intentionality and conventionality in speech ads. Is it then a speech
passion? That sounds like a description of hearing. But the obedience
of which Levinas is here speaking must be more passive than passion
since it is an obedience that precedes any hearing of speech.
Obedience precedes any hearing of the command. The possibility
of finding, anachronously, the order in the obedience itself, and of
receiving the order out of oneself. this reverting of heteronomy
Anarchic Respo1rsibility 31
into autonomy, is the way the Irfinite comes to pass. The
metaphor of the inscription of the law in consciousness expresses
this in a remarkable way, reconciling autonomy and heteronomy. It
does so in an ambivalence which, in the present, is an ambiguity.
(AEAE 189, OBBE 148)
If it were a question of a concept present to consciousness we
should have to say that the concept is ambiguous, pointing in
different directions at one and the same time. But it is not a question
of concepts only and their synchronic or achronic logic. H is a
question of what exceeds the theoretical concept or idea, exceeds
even the practical Idea and the bad infinity of the regulative teleology
of its Sol/en. So there has to be a pad, a peaceful if restless
reconcilation of the logic and temporality of conceptual and
imaginative representation on the one hand with, on the other, the
proto-logic and diachrony of my response to the order which 'has not
been the cause of my response, nor even a question that would have
preceded it in djalogue'. My response is not eo-responsibility. It is not
only a transgression outside the dialogue of the soul with itself to a
dialogue of the soul with the other. It is a transgression outside the
dialogue and its with. The semantic ambiguity, an ;unbiguity of
signification in which the signifier stands for what it signifies, an
ambiguity as a result of which communication may temporarily break
down, is caught up in an intrigue with the incessant rhetorological
ambivalence of my signifying to the other, my standing for him in
response to an order which I find in my response itself. 'I find the
order in my response itself, which, as a sign given to the neighbour,
as a "Here I am", brings me out of invisibility, out of the shadow in
which my responsibility could have been evaded.'
· Could my responsibility have been evaded? What ink would be so
permanently invisible as to permit that? What shadow so indelibly
deep? Not even the shadow of death in which my responsibility
would be delegated to a shawabti12. Just how important these
questions are will be more apparent when we come to consider in
Chapter 5 what Levinas has to say about the language of poetry. We
shall keep them in mind however as we turn now from the difficulty
raised by the idea of responsibility for oneself to the other of the two
chief difficulties touched on above, the predicament of predication, in
particular as it arises in the language of philosophy. How can the very
nature of philosophical assertion not conceal what the philosopher
Emmanuel Levinas wants to say?
32 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
II
The difficulty is that of finding a way to avoid saying the opposite of
what one wants to say, the predicament that haunts among others the
philosopher of sense-certainty and the sceptic in Hegel's Phenomeno­
logy of Spirit,
What Levinas wants to say is that he is more responsible than
anyone else in that it holds of whatever responsibility another might
claim that Levinas is responsible even for that.
The knot of subjectivity consists in going to the other without
concerning oneself with his movement towards me. Or, more
exactly, it consists in approaching in such a way that, over and
beyond all the reciprocal relations that do not fail to get set up
between me and the neighbour, I have always taken one step more
toward him - which is possible only if this step is responsibility, In
the responsibility which we have for one another, I am the one
_
who always has one response more to give, who has to answer for
his responsibility, (AEAE 106, OBBE 84)
What is more, this surplus of my obligations over my rights
augments the greater is my endeavour to meet them. As I approach
the other the distance between us increases in geometrical progres­
sion. The giving then shows itself to be parsimony, the exposure a
reserve, and holiness guilt' (AEAE 181, OBBE 142). This lapse is not
to be confuse1 with original sin. It is pre-original goodness and 'the
diachrony of�dme
.t that flows between the fingers of Mnemosyne'
(AEAE 106, OBBE 84), the infinite time of my life toward the other in
the finite time �f my being toward my own death, displacing me
outside it and outside the concept which is another (Hegelian) name
for death, the in-finite which is both non-finite and in the finite:
]edeinigkeit which extroverts the project of ]emeinigkeit,
The recurrence of this responsibility can be compared with that of
the decimal fraction sometimes obtained as the quotient in an
arithmetical division (for example the division of 5 by 6) when the
same numbers are iterated in the same order ad infinitum, except that
in the recurrence of which Levinas speaks there is an ever-increasing
multiplication of indivisible responsibility, But Levinas does not want
to say that this exponentiation of responsibility obsesses only him,
notwithstanding that he says that this non-reciprocal obsession 'is
tied to an ego that states itself in the first person, escaping the
Anarchic Responsibility 33
concept of an ego in an ipseity - not in an ipseity in generaL, but in
me'. This last word is under stress because Levinas wishes to
emphasize the already emphatic pronoun moi in order to mark the
contrast and the asymmetry between the other and me. But what he
says would be false if the me referred only to him, Emmanuel Levinas.
On the other hand, however loudly the pronoun is pronounced, it is
applicable, like any other token reflexive expression, to any other
person who could say 'me', that is to say, to everyone, And it is
about everyone that the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas wishes to say
that he escapes the concept of an ego in a singular ipseity beyond the
universal and the particular. And this is what we earlier called an
absurdity. How can everyone, however singular, be more responsible
than his neighbour?
The same problem arises with i t a s arises with the injunction 'Thou
shalt love thy neighbour more than thyself: The Sifra, the first
Rabbinic commentary on Leviticus, tells us:
Two men are in the desert with a little water in possession of one
of them. If the one drinks it, he will reach civilisation; but if the
two of them share it, both will die, Ben Petura said, Let the two of
them drink, though both will die. Rabbi Akiba held that, in such a
case, your own life has precedence over that of your fellow men.
Chief Rabbi Hertz holds that Ben Petura's view is the more heroic and
altruistic. It is certainly more altruistic than Rabbi Akiba's. But is not a
third view more altruistic stilL the view which holds that we are
required to love others more than we love ourselves, to live or die for
them? The trouble with this third view is that it appears to be self­
contradictory, For in enjoining others to live for others I am enjoining
them to live for me.3
This threat of self-contradiction remains when love is replaced by
responsibility, If Levinas says that everyone is more responsible than
his neighbour on account of an irreversible asymmetry, he is
cancelling any irreversibility and asymmetry there may have been
and making each of us, including me, equally responsible with the
others, And Levinas knows this full welL This is why he asserts that
the accusedness of him who is held responsible is beyond apology. It
is beyond apology because it is beyond all logos understood as the
giving of justifying reasons. The persecuted one cannot defend
himself by language, He is, Levinas says, without the mediation of
the logos, But this 'without' is the sans whose strangeness Blanchot
34 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
and Derrida have emphasized. To say that one is defenceless is
already a defence, to excuse oneself for not having an excuse. And it
is to say something, if only the opposite of what one wanted to say.
The accused me is accused neither of a historical crime nor an
original sin. It is of a pre-original innocence that I am accused. But 'in
me alone can innocence be accused without absurdity. To accuse the
innocence of the other, to ask of the other more than he owes, is
criminal' (AEAE 144, OBBE 195). Why is it not criminal for the other
to accuse my innocence? Because when I am in the accusaH�e case I
have endorsed in advance the other's accusation. This is my suffering
of unspecific remorse, the ayenbyte of inwyl, in which there is an
effacement of the distinction between the other's accusing me and my
accusing myself. To accuse myself is not to avow my innocence. I can
no more avow my innocence than I can say that the other must
substitute himself for others. To say the latter would be to preach
human sacrifice. I can preach only my own sacrifice. Does that mean
that although it is not for me to preach your sacrifice it is all right for
you to do so? Am I not already going too far in saying this? And is it
not this which Levinas is saying? He warns his readers again and
again that 'me' is not common to several souls, that there is no ipseity
common to me and to others, and that 'me' is the exclusion of the
possibility of comparison, but at the same time he wants to endorse
the 'eternal word' of Jehuda Halevy, 'God speaks to each man in
particular' (AEAE 232, OBBE 184). Is this not precisely the kind of
eternal sentence that can be pronounced by someone who puts
himself at the point of view of God or the Other, and is that not what
Levinas considers to be an ethical if not a logical impossibility? Is it
not speaking for each man in the manner we have just seen that he
rules out? Is i t not to have recourse to the discourse of philosophy to
evade God by saying that no one, and not only not Jonah, is able to
evade God?
Is the only alternative silence? Levinas responds that he and we his
readers are no more condemned to remain silent or to say only the
opposite of what we want to say than is the philosophical sceptic or
the philosopher who maintains that the sceptic accomplishes his own
refutation and would therefore do better to shut up than to propound
his thesis. On Levinas's quasi-analysis of the self this can hardly be a
viable option, not if keeping silence is keeping a thought to oneself.
For according to Levinas, as we have seen, when I enter into myself I
find the other has got there before me and is already calling me to
account. In returning to myself I return to the status quo ante. To try
Anarchic Responsibility 35
to account for myself, to produce a justificatory logos, I must produce
a proposition, if only the proposition that I cannot justify myself, that
here, on the hither side of the self-certain here (AEAE 227, OBBE
180), apologia pro vita mea, logos, is out of place, that any proposition I
produce to defend myself is in practical contradiction with the
exposition of myself that signifies my indefensibility. Every plea in
self-defence cloth protest too much. But every protest is, in Edwin
Markham's words, 'a protest that is also a prophecy'. Every
proposition is itself an exposition, an exposure of its proposer. This
is why when the 'self-fulfilling scepticism', das sich vollbringende
Skeptizismus, of the Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit seems
to have met its death through consumption in the universality of the
concept, it incessantly rises out of its ashes to haunt us all over again.
Before explaining the significance Levinas attaches to this rebirth of
scepticism, let us consider a third illustration of this problem with
universality and the singularity of the Other and the subjected
Signifier.
Ill
The fenestration of the walJs of subjectivity and Subjectivity by an
infinitely Other who, like Aristotelian nous, comes in from an absolute
outside is also the penetration of ethics understood as a system
ordering reciprocal obligations and claims. An ethical system is
unethical unless its network of triadic, quadratic and n-adic symme­
tries remembers the dyadic asymmetry of my face to face with the
other human being. This holds for an ethical system conceived like
that of Spinoza from the point of view of eternity, for the Kantian
morality of the kingdom of rational ends, for the Hegelian system of
Sittlichkeit, and for utilitarian teleologies in their various forms,
whether general or restricted and whether the good to be maximized
and the bad to be minimized be construed as pleasure and pain or
more widely. All these systems are political or onto-theological in the
sense that they allow only for a derivative exteriority, the exteriority
of a third personal or impersonal uninteressierte Zuschauer who looks
down from an or:iginal position, in John Rawls' phrase, like an
architect drawing up a blueprint or a philosopher-king devising a
constitution.4 This explains the failure of the most ingenious
arguments Mill and his successors devise to demonstrate that justice
is a kind, albeit the most important kind, of expediency, the condition
36 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
necessary for the fulfilment of all the other kinds. It also explains
Mill's accidie. In a piece of etymologizing that outheideggers
Heidegger and exposes him to the same risk, Mill observes that .
the idea of justice includes the idea of a command, as hinted by the
origin of the word in the past participle of iubeo. This suggestion
provoked one commentator to remark that the word goes �ack rather
to the past participle of iungo, to join. That was a �erce�hve rema�k
. .
as regards our understanding of Mill, for the mJunchvity of h1s
�
conception of justice is accompanied by a no ion o.f conjuncti?n
. negative intuitionist - obligations are not exhausted by the perfect
within a system of reciprocal claims. Indeed this social reciprocity
buttressed by analogies that Mill draws between utilitarianism and
political legislation in the Platonic republic, the Kantian moral law, the
golden rule and the Old and New Testament command�ent .to love
.
one's neighbour as oneself, is built mto h1s generalized Idea of
expediency almost to the point at which it is as valid to maintain
that expediency is a corollary of justice as it is to maintain, as he
does, the reverse.
What according to Mill holds justice apart from the rest of the
p
s here of moral expediency is the fact that to the moral obligati?n of
. island flowing with milk and honey and I am Robinson Crusoe, would
justice there corresponds a right in some individual person ent!tlmg
that ·person to be treated or not to be treated in a particular way. A
considerable portion of the last chapter of Utilitarianism is taken up
with a description of the different classes of circumstance in which
such rights are conferred. What Levinas maintains is that justice d��e
under such circumstances is not ethical justice but violence unless It IS
founded upon what.in order to mark its difference from this justice of
multiplicity may have to be called pre-ethical justice - thou�h e � anticipate any of his unforeseen needs or to prevent his dying alone,
himself calls it the ethical - a primary justice that has no foundahon m
a system of universal reciprocity but declares itself in the asymme­
trical 'relation' which is the condition or 'condition' of all relations,
the infinite dyad of the face to face. The an-archic 'foundation' of
ethics is, as Levinas puts it, the folly of my responsibility to the
Other, my obligation to be the servant but not the slave of him who
is the absolute lord and master to whom I must look up on account of
his humility, his vulnerability and his sickness unto death. This excess
of folie is at the same time the emphatic superlation of rationality,
rationality beyond reason, the ethical condition and quintessence of
pure reason, including reason as embodied or disembodied in the
universality of the Kantian moral law.
If the Other is thus described, if the Other, whoever he or she may
be, is always to confront me as the orphan, the widow or the poor, it
Anarchic Responsibility 37
is tempting to infer that Levinas's pre-ethical justice is less remote
from negative utilitarianism than it is from the positive or mixed
varieties. This is what we might expect of the teaching that bedrock
is reached when we strike a notion of justice. To say as Mill does that
we never allow an imperfect obligation to be met at the price of
doing an injustice is to give priority to negative utilitarian
obligations, that is, to the avoidance of harm over the promotion
of enjoyment, though perhaps negative utilitarian - or for that matter
obligations of justice.
But what can be said about the relevance, if there is any, to pre­
ethical justice of the positive utilitarian - or for that matter positive
intuitionist - obligation of beneficence? According to Mill 'No one
has a moral right to our generosity or beneficence, because we are
not morally bound to practise those virtues towards any given
individual.' Suppose however that there is only one given individual
other than myself. This is the original position of the face to face:
Crusoe and Man Friday. If Man Friday is hale and hearty on Gaunilo's
it not be grotesque for Levinas to say that Man Friday has a moral or
pre-moral right to my generosity and beneficence? Before we decide
that it would, account should be taken of the following three
considerations.
First, however prosperous the other man may seem to be, there is
always something of which he is short even if that is only time, and
since in this dyadic face to face I am the only person there to
he may well have a pre-systematic and in that sense pre-moral right
to my generosity. Generosity is not supererogatory if the only
alternative to giving him the gift is giving the gift to myself. It is
not an objection to or an escape from Levinas's claim regarding ethics
to say that it is an ethics only of supererogation for saints and heroes
and so can be ignored by those of us who are concerned with ethics
tailored to the manageable, if not always soluble, problems of
everyday life.5 His claim is that the latter is only saved from political
violence because it remains inescapably bound to the straight justice
of the dyadic face to face.
Second, although the original position as we have so far been
describing it is dyadic, involving myself and the Other whom Levinas
refers to as Autrui, the singularity of Autrui is a singularity that
distinguishes every other human being. Autrui is a singular plural. It is
38 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
not equivalent to the third-person plural 'they' or to the omnipersonal
das Man, the collediv� or indefinite 'one'. It is closer to the pronoun
we would need for the person who has distinguished himself from the
indifference of das Man, except that Levinas's pronoun is not one that
I can ever apply to myself, and entitlement to it is not earned by
someone's being authentically toward his death. Autmi as intended by
i tended in Martin Buber's I
Levinas is much closer to Du, 'thou', as n
and Thou, provided the relationship this title indicates is not confused
with the intimacy of love but preserves the separateness of the Other
who commands respect in commanding me. With this proviso, the
Other's command 'thou shalt not kill' is synonymous with 'thou shalt
love the stranger' and 'love thy neighbour' (PL 173). ln issuing this
command the Other is not speaking only on his own behalf. He is not
saying only 'thou shalt not kill me'. He is saying also that I should
command others likewise. I am a link in a chain of command. So
although the original position is a dyadic encounter H makes reference
to other Others. This does not mean that the distinction between
primary dyadic justice and secondary systematic justice collapses. A
lexical sign of this is the fact that there is no grammatical plural of the
word Autrui. When Levinas wishes to refer to the plurality of Others
in their plurality he has to speak of les Autres. The word Autrui in
normal usage does admit of plural application, but as distinguished
from the expression les Autres it allows Levinas to give voice through
it to the singularity of each Other, an aspect that English endeavours
to capture by employing an upper case '0'. Modem English lacks
another power of French to which Levinas sometimes has recourse.
A11trui is addressed as vous, which is both a plural and, in contrast
with tu, the singular of respect. Levinas has recourse to these lexical
and grammatical devices in order to defend a philosophical and
(proto-)ethical claim, a claim which is philosophical precisely because
it is ethical. What he calls ethics and what, to mark its distinctness
from the morals of the market, we prefer to call proto-ethics is first
philosophy, prote philosophia, prior to the science and thinking of
being. Jt is meta ta phusika, metaphysics beyond ontology (metonto­
logy, dare one say?). The claim Levinas wishes to defend is the claim
to absolute alterity and uniqueness of each Other human being, so
that it is he whom I respect, for himself, not as a representative of the
human race or as only a vehicle of the Kantian moral law. The alterity
Levinas primarily has in mind is the alterity of the Other vis-a-vis me.
Radical alterity is a relational or 'relational' property of the vertical
face to face, not a horizontally or horizonally contemplated dimen-
Anarchic Responsibility 39
sion, but a dimension - what Merleau-Ponty describes as the most
existential dimension - of depth or, better, of height, the altitude of
alterity. For the vis-a-vis of this relation is my being looked at and
non-condescendingly spoken down to from on high. This does not
mean that I am less than human. This is acknowledged by the Other's
commanding me to command others not to kill but to love the
neighbour. Levinas wants it both ways. He wants everybody's
singularity to be recognized. However not just by mutual recogni­
tion. The mutual respect of master and slave eventually reached in
Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit must not lose its footing in the
dissymmetry of the vis-a-vis. This does not mean that I must remain
under the Other's power, under his threat to kill. The face to face is
not a power relation. This is why it escapes the psychoanalytic
categories of masochism and sadism. When Levinas talks of a
passivity more passive than passivity he is saying that the face to
face is outside any struggle of wills, beyond the will to power as this
is usually quasi-dynamically understood. Because it is outside any
system of terms in reciprocal relation it is outside any systematicity
analogous to that of Kant's Third Analogy, its ethical analogue the
kingdom of ends or the latter's fulfilment in the Hegelian or neo­
Hegelian Absolute Idea. It is not the Other's superior force that
makes him my Master in Levinas's sense, in particular not a superior
force which has its source in his threatening my death. He is my
Master, that is to say my Magister or teacher, because death
threatens him. It is that which requires me to give my life on his
behalf.
Lest this should seem too dramatic a scheme to apply to what most
of us are accustomed to think of as ethics, a scheme suited only, we
might say, to extreme circumstances such as that of the prison camp
in which it was thought out, this may be an appropriate moment at
which to cite Levinas's clarification of what he takes the sixth
commandment of the Old Testament to mean: "Thou shalt not
kill" . . . does not mean simply that you are not to go around firing a
gun all the time. It refers, rather, to the fact that, in the course of your
life, in different ways, you kill someone. For example, when we sit
down at the table in the morning and drink coffee, we kill an
Ethiopian who doesn't have any coffee' (PL 173). This, it will be said,
does nothing to reduce the harslmess of Levinas's conception of
responsibility. On the contrary, it appears to remove it further from
the conception most of us have. For does it not imply that killing is
something I cannot avoid? In so far as I cater to my own self-centred
40 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
needs I am consuming something that could save the life of someone
starving somewhere in the world, if not in Ethiopia then in
Madagascar or the Sudan. In consuming what I need to keep myself
alive I am taking another person's life. Perhaps we will want to say
here that I am not taking a person's life but rather doing nothing to
keep him alive. If we do make this distinction then we will disagree
with Levinas that I am killing someone somewhere when I drink or
eat what would keep him or her alive. Our disagreement will be still
sharper if the sixth commandment we are said to be breaking in
breaking our fast is translated, as Levinas sometimes does, 'thou shalt
not murder'. The question remains, when these distinctions have been
made, am I free of all responsibility for this death? Is there any one of
us who on reflection feels not the least twinge of guilt?
Any of us? It would be a hard saying indeed if this meant the
Ethiopian too. Yet perhaps the starving Ethiopian mother might feel
this way for her or someone else's starving child. But does not
Levinas's theory of proto-ethical_ justice require that she should feel
this way too for the comparatively comfortable and well-off? The
word 'comparatively' is a sign that it does not. For the problem that
seems to be posed for Levinas by Mill is one that involves
comparison. It is not therefore a problem that arises at the level of
proto-ethical justice. He would probably say that at this level there is
no problem at all; that at this level the ethical problem is transcended
by proto-ethical mystery. Our mistake has been to confuse these two
levels.
We have qverlooked the fact that we are asking what Levinas
would say aboUt a situation involving two other persons. So the
situation is prejudiced from the start. For there are more than two
people gathered together, even if one of them, the ph!losopher
Emmanuel Levinas, is more an observer of the scene than a
participant in the action to be performed on it. As philosopher
Levinas may well have a responsibility to state how he sees the
situation from his point of view outside it, but that statement can
have any validity only if it be based on his own experience of being
himself an agent or, rather, a patient, more passive than the passivity
opposed to agency, non-laterally and non-comparatively pursued by
the Other's regard� concerned, con-cerne; obsessed by him - or, rather,
obsessed by you, mon dissemblable, mon frere. You are the point of
origin of this concern, you who are exorbitant, neither an object nor
an alter ego with me in the enveloping embrace of my care. In the end
a constative response to a question must be traced back to a
Anarchic Responsibility 41
responsibility that is performed. Knowledge of the truth or falsity
of the answer to a question springs from an acknowledgement that
my subjectivity as a knowing and willing agent is heterologically
constituted by my being subject to the Other's, to your, ethical
regard commanding me not to kill. In the end each one of us answers
the question for himself, but the ]emeinigkeit that Heidegger postulates
beneath all our repeatable and communicable answers, whatever in
any of them is said, dit, is secondary to the second-person ]edeinigkeit
of your saying, dire, 'thou shalt not kill'. This saying which speaks the
silence of held breath, le silence d'un souffle retenu (DEHH 213),
announces the good infinity that interrupts the bad infinity of the
anonymous murmuring that goes on and on and on through the
sleepless night of the il y a. It also speaks the end of fundamental
ontology, marks the limits of alethic disclosure and the ungenerosity
of the advent of disdosive appropriation (Ereignis) and of the es gibt
Sein.
Faced with the starving Ethiopian and the well-fed upwardly
mobile entrepreneur, we and Levinas are faced with a problem of
distributive justice at a level where calculations have to be made. At
the level of the proto-ethical face to face calculation is ruled out. This
level is the level of 'monotheism', a term which Levinas uses because
it enables him to bring out that the proto-ethical is a stage at which I
am under the gaze of a singular Other. So he uses the term 'atheism'
to characterize the life which gives no thought to anything but its
own survival and enjoyment. The necessity of this atheism is the
necessity of the denial of pagan polytheism. It is significant that he
does not consider it necessary to use the term 'polytheism' for the
level at which the third party, le tiers, has come on to the scene. That
this is unnecessary and that it would be misleading is indicated by his
admission that already at the level of what we have been calling the
dyadic original position the third party is in the wings. Both the
primary proto-ethical situation of absolute justice and the derivative
situation of comparative justice are monotheistic because Autrui is
both the singularity of every human being and the singularity of every
human being. Both of these aspects must be remembered. Political
moralists like Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel and Mill remember the
universality, but even when universal eudaemonism underlines the
importance of individual liberty and when respect for the moral law is
formulated as treating persons as ends, the other remains a citizen
functioning with respect only to a totality. The other person is not
being respected for himself, since in these ways of regarding him he is
42 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
substitutable by another other. This is why Levinas is bound to resist
the suggestion made by Derrida in 'Violence and Metaphysics' that
when a phenomenologist like Husserl treats the other as an alter ego
he is treating him with the highest possible respect. The highest
possible respect is given, Levinas would maintain, only when we say,
not as Kant does that God is also a citizen in the intelligible kingdom
of ends, but that each other for whom I respond is vis-a-vis me
sovereignly divine master. Only when this is not forgotten do we
escape what Heidegger understands by the crisis of technology,
treating human beings as commodity and stock, as it is possible to do
within the rule of law, and not only in the blatantly totalitarian State
which Heidegger and Levinas saw from opposite sides. Totalitarian­
ism as Levinas understands it can be subtler than that. It would have
to be, if on his view the moral theories both of Kant and John Stuart
Mill are no less totalitarian than is the amoral and, at least in Levinas's
sense, atheistic thinking of Heidegger.6
Totalitarianism can be so subtle that it will infiltrate our thinking
about the monotheistic thinking of Levinas. We have just been
drawing a line between the sphere of the proto-ethical dyad and
the ethical multiplicity where problems of distributive justice arise.
We distinguished ]emeinigkeit from ]edeinigkeit as a way of marking the
frontier between the thinking of Heidegger and the thinking of
Levinas. Now the German je does not have the collectivist
connotation of the German prefix ge-. It has a distributivist
connotation. But we have missed the essence of Levinas's thinking
if we think that it is no more than a move from collectivism to
·
distributivism. We have missed it if we think that it is no more or less
than an -ism and an essence in a classical or post-classical Heidegger­
ian sense. If we think that, we shall have missed the difference
between what Heidegger means by the Sinn von Sein and what
Levinas means by the sens de l'itre. This is what we have been aiming
to bring out in our treatment in this chapter of what we have called
the predicament of predication. That treatment will have proved
inefficacious unless it has confirmed the claim made at the end of our
first chapter that Levinas's thinking of the other is other than a
defence of psychological or ethical altruism. It is clear that it is not
the former. It is less clear that it is not the latter. That it is not the
latter will never be clear if we ·insist on a clarity that will not tolerate
the ambiguity between the truth of disclosure or revelation and the
betrothal of witness, between the said of a philosophical doctrine and
the twofold saying of the other which is the anarchic principle of
Anarchic Responsibility 43
individuation of my divided self: 'frontier at once ineffacable and
more fine than the trace of an ideal line', without which there is no
demarcating of Levinas from the philosophy of Hegel.7
IV
Without mentioning the author of the Phenomenology of Spirit by
name, Levinas's paragraphs on scepticism mime paragraphs on the
sam� subject in that book in order to show, not entirely in the spirit
of tts author, that scepticism cannot be conjured away, and
furthermore, that this is because it opens up on to what on a
superficial reading of Levinas and Hegel could be mistaken for the
figure of Unhappy Consciousness to which the latter holds that
scepticis ":' le�ds. Not parallel texts then, the Hegelian paragraphs and
their Levmastan parody are connected chiasmically, in the sense that
their double crossing has the asymmetry symbolised by the fad that
one foot is further forward than the other in x, the Greek letter chi.8
'Unhappy consciousness', ungliickliches Bewusstsein, Hegel's translator
J. B. Baillie remarks, is an unhappy phrase: 'the term hardly seems
fortunate'. It hardly seems fortunate as applied to Levinas's philo­
sophy of the self. since this goes along with a philosophy of
phenomenology which, while taking Hegel's philosophy as its point
of dep�rture, does so in order to bring out that it is bound to depart
� �
from ' tsel , n �t east because sooner or later the philosopher
.
�roposmg 1t will fmd that his own self is not comprehensible within
It unless it acknowledges that being and self-consciousness, Selbstbe­
wusst-sein, are interrupted by responsibility for the other. That is to
sa �, Hegel will find that his own self is not comprehensible within his
ph1losophy. Now Hegel's response to this challenge might well be to
en:brace this implication as an implication of his own philosophy of
philosophy. Indeed, does not his own philosophy, or just philosophy,
as he would prefer to say, include an account of why his own singular
.
self IS not comprehensible within it, why it remains over from
absolute knowledge or (for these are not mutually exclusive
alternatives) why it remains in absolute knowledge as a subject -
or the Subject, as he would prefer to say?9 And does not the
�
philosop y of Levinas do the same? 'Are we not at this very
moment m the process of barring the exit that our whole essay
attempts, and of encircling our position from all sides?' (AEAE 215,
OBBE 169) How these questions are answered will depend upon what
44 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
one understands by singularity and self. And that is the crux of the
matter. Here is the place at which the paths of Hegel and Levinas
cross, the place at which the two philosophers exchange words in
passing about scepticism, philosophy and reason. Here are the words
of Hegel:
Sceptical self-consciousness . . . pronounces an absolute vanishing,
but the pronouncement is, and this consciousness is the vanishing
that is pronounced. It affirms the nullity of seeing, hearing, etc., yet
it is itself seeing, hearing, etc. It affirms the nullity of ethical
principles, and lets its condud be governed by these very
principles. Its deeds and its words always belie one another and
equally it has itself the doubly contradictory consciousness of
unchangeableness and sameness, and of utter contingency and non­
identity with itself. But it keeps the poles of this its self­
contradiction apart, and adopts the same attitude to it as it does
in its purely negative attitude in general. Point out likeness or
identity to it, and it will point out unlikeness or non-identity; and
when it is now confronted with what it has just asserted, it turns
10
round and points out likeness or identity.
Here are the words of Levinas:
Scepticism, which crosses the rationality or logic of knowledge, is a
refusal to synchronize the implicit affirmation containe_d in-saytng
and the negation ·which this affirmation states in the said. The
contradiction is visible to reflection, which refutes it, but scepticism
is insensitive to the refutation, as though the affirmation and
negation did not resound in the same. Scepticism then contests the
thesis that between the saying and the said the relationship that binds
in synchrony a condition with the conditioned is repeated. It is as
though scepticism were sensitive to the difference between my
exposure without reserve to the other, which is saying, and the
exposition or statement of the said in its equilibrium and justice.
(AEAE 213, OBBE 167-8)·
On Hegel's analysis scepticism is not insensitive to the contradic­
tion between its words and deeds, between what it says and what is
presupposed in its saying them or, as Levinas expresses it, between
the affirmation implicit in saying and the negation of this affirmation
which is the content of what is said. But it takes a childish pleasure in
Anarchic Responsibility 45
being contrary, arguing eristic<!]lY.. first for one side and then for the
other, indifferent to both. It perceives these sides as contradictories,
however, only because it directs its attention at the proposition
explicit ni the words affirmed and the proposition that is implicit in
the deed of saying. To the saying as saying it is less sensitive on
Hegel's analysis. It nominalises the dire, taking advantage of the fact
that in the one-for-the-other which it expresses there slumbers a doxic
thesis. The one-for-the-other, responsibility, gets evaded not because
it is hidden in deep shadow, but because it is made visible by being
brought into the light. The ambiguities of truth and falsehood, being
and not-being, and the ontological difference of being and beings
conceal the ambivalence or amphibology between these and the one­
for-the-other. Otherwise than being and beyond essence, also beyond
the Begriff, the for-the-other cannot be put in correlation with
anything at any of these three levels of Hegel's logic. 'In totalizing
being, discourse qua discourse thus belies the very claim to totalize',
Levinas remarks, still echoing Hegel. The indifference of Hegel's
sceptic is the visible sign of a non-indifference which the sceptic does
not avow but which explains why scepticism returns despite its
refutation. Its refutation is itself the spectre of scepticism in that as
soon as the refutation is uttered it is undermined. Speaking is already
a sceptical limitation of the rationality of the logic of truth, the
emphasized rationality of that rationality, the truth or veracity of its
truth, in so far as it is address. The addressee and therefore the
speaker are 'outside the said that the discourse says, outside all it
includes'. But what about this statement we have just made, is not
that included in the said? It is. Has not it now been deposited in the
archive? It has. Although discourse is a sceptical interruption of
philosophical rationality, the saying is always capped by a said. The
discourse of Western philosophy resumes every interruption within a
cultural history that runs without break from a beginning toward an
end. In the exchange between Levinas and Hegel, the latter has the
last meaningful word. What each of them has said will survive their
deaths not only like entries in a bank statement with the accountant's
'End of History' its very last words, but as an unconcluding �radition
inherited by future addressees whose responses will continue to
interrupt the continuity.
So it is arguable that although philosophy makes the last mean­
ingful statement it is as an owl of Minerva whose wings are
supported by the breath of what Levinas calls pre-original saying.
H is because Levinas wishes to argue precisely this that he insists that
46 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
he is arguing with the philosophers. This is why much of the force of
his argument would be lost if in order to attempt to escape from the
predicament of predication he had recourse to indirect, poetic,
aphoristic, dialogical styles such as those adopted by Kierkegaard,
Nietzsche, Pascal and Plato, or to the style of 'audacious' commentary
he himself adopts in his lectures falmudiques (QLT 14). The impact of
that argument is all the greater if Levinas can persuade his readers
that it is where it might be least expected, in what is said in
predicative prose, that pre-original saying presides.11 Of this pre­
original saying he says that it is from it that philosophy, history and
culture proceed. Yet on the same and next pages he writes:
there is need to unsay all that comes to alter the nakedness of
signs, to set aside all that is said in the pure saying proper to
proximity. One cannot, without equivocation, make signs in the
night. One has to say 'what it's all about', say some thing - before
saying only the saying, before making sign, before making oneself
a sign. (AEAE 182-3, OBBE 198)
This second statement seems to contradict the first. It seems as
though Levinas first maintains that pre-original saying, as one might
expect from its description, precedes anything thematically said, then
maintains the opposite or at least that there must be a said
contemporary with a saying. To suppose however that there is a
contradiction here is to forget that the saying harks back to the
immemorial past of -proximity to my neighbour and that, since this
past is in diachronic disrelation with what is said, the usual questions
of logical and chronological priority do not arise, nor therefore the
possibility of contradiction, for A and B cannot exclude each other
unless they are either achronic or are included synchronically in one
and the same logical space-time.
V the glory of the Infinite. It is by the voice of the witness that the
Scepticism is a reminder and symptom of the anarchic responsibility
from which not even the philosopher is exempt, however successful
he may be in evading acknowledgement of it. However absorbed he
may be in the reduction of the particular to the universal, the
philosopher is obliged to perform a second reduction of the universal
to the singularity of signifying to the other in the face to face. This
Anarchic Responsibility 47
reduction of reduction is an unsaying of the said in witness to the
trace of infinite tertiality, the god without divinity that survives the
death of god, more human than the values of humanism, doubling the
tertiality of third-personal justice and thematisation which is the
origin of origin: the excluded third of illeity in ilia tempore which is
the only exit 'from existence to the existent', from the excluded third
of ilyaity and its anonymous eternal return.
Proto-ethical responsibility is pre-original, otherwise-than-being.
Before being, before nothingness and before becoming, otherwise­
than-being 'is' before the beginning. Like the wonder that there is
something and not nothing, and the wonder at what is, the wonder,
efonnemenf, that Levinas refers to as the object of Otherwise than Being
or Beyond Essence (AEAE 228, OBBE 181} is beyond the proposition
and the interrogation in response to which the proposition supplies
the answer. But it is also beyond that ontological thaurnazein in which
Heidegger sees the beginning of philosophy. Levinas calls this proto­
ethical thauma glory, an appellation which provides a second reason
why to call wonder at this proto-ethical wonder of all wonders
unhappy consciousness is to give it a very bad name. Otherwise than
both consciousness and being, answerability beyond question and
answer is no more vulnerable than is Kant's conception of obligation
to Schiller's gibe that it must be synonymous with dejection,
'Carthusian', incompatible with cheer. Miming Heidegger this time
as well as Hegel, Plato and Father Parmenides, inviting us to listen to
the pre-echo of the listening belonging together (ge-horen, zu-lt6ren,
ge-horchen) of thinking and being, Levinas says that the saying of
prophecy which is obedience before the law, before hearing its
command, which signifies acknowledgement to the other in saying
'Here I am. Command me', and which belongs to the margin of
philosophy, though in Western philosophy it has seldom been
acknowledged, 'belongs to the very glory of which it bears
witness' (AEAE 191, OBBE 150). 'The Infinite does not appear to
him that bears witness to it. On the contrary, the witness belongs to
glory of the Infinite is glorified' (AEAE 186, OBBE 146}. This voice of
witness, Levinas also says, says more than the vocative and
invocative '0' and 'Hullo'. It expresses with open-mouthed astonish­
ment the pro-vocative 'Our' and 'Oui', 'Oyez' and 'Yes' which affirm
the speaker's ex-position and pro-position of himself as sworn witness
giving his word by a Dire anterior to the 'Yes' correlated with the
'No' of constative speech ads, and anterior to the polarity of True
48 Tile Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
and False which delimit the logic of the proposition that is said. Is this
provocative voice of witness perhaps the Indo-European middle voice
heard in Sanskrit and Greek in which the desire for wisdom of
Western philosophy lets itself be translated into the wisdom of
Desire? Before considering the mediality of this voice, we shall
consider the case for an alternative to Levinas's first response to
the question 'Who is my neighbour?' We shall also find ourselves in
disagreement with Levinas's first appraisal of the relation of poetry
and the other arts to responsibility for the neighbour, moving,
through an examination of Heidegger's appraisal of the relation of
poetry to thinking, toward Levinas' s second appraisal of the relation
of poetry to responsibility for the neighbour, which, we shall argue,
can with a modicum of charity be seen to provide support not
otherwise provided by Levinas himself for his second response to the
question 'Who is my neighbour?' His second response to this
question, we shall argue, suggests that this question begs a
question, and that the more responsible question is 'Who or what
is my neighbour?' where the 'what' asks not after any property of a
human being, but extends the question to include non-human beings
in its range. We read this suggestion in or into the following words
which we cite from Derrida and which we adopt both as an iteration
of the intrigue with which this chapter has been occupied and as an
announcement of the study we undertake in later chapters of
Heidegger's later thinking on world neighbourhood and the poietic
word.
Suppose a first yes, the archi-original yes that engages, promises,
acquiesces before all. On the one hand, it is originarily, in its very
structure, a reply. It is from the beginning second, coming after a
request, a question, or a yes. On the other hand, a s engagement or
promise, it must at least and in advance bind itself to a confirmation
in a neighbouring yes. Yes to the neighbour(ing), otherwise said to
the other yes that is already there and yet remains to come. Oui au
prochain, autrement dit a /'autre oui qui est deja la mais reste pourtant a
· 12
vemr.
Let us not be in too great a hurry to decide whether the prochain is a
who or a what.
3
Who is My Neighbour?
Et quis. est meus proximus?
Luke, 10: 29
·
Who is my neighbour? The discussion of this question throughout the
�
ages as ranged from asking whether my neighbour is the Jew and
the fnend, through whether my neighbour is any and every other
hum� being including the stranger and my enemy, to whether he or
she IS G �d. Is it conceivable that my neighbour might be a non­
human ammal? Would this be conceivable to Levinas? This question is
�
rele�an to the question treated in Chapter I. If it is claimed that
Le.�ma�• .u:' metaphysics can meet a shortcoming in the ethics of
uhhtanarusm at least as this is understood by John Stuart Mill it must
not do so at the cost of ignoring the fact that utilitarianism requires
. . _
that m determmmg the morality of an action, rule or institution
�
considerati?n mus b� given to the welfare of any sentient being. Of
what class•cal uhl1tanans have said on this matter nothing is more
eloquent than the words in which Jeremy Bentham declares his hope
that:
The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may
. those rights which never could have been withholden from
acqutre
�
t em but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already
�
d1scovere that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a
human bemg should be abandoned without redress to the caprice
of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the
number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the
os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a
sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace
the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the
faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond
comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal,
49
50 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old. But
suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is
1 that sitteth behind the mill; and all the first-born of beasts'. But one of
not, Can they reason? nor Can they falk? but, Can they suffer?
Is Levinas of the opinion that the question is, Can they talk? It is
not easy to detennine his opinion because almost always when he
touches upon the subject of animality he is thinking of the animality
of man. There are however a few places where he writes explicitly
about a non-human animal. In particular I am thinking of Bobby. Not
Greyfriars Bobby of Edinburgh, the Franciscan terrier that is said to
have mourned on his master's grave for fourteen years until he
himself died, but the dog referred to in an essay entitled 'Nom d'un
chien ou droit nature!' published in 1975 n i a collection entitled 'Celui
qui ne peut se servir des mots' and reprinted in Difficile Liberte. No
less eloquent than those words of Bentham's are those of the opening
paragraph of this essay where Levinas mentions that according to
Genesis Adam was a vegetarian and where he all but proposes an
analogy between the unspeakable human holocaust and the unspoken
animal one. The reader of that paragraph may well feel his leather
shoes beginning to pinch.2
I am thinking of Bobby in order to understand whom or what
Levinas means by Aulmi. Is Aufrui a strictly personal pronoun? Can it
stand for God? Can it stand for a dog? The question is not as rum as
it may· seem. Not as rum as the idea that occurred to George Borrow
when, learning that the Romany word for God is DuveL he muses in
Lavengro, Would it not be a rum thing if divine and devilish were
originally one a·nd the same word?' We are not about to find Levinas
arguing that the words 'God' and 'dog' have a common root.
Although Bobby has his origins on the Egyptian side of the Red
Sea, he is not a metaphorical Anubis. Throughout the entire essay
about him Levinas tries to keep the metaphorical at bay, for the sake
of the literal truth about the dog of the verse in Exodus 22 which his
essay takes as its text: 'neither shall ye eat any flesh that is torn of
beasts in the field; ye shall cast it to the dogs'. It is an uphill task,
both for him and for the Talmudic interpreters of this text who
explain what Levinas calls 'the paradox' of a purely natural creature
having a right. here the right of the dog to feed on this particular sort
of meat. by referring to Exodus 11: 7, which says that no dog shall
move its tongue at the midnight when the first-born in the land of
Egypt are threatened with slaughter and the Jews are about to be led
into captivity. Threatened, be it noted, are the first-born not only of
Who is My Neighbour? 51
man, but of the chain of being 'from the first-born of the Pharoah that
sitteth upon his throne, even unto the first-born of the maidservant
these beasts, the silent dog sans ethic and sans logos, by holding its
tongue bears witness to the dignity of man. Man's best friend
signifies a transcendence in its animaJity, dans /'animal! For which
service he has the everlasting right mentioned in Exodus 22.
It makes a nice story, Levinas seems to say, but have not the
Talmudic exegetes lapsed into merely rhetorical figures of speech? He
decides that they have, no less than Aesop and La Fontaine, but he
goes on to tell of another dog, the dog that strayed into the German
camp for Jewish prisoners where Levinas himself and his companions
had become accustomed to being treated as less than human,
sometimes subjected to looks that were enough, as he chillingly
expresses it, to strip them of their human skin. Yet Bobby, during the
few weeks the guards allowed him to remain, was there every
morning to welcome them with wagging tail as they lined up before
l�aving f�r work and, unconstrained by the prohibition placed upon
h1s Egyphan ancestors, was there waiting when they ·returned at night
to welcome them one and all with an excited bark. The last Kantian in
Nazi Germany, Levinas comments, and one wonders if he intends us
to take that comment as nothing more or less than the literal truth.
How can we? How, any more than Aesop, La Fontaine and the
Talmudic exegetes, can Levinas be speaking otherwise than figurat­
ively? For in the very same breath he adds that Bobby lacks the brains
to universalize his maxim. He is too stupid, frop bile. Bobby is
without logos and that is why he is without ethics. Therefore he is
without Kantian ethics; and so he is without Levinasian ethics, since
the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas is analogous to the ethics of
Immanuel Kant in that each is an ethics with a God within the
� im� ts of reason alone, but without a dog or any other beast, except
.
Indirectly, tf we are to judge by reason alone.
To judge by reason alone, man has no duties except to men
(himself or others), for his duty to any subject at all is the moral
constraint by his will. Accordingly, a subject who constrains
(obligates) must, first. be a person; and he must, secondly, be
given as an object of experience, because he is to influence the
purpose of a man's will; and such an influence can occur only in the
relationship of two existing beings (for a mere creation of thought
cannot become the cause of any purposive achievement). Since in
 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
Who is My Neighbour? 53
52

with no being which might be given being to whom we are obligated; for the actuality of such a
all our experience we are acquainted ive) ept one, �an therefore bei.ng v:ould first have to be made known by experience'. He also
capable of obligation (active or passr thanexcman . And 1f he supposes wntes, m the paragraph already cited, that we can have no duties
can have no duty to
any being othe except d�ties to human beings because 'we are acquainted with
that he has such another duty, ctio then this happens through an (ken�en w1r) no bein� which might be capable of obligation (active or
amphiboly of the concepts of refley ton; him and so his s�pposed dut�
self. He IS led �o th�s pass1ve) except man . We can be under an obligation only to a being
to other beings is merely his dut fuses his duty regardmg (m with whom we can be, as we say, face to face. In the very human
misunderstanding because he con foward (gegen) these beings.3 world of Immanuel Kant the other man is the only being with whom I
a duty
Ansehung) other beings with co�e face to face. So too in the very human world of Emmanuel
not even say 'Good .day', no Levmas. The only face we behold is the human face and that is the
To judge by reason alone, Bobby can o�ly face in which there is a trace of any being to which we can be
matter how gaily he may wag hisduti tail and no matter how exCitedly he dinctly beholden. �thicaUy, that is all that matters . In this, despite
may bark. If I think that I have toesortotow animals it is. be.cause I �m
ard from 1�d1rect duhes therr: fundamental d1sagreement over what it is for two human beings
failing to distinguish direct duties long-perform ed serv1ce of an old to �e face to face, there is a considerable area of agreement between
regarding. 'Even gratitude for themembers of the household) belongs Levmas and .Kant. Just as Kant maintains that I can have obligations
horse or dog (just as if they werehis duty rega d i ng these a�mals; �ut
r
only �o a bemg that has, or (to cover the infantile and the senile) is of
indirectly to man's duty, namely always only h1s. duty to �tm�elf,. If the kmd that can �a :'� .obligations, so Levinas seems to imply that I
directly considered, such a duty is relations with animals he IS hke�y to can have respons1b1hbes only toward beings capable of having
a man is not compassionate in his s with other human bemgs. responsibilities.
become insensitive in his relation gations only to a bein� that We. have �een why Kant thinks that God can have no obligations.
According to Kant a man can havehisobliacco of human e�penence, H� th�nks th1s b�cause he thinks that the notion of obligation carries
has obligations, which means, on only tount other human b�mgs. �he With 1t the �ot10n of constraint, of a tie. So although we may
that human beings have obligations ee� doin� somethmg wh1ch coher.en�ly thmk of God acting according to the moral law, that law is
argument turns on the differenceg betw somethmg wh1ch falls un�er t:"o descnphve, not prescriptive, of .his action, and it is not a law for
falls under a single law and doin and of human rahonahty, which he can feel respect or by which he can feel obliged. He can
laws, the law of human animality to thetheexplaw erience of constraint �nd command, but he cannot be commanded. And this is what Levinas
and it is this du!llity that gives rise on of bein g bound. s.o a. bemg says, speaking of Au�rui. '·do not judge the Other. The Other judges
tension which is implied in the noti have no sens e of obligation, of me. I do not categonze h1m. He categorizes me. He makes me stand
which is a purely animal nature willis purely rational. Hence, Kant out (m'accuse), identifies and accuses me. I do not simply appear, but
oughtness. Nor will a being that obligations to God. We have, am summoned to appear before him (DDVI 117). And in this court of
maintains we can have no moral ion, that is to say, duties 'of appeal it is �e. ��o does the calling. calling me to testify: to testify to
accordin� to Kant, duties of religdivine commands'. The duty of my responsibiiihes even for his responsibilities. So that where Kant
recognizing all duties as (insfar) an Idea of Reason that, from a a�lows that I have responsibilities to myself, namely to make myself
religion, however, is correlated with to make sense of the apparent YJr�ous, my responsibility toward myself according to Levinas is
theoretical point of view, helps us a practical point of view, Kant med1ated by . my responsibility for the Other's responsibility toward
purposefulness of nature; and, from moral fecundity in availing an me. Furt�er, m contrast to Kant's view that I have a duty to promote
holds, this Idea is of the grea test the happmess ,but not. the virtue of others, Levinas holds that I go bail
incentive to virt uou s con duc t. Thu s what we take to be a duty to for the Other s obed1ence to the Law. 'His business is my business'
man has to himself,
God is a duty to man himself, namely a duty each (ADV 106). But, Levinas goes on to ask. 1s not my business his? Is he
the duty to make himself virtuous. ot have a duty to a being he does not res.p��sible for �e? Ca � I therefore be responsible for his
Does Kant think that a man cann not . . . have before us (vor uns) a respons1bt!Jty for me? To th1s last question Levinas answers Yes.
not know exists? He writes: 'we do
54 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
For every responsibility that the Other has toward me and others I
have a pre-ordained meta-responsibility.
Starting from below, as it were, from my responsibility toward the
other human being, an infinite progress is generated, an infinite
progress that is not to be confused with the agent's infinite progress
towards moral perfection as postulated in the ethical theory of Kant,
even though both Kant and Levinas call what gives direction to this
progress an Ideal. In the Kantian Ideal happiness is commensurate
with virtue. It is an Ideal towards which one strives by exerting a
good will, and the realization of the Ideal would be a fulfilment. The
Levinasian Ideal, as viewed from my subjectivity, recedes unmensur­
ably further and further away the more I take up my responsibilities.
The incessant realizing of it would be a derealizing of my self, an
emptying of myself, but a kenosis that could never be complete. And
this taking up of my responsibilities is not an exercise of power, not
even of the power of a good will. It is a being taken up by the idea of
Infinity and Goodness, the idea which is presupposed by the infinite
progression-regression and which prevents it becoming the bad
infinite that it would otherwise be.
This explains the structure of Levinas's important essay 'God and
Philosophy'. The first part of this starts from above with the idea of
God, Err Sof, the topic of Descartes's Third Meditation. Then, on
pages 1 1 3-15 of De Dieu qui vient a /'idee, it starts again, this time
from below, with the topic of the First and Second Meditations,
subjectivity and therefore in Levinas's text, since subjectivity is ethical
subjection, with Autrui, the difficult pronoun that seems to do service
for God in the; meditations of Levinas rather as the name of God
seems to do service for the scarcely mentioned 'other minds' in the
Meditations of Descartes.
Is God Autrui 7 Not if by God is meant the God of positive or
negative theology. The Other is not some Plotinian avatar of God.
The Other is not the incarnation of God, but precisely by his face, in
which he is disincarnate, is the manifestation of the height in which he
is revealed' (TI 51; 79), revealed in discourse. 'It is our relations with
men . . . that give to theological concepts the sole signification of
which they admit.' 'Everything that cannot be reduced to an
interhuman relation represents not the superior form but the forever
primitive form of religion.' As indeed Hegel might have said, except
that the infinity of the interhuman relation in his conception is an
infinity that totalizes a symmetrical intersubjectivity. Hegel's God is
beyond any gulf between subject and object, but it is, Levinas would
Who is My Neighbour? 55
contend, not beyond the participation of what according to Hegel too
are primitive forms of religion, the mythological religions of faceless
gods. The superior form of religion is one in which God is not
numinous, and in which he is 'in-himself', kath auto, only on the
assumption of ontological atheism. Atheistic de-ontology, the atheism
which results from the death of the pagan gods before which we are
in danger of confusing God with the nocturnal shuffling of the if !I a
(TI 115-16; 142. DDVI 115). The Other, in his signification prior to
my initiative, resembles God' (TI 269; 293). 'The Other is the very
locus of metaphysical truth, and is indispensable for my relation with
God' (TI 51; 78). But even when he is no longer conceived as the
God of positive or negative theology, God is not the Other, Autrui.
Far from it. He is closer to this farness. Not the impersonal i/ of the il
y a, not the third person of justice nascent in the dyadic face to face,
God is the third personal Il over and up there, illic, and, as Descartes
says, echoing the Symposium, majestic. God is the eminence of illeity
of which the trace is inscribed in the face of the second person You as
well as in the third person nascent there. Still speaking in Cartesian
terms, Levinas says that the idea of God is the idea of Infinity
thought by the first-personal but never nominative me, the 'in' of this
idea of infinity connoting both the being of this idea in the finite me
and the negation implied i n the idea of my own finitude revealed to
me a posteriori by my doubt and desire but a priori by the
immeasurable degree to which the 'objective reality' of my idea of
infinity falls short of the 'formal reality' of its metaphysical and ethical
origin. Infinity, the Desirable, God is the transcendence and holiness
or distance that makes my nearness to my neighbour more than a
relation of love, as for Kant, mutatis mutandis, love is that which
unites while respect is that which sets a distance between us. 'God is
not simply "the first other", or "the other par excellence" or "the
absolutely other'", but other than the other, otherwise other, other
with an alterity prior to the alterity of the other' (DDVI 113-15).
Levinas's phenomenological analysis of love is a reflection on
5
Plato's Symposium and Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption. Love is
ambiguous. On the one hand it points to the exteriority of the
beloved and to an exteriority beyond that exteriority, beyond the
face. On the other hand it enjoys the interiority of sensation and
return to oneself (TI 244; 266), to the concupiscence that Pascal
describes with the help of the proclan1ation of the First Epistle of
Saint John, 2: 16: 'Everything in the world is lust of the Aesh, or
concupiscence of the eyes, or vaingloriousness of life', libido sentiendi,
 Who is My Neighbour? 57
56 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience

sentient creatures he is inclined to reply that our thinking about them .

libido sciendi, ' libido dominandi, the very same cupere that throws us
may have to be only analogical or that the answer turns on whether
back from the Cartesian idea of God to the cogifo that would like to
we can discern in the eyes of the animal a recognition, however
have everything under its command. We reported in Chapter 1
obscure, of its own mortality, on whether, in Levinas's sense, the
Levinas's statement that there is a touch of the erotic in all love,
animal has a face.8 If this question is crucial, we may have to be
followed by his reference to Amour sans Eras. lt is as though the
satisfied with falling back on the need to appeal to agents to speak on
pagan god is left behind as Levinas's thoughts turn from Plato to
the animal's behalf, as we do in the case of infants. However, the
Rosenzweig. Rosenzweig writes of the love of a non-pagan God, of
agent who speaks for the child says what he says on the child's behalf
God's love for man and of man's love for God. In a footnote Levinas
on the basis of the certainty that the child does not enjoy being
makes the comment that 'Franz Rosenzweig interprets the response
battered or starved. Is not the fact that this is also how it is with non­
made by Man to the love with which God loves him, as the
human animals enough to prove that I have responsibility for them,
movement towards the neighbour'. He probably has in mind the
and that responsibility does not depend upon their having responsi­
sentences:
bilities, for example responsibilities to their offspring or to humans
they guard or guide? Suppose we agree that talk of the animal's
Since love cannot be commanded except by the lover himself,
responsibilities is anthropomorphism or rhetoric, still, as Bentham and
therefore the love for man, in being commanded by God, is
other utilitarians put it, the question is not Can they reason? or Can
directly derived from the love for God. The love for God is to
they talk? but Can they suffer?
express itself in love for one's neighbour. It is for this reason that
The first and perhaps the second of these questions has been seen
love of neighbour can and must be commanded.6
to be all-important for Kant. Yet the last is not for him morally
irrelevant, as some of his readers have inferred. It is argued that
We saw how in the spirit of these sentences the love without eros to
Kant's concession that we have indirect duties to animals can be
which Levinas refers - and which Rosenzweig champions (on p. 163),
reduced to absurdity on the grounds that rationality is the only
though in treating of God's love for man - gets spoken of henceforth
morally relevant characteristic that he can admit by which to
as responsibility in order to mark its difference from ego-based desire
distinguish animals from other non-human beings and that there­
and to mark that it is a response.
fore, if we are to refrain from treating animals only as means because
that is likely to lead us to treat fellow human beings as means only,
we should for the same reason refrain from treating only as means
11
inanimate objects like hammers. (We shall return to this alleged
absurdity.) This argument derives its plausibility from the failure to
Why however must responsibility be limited to responding to a being
distinguish a necessary condition of moral agency, where the moral is
that has the gift of speech? Is there no room for responsibility to
opposed to the non-moral, from a condition of the circumstances in
dumb animals?
which an action is performed that might determine whether the action
Responsibilities may be responsibilities towards, but not all such
responsibilities are responses fa in the strict sense of answers or other is moral as opposed to immoral. The former condition is one that
responses to a question or command. They may be responsibilities for, holds for any rational beings that ·may exist. The latter condition
holds only for the actions of those we know to exist, human beings.
and it is of responsibilities pour or de that Levinas mostly writes,
explicitly distinguishing them only once or twice from responsibilities That Kant agrees that the animality of rational animals can be
a (NP 108)? We could of course take up the question whether animals determinative of our duties toward them is implied by his claim
that we have a direct duty to contribute to the well-being of other
talk and, · if so, which if any can talk to us. There are grounds for
humans and to support them in distress, and an indirect duty to
believing that Levinas would consider it crucial for his account
assure one's own happiness as far as one can consistently with one's
whether Bobby merely barks or whether in doing so he can say
Bonjour. When asked about our responsibilities toward non-human other obligations.9 The practical contradictoriness that makes some of
58 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
my action s wrong depends on the fact that it is natural for men to
seek their own happines s. The moral law is a test for practi caL and
that means tele ological, consistency, and it applies to maxims
prescriptive of how men can achieve that natural end. Since that
natural end includes man s we ll being as an animal, the maxim Treat
' -
non-human animals as if they have no capacity for suffering' is not
one that can be consistently conceived as a law of nature or willed to
10
become one. Such conception is inconsistent with what one knows
about animals from one's own experience of being one. This removes
one obstacle preventing Kant admitting that we have dire ct duties to
brute s.
There remains the obstacle presented by Kant's doctrine that as far
as we can tell on the basis of reason alone, in other words setting
aside matters based on faith and on feelings other than the feeling of
moral respect, man has no du ti es except to men because his duty to
any s ubject is moral constraint by that subject's will. We should be
well on the way to clearing Kant's path to admit ting direct duties to
animals if only this reference to the subject's will could be interpreted
as what he desires. If that were allowed, and if similar translations of
the accommodating word Wille were permjtted elsewhere in Kant's
text, we should also be well on the way to converting Kant s th eory
' to do with the unity of being. But this second aspect is derivative
of ethics into the tacit utilitarianism that Mill holds it to be. Kant
himself i s les s accommoda ting than the word, taking pains to
distinguish two of its primary senses. He is adamant that we can
have direct duties only to beings that have Wille understood as pure
practical reason.
In the metaphysical ethics of Levinas I can have direct responsi­
bilities only toward beings that can sp eak and this means beings that
have a rationality that is p res upposed by the univ e rsalizing reason
fundamental in the metaphysics of ethics of Kant. However, the
proto-rationality of primary justice between two unequals anticipates
the rationality of secondary justice among many, but without this
entailing that I cease being more responsible than anyone else.
Both Kant and Levinas are so sensitive to the dangers of the
Schwiirmerei threate ned by what Kant calls pathologi cal love that they
require an obligating being to be able to make a claim in so many
words. No claim goes without saying, even if the saying is the silent
saying of the discourse of the face - a silence not to be confused with
the nocturnal silence in which the insomniac hears the menacing rustle
of the anonymous il y a (Tl 236; 258-9). The Other has to look at
me. Indeed, as we have already observed, what is expressed in his
Who is My Neighbour? 59
face may be expressed by his hand or the nape of the neck (TI 240;
262). And for Kant at least the claim does not have to be a claim to a
perfect right. I can have duti es to others without any of those others
having a right to require that that duty be exercised toward him or
her by me. Levinas however seems to be more demanding. The very
droilure of the face to face, its uprightness or rectitude (Gerechtigkeit,
justice), is the expression of the other's right over me, droit (Tl 10;
40). And in one place at least Levinas says 'I support the universe', ]e
soutiens l'univers (AEAE 152, OBBE 197). This might seem to augur
well for Bobby He is presumably part of the universe. So if
.
supporting means being responsible for, I am responsible for, that
is to say, ob�essed by him. But Levinas distinguishes my support of
the universe into two aspects. My support of the universe performs
the role which Kant assigns to the
transcendental unity appe cep­
of r
tion, the role of giving the universe it s unity. Prior to transcendental
unifying, Levinas says, is the unity of human society the one�ess of
which is brought about by my responsibilit y. Human society. So there
is no place for direct responsibility for Bobby here.
What about the other aspect in which the unity of the universe is
due to me? The other aspect of my unifying support is that which has
from the first and would t herefore appear to be no more capable than
it of allowing for responsibility for the non-human animal. The one
space of th e universe is the space of secondary justice, justice in the
proximity of the third party. It is the ubiquity not of the geometrical
space of the things at which I look, but of the pre-geometrical space
from which I am looked at by the face, the face which me regarde in
both senses of the word, the face that looks at me and concerns me,
the face that m'accuse in both senses of that word: the face whose look
makes me stand out and accuses me (AEAE 147, OBBE 116). The face
that calls me into question is not the face of the animal. It is thanks to
human faces, Levinas writes, that Being will have a meaning as a
'
universe, and th e unity of the univ erse will be in me as subject to
being. That means that the space of the universe will manifest itself as
the dwelling of the others.' The door of that dwelling would seem to
be slammed in Bobby's face, assuming it be allowed that he has one.
This impression is confirmed by Levinas' s endorsement of much of
what he finds said in Rabbi Halm of Volozhin's Nefesh Hahafm, The
Soul of Life. In the doctrine expounded in this book Levinas recognizes
a ba si s for his own teaching that man is responsibl e for the universe .
The soul of the universe, according to Rabbi Halm, is man and,
60 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience Who is My Neighbour? 61

d not Hellenistic�lly There is no sign that Levinas would place the lower animal 'above
significantly for our present question, man define
stood Biblic ally as the bemg oneself' among the collectivities, persons and spiritual structures. It is
as a rational animal, but man under
preci sely, Levin as hastens to as though the universe to which Levinas applies Rabbi Halm's
created in the image of God and, more
princi ple of justice , not God as cosmology is the universe of discourse between the Creator and
add, of God as Elohim, God as the
principle of mercy unpronouncably named
in the T etragr a �
m aton. the human creature in the traditional great chain of being. The
. Nefesh Hahar m descn bes a creatureliness of any creature more humble than man is a purely (or
Elohim is also the soul of the world
in whjch i s postu lated a should we say 'impurely'?) cosmological creatureliness, recalcitrant to
cosmology, cabbalistic and Hellenistic,
.
hierarchy of worlds with God at the top But th is cosmo logy h �s production into ethics, whereas creation is the intake of ethical breath
of justic e at the head of this which Levinas calls psychisme: the reveille of the inner life by a Wachef
to be read ethically. The principle
the root of the soul auf that rouses it from the twilight of its dogmatic slumber,
hierarchy of worlds is the source on which feeds . .
nouris hes the mterm ediate worlds. apparently re-creation but in truth older than cosmological creation
of man. Thanks to this, man in turn
is at �he . sane ti.me
Man is dependent upon Elohim, yet Elohim as ontologically understood - the very pneuma of the psyche.
dependent upon man as mediator (ADV 190). In � . �
Ra bi Ha1m s ethical
c1ally, and on the
cosmology man is homo Tsraelis understood non-ra
ands of the Torah depend the life III
Israelite's obedience to the comm
world s, this 'powe r' of life and death
and death of all the intermediate
or, as Levina woul� say his �assivity In Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence Levinas writes: The soul is
being man's responsibility � . : .
ivity to wh1ch achvit y IS trad1bonally the other in me. The psyche (psychisme), the one-for-the-other, can be
more passive than the recept
opposed. . possession and psychosis; the soul is already the seed of folly' (AEAE
. .
th lower ammal? 86, OBBE 191). Where the conatus of the synoptic ego is a desire to
Does this responsibility include respons1bihty for �
.

Yes, If we ar � t� go
The answer to this question would appear to be .
possess, ethical and metaphysical Desire is psychotic possession,
by the following statement cited by Levina s from Nefesh Haharm: Just possession not by being or language, however, but possession by
ds on the soul that is God: sobered (degrise) enthusiasm in which there is a response to the
as the way in which the body moves depen
r and living soul of the word of the Other. Levinas maintains that the first word addressed to
interior to man, man in his entirety is the powe
his charg e, above him and below' (ADV 194). me by the Other is Thou shalt not murder/kill' where the oblique
innumerable worlds in .
as's interpretation On
And below. These two words get lost in Levin stroke we insert signals the question, How are we to translate the
he writes 'It i.s at the Hebrew word rasah? The answer to this question will have
the very same: page on which he cites them .
fate of the u�Iverse IS repercussions for the question whether I am obsessed by Bobby,
lowest (au plus bas), in man, that the entire .
the Talmud1c treahs e whether I have direct responsibility for him. We have failed to
decided', and on the next page he cites from
in the world s
Aboth 'Know what confusion your action brings about discover any evidence that Levinas allows that Bobby and I can be
above you.' That is to say: face to face such that I could read in his own eyes Thou shalt not
kill.' We must therefore retreat to the question whether in the face to
It is not by substantiality - by an in-itself or for-its
el - that ma.n � face the other man addresses me not only on behalf of himself and
e-other : for what IS
and his interiority are defined, but by the 'for-th other men, but also on behalf of the non-human animal; and to the
above oneself for the worlds - but also,
interpreting 'world' question whether, ifwhat the human face tells me is Thou shalt not
broadly, for c�llectivities, persons, spiritual
structures. In spite of murder', the legal and quasi-legal connotations of the word 'murder'
in injuring them (or
his creaturely humility, man is engaged prevent our saying that the commandment includes within its scope
preserving them). the non-human animal.
Commenting on Exodus 20: 13, ]. P. Hyatt states that rasah refers to
Is this broad definition of 'world' not still too narrow to allow for the murder of a personal enemy and that it is used much less frequenHy
direct responsibility for the lower animal? Where does he or she fit in? than the two words meaning to kilL harag and hemif. He adds:
62 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
It originally had nothing to do with capital punishment (admin­
istered by the avenger of blood or by the community), killing
in war which was certainly sanctioned by the OT, or the killing of
animals. Careful studies have shown that it is not confined,
however, to intentional murder, but is occasionally used of
unintentional homicide.11
When we turn to Levinas's statements of the commandment we find
that he sometimes formulates it as Thou shalt not kill', but other
times replaces tuer by meurtrir with no contextual indication that he
would not be willing to use the latter in all his mentions of the
commandment. Of course this must not be taken to imply that he is
not fully aware of the strict injunctions of the Torah against causing
animals unnecessary pain. He also knows very well that the later
Priestly sections of Genesis which speak of man's dominion over
animals have alongside them sections from the earlier Jahwist sections
which speak of animals as man's companions and affirm that God's
covenant is made between him and man and every living creature.12
But what sort of relevance is to be ascribed to this sensitivity and
knowledge on Levinas's part or indeed to any of the citations he
makes in the course of his more philosophical writings of texts from
the Jewish Bible or the Talmud7 The face to face faces us with a
dilemma. If the first word addressed to me derives its authority from,
say, Sinai, does thaf not prevent Levinas making his claim that
metaphysical ethics makes no appeal to the content of any positive
religion? Even if Levinas's ethics cannot be an ethics of the other
animal, even if Bobby cannot be my neighbour according to that
ethics, we must take Levinas seriously when he insists that the ethics
of which he speaks is a humanism of the other man. This means that
we cannot avoid asking how in the face to face the other man can say
anything at all and how, without the constraints imposed by the
importation of commandments from positive religions, he can be
prevented from saying anything whatsoever.
The best solution of this dilemma that Levinas's writings seem to
offer is to understand the encounter that Moses had on Sinai, where
he was told by God 'my face shall not be seen', as a face to face
encounter with the other man, and, second, to understand 'Thou shalt
not kill' not as a proposition said or commandment affirmed as a
principle of ethics, not as something dil, but as the nearest one can
come to an enunciation of the force of any saying, the dire that is left
when what is said is unsaid, didif. This "remainder is not as big a
Who s
i My Neighbour? 63
challenge to our understanding as the smile left behind after the
subtraction of the face of the Cheshire cat. For to every unsaying
there immediately accrues another said calling to be unsaid again to
infinity. Since Levinas replaces or translates the commandment 'Thou
shalt not kill' sometimes by such words as Thou shalt give the other
the bread from thy mouth' and Thou shalt not let the stranger die
alone', it would seem not improper to conclude that these various
forms of words are different ways of expressing the vulnerability of
the human being, symbolized by the fact that these words are read in
the eyes of the other, the most vulnerable part of the face. This
symbolism does not prevent his granting that any part of the body
can be the face in his ethical or proto-ethical sense. One problem
raised by the suggestion we have just made is that the vulnerability
in question is the vulnerability of the other, whereas saying, Dire, is
not restricted to that side. This problem is a difficulty intrinsic to the
saying of the face to face, not necessarily an objection to what
Levinas says about this. What he says is intrinsically difficult to
comprehend, and perhaps it is impossible to do so if comprehension is
subsumption under concepts. But this particular difficulty can be at
least articulated if we recall that there is an asymmetrical chiasmic
exchange of places in the face to face which Levinas tries to describe
in sentences we quoted above from which it appears that despite the
radical alterity of the other this alterity is somehow already
immemorially on my side because it is the anarchic condition of
my identity. I am neither at one time nor at one place. Because I am
diachronic and diaconal 1 am situated in the place of the other,
substituted ethically in his stead to the point at which my so-called
subjectivity is the other in my place, au lieu de moi, as Blanchot says,
and therefore no more subjective than ob-jective, like the Cartesian
idea of God, where the 'of' is both a subjective and an objective
genitive.13 So my dire is a speaking for him, prophecy. My word is a
priori and, from before the beginning, psychotically possessed by him.
Its authority is independent of my authorship.
Our main problem in this chapter has been and still is to
understand why Levinas gives so much ethical weight to the ability
to speak; why calling or claiming is required in so literal a sense,
though that sense is already extended some way by him from what
one ordinarily thinks of as speech. If calling or claiming are to be
understood in such a way that they do imply speech, why cannot the
speech be that of persons who speak on behalf of those that cannot
speak for themselves? Does not their being unable to speak for
64 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
themselves magnify my responsibility? Does their not being able to
speak make my responsibility for them any the less direct than my
responsibility for the other human being? This may not be a
responsibility to or toward if by that is meant a response to a being
that can put his or her request into words - though in the case of at
least some non-human animals it is only on an extremely exacting
definition of language that it is plausible to hold that such a response
is ruled out. But is it not a responsibility for, and a direct one in the
sense of underivative?
Now it is obligations that Kant distinguishes into direct ones to or
toward (gegen) and indirect ones regarding (in Ansehung). And if we
distinguish also obligations from responsibilities the prospect Levinas
offers Bobby begins to look less bleak. In an interview published in
1988, in reply to the question whether we have obligations to
animals, he answers, as we have never doubted for one moment that
he would, Yes we do.
It is dear that, without considering animals as human beings, the
ethical extends to all living beings. We d o not want to make an
animal suffer needlessly and so on. But the prototype of this is
human ethics. Vegetarianism, for example, arises from the transfer­
ence to animals of the idea of suffering. The animal suffers. It is
because we, as human, know what suffering is that we can have
this obligation. (PL 172)
That is his answer to Bentham. But this answer leaves unanswered the
question whether the obligation is direct or, as Kant maintains, only
indirect and derived. It also leaves unanswered the question whether
our obligation is also a responsibility. A negative answer to this
question seems to be implied by the notion of the face to face which
is at the centre of Levinas's rethinking of the ethical. Notwithstanding
his recent statement 'the ethical extends to all living beings', since on
Levinas's analysis ethical responsibility 'originates' in the face to face,
it is not enough for the bearer of that responsibility to have a face.
The being to or for whom I am responsible must also have a face in
Levinas's ethical sense. Despite his granting that we have obligations
with respect to animals, and that the ethical extends to all living
beings - where, if the 'all' includes vegetable as well as animal life, the
position of the vegetarians he goes on to mention becomes still more
complex - he appears to continue to think that in ethics proper, that
is to say in the 'prototype' of ethics as distinct from its extension
Who is My Neighbour? 65
(whether this be an extension of ethics or an extension of 'ethics'), the
other, whether it be animal, vegetable or mineral, can be an other in
respect of whom or which I have responsibilities only on condition of
its having a face. On being asked whether having a face in the ethical
sense means being able to speak, he replies:
I cannot say at what moment you have the right to be ca1led 'face'.
The human face is completely different and only afterwards do we
discover the face of an animal. I don't know if a snake has a face. I
can't answer that question. A more specific analysis is needed.
This seems to confirm that the distinction between obligation and
responsibility is important for Levinas. Since 'It is clear that, without
considering animals as human beings, the ethical extends to all living
beings' and that we have an obligation to animals because they suffer,
the implication appears to be that we can have an ethical obligation
without having a proto-ethical responsibility to animals. Therefore
when, at the end of his great poem, after describing how he threw a
log in the direction of the snake he encountered at his water-trough,
D. H. Lawrence writes
And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate;
A pettiness.
the expiation will be either of a failure to meet an ethical obligation
or of the shirking of a proto-ethical responsibility, depending on what
is the right answer to the question asked earlier in the poem and on
·
the reasons for its being right:
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
What answer and what reasons Levinas would give depend on what
answer he would give after further analysis to the question to which
he says he does not yet know the answer, namely whether a snake
has a face. And his answer to the latter question appears to depend
on whether in some sense the snake can talk. Since he grants that the
fact that animals suffer is enough to put us under obligation in respect
to them, has he not granted what matters most? Why do we need to
pursue the question of responsibility in respect of non-human beings?
66 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
We need to do this in order to understand what Levinas means by
ethics and how the ethical is related to responsibility. Despite his
granting that we are under ethical obligations to animals, these
obligations appear on Levinas's account to have a lower status than
obligations to human beings because the latter, but not the former,
are clearly expressions of proto-ethical responsibility. When Levinas
says that the human face is completely different from the face of the
animal and then adds 'I don't know if a snake has a face' we have to
ask whether if he discovered that the snake has a face it would be a
face in the same sense as that in which a human being has a face.
For an animal to have a face in the same sense as that in which a
human being has a face would mean, on one interpretation of some of
Levinas's words, that the animal is capable of holiness or saintliness,
understanding by this that the animal is capable of being 'more
attached to the being of the other than to his own'. I do not know
whether Levinas would accept as evidence of this reports of
apparently altruistic and self-sacrificial behaviour among non-human
animals - it is said that elephants even mourn - or whether he would
interpret these as manifestations of individual altruism in the interest
of the preservation of the genus or the gene. The first alternative
seems to be ruled out by the following remarks:
You ask at what moment one becomes a face. I do not know at
what moment the face appears, but what 1 want to emphasize is
that the human breaks with pure being, which is always a
persistence in being. This is my principal thesis. A being is
something· that is attached to being, to its own being. That is
Darwin's idea. The being of animals is a struggle for life. A
struggle for life without ethics. It is a question of might. Heidegger
says at the beginning of Being and Time that Dasein is a being who
in his being is concerned for this being itself. That's Darwin's idea:
the living being struggles for life. The aim of being is being itself.
However, with the appearance of the human - and this is my entire
philosophy - there is something more important than my life, and
that is the life of the other. That is unreasonable. Man is an
unreasonable animal.
Like Heidegger, Levinas takes exception to the traditional defini­
tion of man as a rational animal. Levinas here has the adjective take
the weight of his disagreement with this definition. As we have seen,
it would be a mistake to suppose that he is arguing for an irrationalist
Who is My Neighbour? 67
or non-rationalist philosophy of man; he is arguing for a definition of
rationality that brings out that the height of rationality is what by the
standards of rationality as traditionally understood would be deemed
the height of folly. However, as we shall see n i a later chapter,
Heidegger separates the human from non-human animality more
sharply than Levinas does, so sharply that he would be very
unhappy with the equation Levinas draws between Dasein's being
concerned for its being and the Darwinian idea that the living being
struggles for life. First, the being of Dasein is not a struggle for life.
However paradoxical it may be to say so - particularly paradoxical if
the being of Dasein is being toward its death - the being of Dasein is
not a living being. Concern for its existence is not concern for its life.
Second, Dasein is indeed concerned for its being according to the
analysis given in Being and Time; but it is concerned for - one might
say also concerned or obsessed by - being, and this concern cannot
be construed as a concern only for its own survival and/or the
survival of other beings. It remains to be seen in the following
chapters whether the surplus of concern for being should be
construed as a requirement for persistence in being, or at least
persistence in authentic being.
Having reached some understanding of Levinas's objections to
teleological theories of ethics as represented by utilitarianism and
having begun to acquire some understanding of the degree of his
agreement with Kant, we shall in the next chapter continue to pursue
Kantian themes in order to acquire some understanding of Levinas's
disagreement with Kant and, since we shall be reading Kant also as
interpreted by Heidegger, in order to make a transition to an
examination of topics whose treatment by Heidegger will provide
us with a new basis from which to respond to the question that the
present inconclusive chapter compels us to ask: if, as Levinas
maintains, ethics can escape violence or permit more. than a second­
best sort of obligation only if it is not severed from proto-ethical
responsibility, can the latter be described in such a way that i t does
not restrict proto-ethical responsibility to the human? For the reasons
just indicated, as good as any point from which to begin seeking an
answer t o this question is the point where Kant combines a
phenomenology of morals with a phenomenology of the great chain
of being.

4 Human Freedom, between writing the first Critique and the second
Critical Resp onsibility
Nous sommes toujours sur le seuil du Conflit des Facultes.
)acques Derrida, Mochlos
Kantian critique distinguishes the faculties of mi�d and shows ow � sense, time. As the Transcendental Aesthetic of the first Critique
the elements distinguished - sensibility, imagination, understandmg,
will, reason - should, but can fail, to cooperate with each other. Man
f
is fully person, he tells us in Religion within the Bounds o Reason Alone,
when he is fully rational, and that means fully responsible. In §13 of
The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (19 27) Heidegger's rethinking of
Kant (already underway in Being and Time, in lectures to be published
in 1929 as Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, and continued
meanwhile in the course on the first Critique) distinguishes moral
�
personality. psychological personality and transcendent perso�ality.
Transcendental personality is man's self-consciousness, h1s capac1ty to
prefix 'I think' to any of his thoughts in the broad sense of thought
which Descartes ascribes to cogitalio in one of his uses of that word.
Hence among those thoughts of which man is conscious that he
thinks them will be any thought he may have of his empirical nature,
any thought of which the object is or is in his inner sense, the
temporal flow of his stream of consciousne�s. !he transcendental
�
personality manifests itself too with those co lfafiones th�t Descart�s
includes under the heading of will, thus m any acbon that IS
performed out of respect for the moral law. Tha� is to say, the
transcendental personality manifests itself ni any acbon of the mor � what he says about it is usually classified as moral psychology and
personality, in any act of practical rea�on. It would therefore seem m
. .
order to take this activity of combimng my cogrtalrones to be what
Kant means by the action he identifies with intelligence. And that
may be what Kant would have said at the time of the composition of
the Critique of P�tre Reason. The combining Kant is primarily interested
in there is the combining of cogifationes treated as representations. But,
Heidegger says in his study of Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of
68
Critical Responsibility 69
Kant comes to see that the real nature of the person is not the
representative 'I think' of the Cartesian ego or the Leibnizian monad,
but the 'I act', ich handle (G42 159, S 1 1 1 {92]). Or, as Heidegger also
says in the same place, Kant comes to see the 'I represent' as 'I ad'.
The idea (Vorsteflung) is understood in terms of the freedom in which I
give myself the law from the ground of my being and in which the I
is truly together with itself. Indeed, although he does not fully realize
it, Kant is some distance along this path when in the first Critique he
maintains that I am conscious of the spontaneity of my intelligence
even though this consciousness does not count as knowledge. It does
not amount to knowledge because for there to be knowledge the
categories must be applied to data presented under the form of inner
maintains, time is the form only, and only the form, of what is capable
of being given in empirical or pure intuition, so I can have knowledge
only of my psychological self which, Kant says (too hastily in
Heidegger's opinion), is the self only as object. Kant does not grasp
that although the categories temporalized by schematism do not
apply to the self as subject, that is, as the agent which applies the
categories, a more original temporality might enable us to supplement
the categories through which we understand the given object with
existentials through which we understand the giving, the es gibf, the
being of spontaneous subjectivity.
Heidegger argues that although Kant fails to work out a way of
describing the unity of the theoretical and practical ego, this
deficiency can be met by following guidelines laid down by Kant,
in particular in his interpretation of the phenomenon of respect.
Heidegger's claim to be able to arrive in this way at an ontology of
the self presupposed by the distinction between theory and practice is
not without paradox. It is doubly paradoxical because a superficial
reading of the first and the second Critiques might lead one to
conclude that Kant limits respect to practical reason, and because
could be expected to have little to offer to a thinker who, heeding
Plato's warning that instead of taking faculty psychology too
seriously we must take the long philosophical way round, had
already written at length decrying psychologism. Yet Heidegger
declares that 'Kant's interpretation of the phenomenon of respect is
probably the most brilliant phenomenological analysis of the
phenomenon of morality that we have from him' (G24 189,
70 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
BPP 133). If it
is initially surprising that Heidegger seizes upon Kant's
analysis of respect as a due we should remember that his application
of that analysis is a reapplication of some of the thoughts suggested
to him by the doctrine of transcendental schematism sketched out by
Kant in the first Critique. Those thoughts were later to be published in
the book on Kant which appeared in 1929. That book contains too
some reflections on respect, and these in turn should be remembered
as we read what is said on that topic in The Basic Problems of
Phenomenology.
Respect is, in Heidegger's phrase, 'subjugative self-elevation',
unterwerfende Sicherhaben. As Kant himself says, the feeling of respect
for the moral law is at one and the same time something like
inclination and something like fear. We feel diminished and threatened
when we compare our all-too-human humanity with the demand
made by the moral law. We are raised at the thought that submission
to the moral law is a giving of oneself to what one is par excellence, a
giving of oneself to 'the hero in one's soul' (G24 192, BPP 136).
Respect, he says, strikes down self-love and self-conceit. However,
there is a danger that in this striking down one form of self-love and
self-conceit will be usurped by another kind unless we keep in view
that although 'Respect always goes to persons only, not to things'/
'Respect for a person is properly only respect for the law (of honesty,
etc.) of which he gives an example'. 2 This danger is only brushed
under the carpet by Kant's insistence that I can never be sure that l
myself have or anyone else has acted from a moral motive and that
therefore what we respect is the law which is capable of being adopted
as the principl� determining a person's will, a good will being, in
Heideggerian terms, a possible modification of Dasein, 'as we are able
to be own to ourselves' (G24 228, BPP 160). Ignorance of whether I
have ever been determined in my action by the moral law does not
clear away the danger that self-love arising from turning a blind eye
to the law may be succeeded by pride at the thought that I am
capable of following it. On the other hand. if this latter danger is
reduced by consciousness that respect for a person, hence self-respect,
is properly respect for the moral law, another danger looms for an
interpretation of Kant that would see in his account of respect the
promise of an ontology of the self. The risk now is that the law will
be too other than self to be capable of grounding an ontology of the
self. This risk is a threat to the possibility of an existential ontology
based on Kant's doctrine of respect, not, like the other two risks, a
threat to the possibility of moral behaviour or what Heidegger holds
Critical Responsibility 71
to be its pre-moral condition, authenticity. Fortunately for Heideg­
ger's project, these risks can be circumvented. We see that this is so
as soon as we realize that Heidegger's ontology draws neither simply
on ��e moral la� nor � imply on human sentiment but on that special
amb1guous senbment analogous to other sentiments' of which Kant
says no person ea:' be destitute without ceasing to be a person.3
The moral law IS the obJect of a complex feeling, aspects of which
are analo�ou� to inclination and fear. If with Heidegger we under­
_
stand mclmabo n and fear as dispositions to seek and avoid, we have
already made a step away from the view that feelings are simply
occurrent, extant and present at hand psychological states, a view
Kant takes when he regards the psychological personality as a
_
contmuun : of empirical states and processes. Feelings and moods -
how we fmd ourselves (wie wir uns befinden, comment on se frouve) -
are understan�a�le only in terms of ways of comporting ourselves in
the w�rld. Th1s IS a break with one kind or aspect of psychologism.
But th1s brea� IS not one that has to do specifically with respect as
compared w1th other feelings or emotions. Further, when Kant
maintains tha: incl�nati�n or attraction and fear are only analogues
of the confl1ctmg d1spos1bo. ns combined in respect, he is concerned to
�nderline that �he moti �ation to and from distinctive of respect is
mtellectual. He1degger mterprets this intellectuality of respect by
mean� of the e�istential notion of Verstehen described in Being and
_ Ju�t as h� mterprets the feeling of respect along
T1r:'e
the lines of the
extstenbal notion of _Befi��lichkeit described there. So that 'in respect 1
myself am am actmg . 1Ch selbst bin. Here we do well to recall that
-
in Being and Time and The History of the Concept of Time Heidegger
speaks of an etymological connection between bin and bei and innan
words connoting dwelling and the home. In the 'Letter on Humanism:
he associates t�e word ethos with these ideas. This is important for
o�r understandmg of the debate between Heidegger and Levinas. It
bnngs out that although Heidegger emphasizes that his thinking
tre�ts of what preced�s the distinction of philosophy into logic,
ethtcs, etc.. he IS_ treahng of what can provisionally be called
an
ontology of ethics. �is aim is obviously not to develop a system of
etht_�s as su�h. But th1s can _be said also of Levinas. However strongly
Le�mas res1sts the suggesbon that he is developing an ontology of
. metaphysics
eth1cs, the ethtcal
which is his avowed concern has in
common with Heidegger's reflections on ethos and oikos a radicality
that means that f�r at least some of the time they are seeking answers
to the same queshon. When Levinas maintains that the ethical is prior
n The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
to ontology and to the thinking of being the impact of his argument
against Heidegger will be underestimated unless we remember that
Heidegger's topic is in a broad sense ethical and that he is working
towards a deeper understanding of humanism. Al�hough the senses
Heidegger and Levinas give to their key words may differ, although
they disagree over the scope of the words 'being' and 'ontology', and
although a particular word used by Heidegger may be used by
Levinas with an 'emphasis' which displaces its force, the question at
issue between them cannot be seen in proper perspective unless we
notice the degree to which they share a common vocabulary.
Recognition of this sharpens the point of their dispute. The terms
of that dispute are often terms they have carried over from their
reading of Kant. 'Respect', although not a term that Levinas employs
frequently, is one that is associated by Kant and in Heidegger's
reflections on Kant with terms that Levinas does employ frequently:
'responsibility', 'holy' and 'conscience'. We shall now consider each of
these words in that order with a view to making clearer the extent of
agreement and disagreement between Heidegger and Levinas as
revealed in the light of their reactions to Kant. This will enable us
to achieve a clearer idea of how the link between the notions these
three words denote and the Kantian conception of moral respect
serves to articulate a Heideggerian conception of ontological respect
or responsibili.ty which we shall introduce in Chapter 6 and to
perceive how this conception relates to the Levinasian conception
of responsibility which we have already discussed.
II
Heidegger appeals to Kant's account of respect in order to support
the claim made in Being and Time for the ]emeinigkeit of Dasein. The
moral feeling, like other feelings, is a feeling-of or feeling-for which is
at the same time a self-feeling. I feel myself feeling. As Descartes puts
this, cogito me senfire. But against Descartes Heidegger maintains that
this self-feeling is a direct self-having, not an intuitive knowledge, and
not reflective in the sense that implies a bending back (G24 187, BPP
133). In the case of the direct self-feeling of moral feeling, respect, I
know myself as responsible. 'Respect reveals the dignity before which
and for which the self knows itself to be responsible. Only in
responsibility does the ego reveal itself - the self not in a genera}
Critical Responsibility 73
sense as knowledge of an ego in general but as in each case mine (a/s
je meines), the ego as in each case the individual factical ego' (G24
194, BPP 137). Here Heidegger is making recourse to the Kantian
teaching on responsibility to help him spell out his reasons for
rejecting the neo-Kantian, especially Rickertian, gloss according to
which Kant' s logical ego is a nameless abstraction. The strength of
this rejection depends however on the demonstration that the logical
ego, fhe transcendental unity of self-consciousness that Heidegger
calls transcendental personality, is one with what he calls the moral
personality. Assuming that that demonstration is accepted, Heideg­
ger's argument for the concreteness of the Kantian ego can be
supported by drawing our and Rickert's attention to the order of
proceeding in the Groundwork where the analysis has as its point of
departure the concrete experience of the difference between pmden­
tial and moral necessity. Heidegger would add that it is important not
to forget that the freedom and responsibility to which Kant believes
we are committed by the Faktum of pure practical reason is not
confined to virtuous action but is the ontological freedom and
responsibility which is the definition and vocation of personality as
such and is revealed in the respect for the moral law felt by the most
vicious among us. In respect we know ourselves because respect,
unlike other feelings, is self-wrought, selbstgewirkt - Kant subscribes
to a version of Vico's verum-fadum principle: we can know only what
we make (G24 213, BPP 149-50). Hence mineness is the ground no
less of inauthentic than of authentic self-understanding (G24 242, BPP
170). This existential-ontological distinction between inauthenticity
and authenticity corresponds to Kant's ontic-ethical distinction
between heteronomy and autonomy. However, it is not especially
the mineness of Dasein that leads Heidegger to make a connection
between his ontology and Kant's metaphysics of morals, but features
of the structure of that mineness as Dasein' s being for the sake of its
own self, umwillen seiner selbst.
Dasein's mineness is the existential-ontological ground of formal
or logical self-identity and of ontological identity in the traditional
sense of ontology that classifies according to categories and
according to the opposition of substance or essence and predicate
or property. This is what Heidegger means here by 'formal­
ontological'. Mineness is the phenomenological-ontological belong­
ing of each Dasein to itself, its existed having of itself.
Dasein's being for the sake of its own self, Heidegger writes, 'is the
structural moment that motivated Kant to define the person
74 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
ontologically as an end, without inquiring into the specific structure
of purposiveness and the question of ontological possibility'. In other
words, Kant's doctrine that the person is an end in itself begins, but
only begins, to acknowledge that Dasein is a possibility-of-being, a
Seinkonnen, whose unifying principle is Sorge, care. The phrase 'end in
itself here marks the earlier-mentioned fad that respect for persons is
respect for the moral law. Personality on Kant's account of it is
distinguished by its impersonality. It is difficult to see how this can be
reconciled with the for-the-sake-of-itselfness of Dasein that Heideg­
ger's reading of Kant discovers in the Critical doctrine unless this is
located on the animal side of the rational animal, the side of which the
principle is not the moral law but the interest in the attainment of
happiness. This is a difficulty Levinas sees in Kant, one he tries to
overcome by working out an analysis of concrete, personal me-ness
that is not based on the quest for happiness but on rationality
understood through the face to face encounter in which my
subjectivity is my ethical subjection to the Other's accusative regard.
This difficulty affecting the interpretation of Kant Heidegger
advanced in his Marburg years against the Marburg and South-West
German neo-Kantians looms too in Heidegger's statement in The
Metaphysical Foundations of Logic that 'Selfhood is free responsibility
for and toward itself' (G26 247, MFL 192). It is followed half a page
later by a statement that enables us to see in relief another deep
difference between Heidegger and Levinas. Heidegger writes: 'The
surpassing of the fadic beings that is peculiar to the world as such,
and thereby to transcendence and freedom corresponds to the
epekeina. In other words, the world itself is surpassive (iiberfrifftig);
beings of Dasein's character are distinguished by overleaping
(Uberschwung).' Here again is the Platonic epekeina tes ousias, but with
a difference, a difference not only from Plato but a difference from
Levinas. The difference from Levinas is made all the more poignant
by the presence in Heidegger's text at this point not only of this
Platonic tag that Levinas too likes to quote, but also of the phrase
'primary insatiability', where the noun is the one Levinas uses to
describe the fact that ethical Desire never achieves even momentary
satisfaction since the more I heed my responsibilities to the other the
more responsibility comes my way. The excession that Heidegger is
describing on the other hand is not, like that to which Levinas refers,
an excession beyond being. It is an excession beyond beings, but not
an excession beyond being, whatever at a later stage of his thinking,
for example in 'Time and Being', may call to be said about es gibt,
Critical Responsibility 75
Ereignis, and the torn edge between being and beings - the
differentiating Riss which in the crazed mirror of Levinas's epekeina
is reflected as the dechirure at the threshold between the Other and
me.
That for the sake of which personality ads according to Kant is at
one and the same time the good will, which requires the perfect
accordance of the mind with the moral law, and the highest good. On
Kant's interpretation of 'the moral destination of our nature' there can
be only an endless progression toward the summr4m bonum thanks to
our acting out of respect for the moral law. And, he says, the moral
law is holy. That is what he writes in the second Critique. In the Opus
Postumum he writes: The highest ideal as person (of which there can
be only one) is God'. The words at least are ones that Levinas might
employ provided the asymmetry between the Other and myself is
preserved and ethical heteronomy, that is to say my being the
Other's servant without his being mine, is given priority over the
autonomy that immediately implies ullfversal impersonalism in the
ethical teaching of Kant. Even though on Kant's teaching God would
be a citizen of the Kingdom of Ends, he is on that teaching also a
Sovereign. So Levinas can borrow the Idea of God from Kant to assist
in his explanation of what he means when he says that infinity is
invested in the other man. This appeal to God is not theological in
either Levinas's teaching or Kant's. It is ethical, and religious only to
the extent that religion and obligation have in common the idea of a
bond. In Heidegger's thinking, certainly that of the 1920s and the
early 1930s, the very idea of God, ethical or theological, would be
the idea of a being or of beingness, hence beside the point of
fundamental ontology. Similarly with the notion of Goodness. In Kant
this notion, along with the idea of the ought, is sharply distinguished
from the notion of what is, even though theoretical reason turns out
to presuppose practical Ideas, for example the Idea of freedom which
Kant analyses in terms of the ought. That gives priority to the ethical,
as Levinas does. H would be a gross error to say that Heidegger gives
priority to the theoretical, since he is concerned to expose to view, as
far as that is possible, the common root of theory and practice. What
Heidegger gives priority to is being. So long as allowance is made for
Heidegger's rethinking of the tradition, it can be said that he belongs
and Levinas does not belong to the tradition which says, in Eckhart's
words, not only of goodness, but of holiness and the divine,
'Goodness depends on being, for if there were no being there could
be no goodness, and thus being is purer than goodness'.4
 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
76
On Heidegger's rethinking of this tradition however, the rethinking
that is well under way in Being and Time and the Introduction to
Metaphysics (G40 205f., EM 149f., IM 164£.), goodness and in general
value are not subordinated to being hierarchically. What follows from
this rethinking is that value and obligation are no longer regarded as
tertiary properties superimposed upon the primary and secondary
qualities of things or consequential upon the 'good-mak� ng' char­
acteristics of human dispositions or actions, but are formahve of the
very structure of being in the world. This is another way of saying
that ontological ethos is prior to the distinction between theory and
practice, and this explains why Heidegger says that an authentic way
of being in the world is a responsible, careful, resolved and open (ent­
schlossen) way of responding to the call of being.
lli
There is a paradoxical alienness in this call which has analogues in the
thinking of Levinas and Kant. ln Religion within the Bo�nds of Rea�on
Alone Kant distinguishes three classes or elements m the callmg
(Bestimmung) of man or, more precisely, three components 'of the
original disposition for good in human nature': the disp�sition to
. employed as an instrument toward the satisfaction of physical desire,
animality of man as a living being, the disposition of humamty m man
taken as living and at the same time as rational, and the disposition to
personality as a rational and at the same time responsible and
accountable being. This classification is made accordmg to the
functions or ends of man. So the first does not refer to life in
generaL life such as is manifest in creatures with a veg etable soul,
. humanity participates in man's animality and in the predisposition in
plants. Nor apparently can the animality or animateness mtended be
that which man shares with non-human animals.. For although Kant
says that Tierheit is physical and mechanical self-love that manifests
itself in the instinct for self-preservation, propagation of the species
and the social impulse which we could call man's gregariousness, he
associates with these various vices, for example the coarseness of
drunkenness, sensuality and lawlessness in regard to other human
beings. True, he describes these as 'beastly' or 'brutish' vices, but we
all do that without believing that they can be imputed to non-human
animals and that to them can be attributed the corresponding virtues.
Thus the animality of Kant's first class encroaches upon the humanity
of the second.
Critical Responsibility 77
As for this second class, the question arises how humanity can be
an element in the constitution, condition, definition, destiny or calling
of man. Is not humanness rather the whole, all there is to humanness?
Is not humanity tautologically the whole duty of man, the Heiligkeit,
in the sense of the wholeness and wholesomeness or health, of his
calling? Kant must be using the word Mensch with a wider and a
narrower meaning, the wider meaning being that of which each
division mentions an aspect, the narrower being that specified in the
second class, man's all-too-human humanness. Like the predisposition
to anim(llity, this predisposition to humanness or humanity is natural
self-love, but whereas the predispositon to animality is mechanical
(mechanisch), the predisposition to humanity is comparative
(vergleichend). It is concerned with whether we are more or less happy
than others. This concern gives rise first to an interest in acquiring at
least equal esteem, and then, when we become aware that others seek
to be esteemed above us, to an interest in being esteemed above
them. The vices correlated with humanity are vices of culture, and in
their extreme forms of envy, ingratitude and malice they are
described as devilish; that is to say, their evil is thought of as going
beyond humanity, as being manifestations of man's inhumanity to
man. Like the so-called beastly vices, they are abuses of humanity in
the generic sense of the word. Unlike them, they and their correlated
non-deviant uses are abuses and uses of reason, specifically reason
as ancilla of the passions. While in Kant's philosophy of theory the
imagination's schematism participates in both the particularity of
sensibility and the universality of intellectuality and is the medium
through which the one is applied to the other in what the Critique of
Judgement calls determinant, as opposed to reflective judgement, so
which man manifests reason par excellence, the predisposition to
personality.
Unlike his predisposition to humanity and animality, man's
predisposition to personality is not· one upon which vices can be
grafted. Hence, when this predisposition becomes a motive for man's
elective will, that will is, as Kant says in the Groundwork, the only
thing that is good without qualification. Kant also says in the
Goundwork, in a passage reproduced by Heidegger, that 'man and
every rationaJ being exists as an end in himself; and not merely as a
means to be used arbitrarily by this or that will.' That is, Kant wishes
not to limit rationality to human beings. But if the rationality of
78 · The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
superhuman beings is what commands respect, how, we must ask, can
it be true that, as Heidegger says in interpreting Kant, 'What
constitutes the nature of the person, its essentia, . . . is an object of
respect', that 'Conversely, that which is objective in respect, what is
revealed in it, makes manifest the personality of the person', and that
This interpretation of the personalitas moralis first makes clear what
man is and defines his quidditas, man's essential nature, the rigorous
concept of Menschheit, humanity' (G24 196, BPP 138)? How can what
is essentially superhuman according to the classification of humanity
in Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone nevertheless be the
essence of humanity? It is not just, as Suarez expresses it, that the
human intellect is a mean between the angelic intellect and sense or,
as Kant himself says in the Critique of Practical Reason, 'the person as
belonging to the sensible world is subject to his own personality as
belonging to the intelligible', so that man is elevated (erhoben) above
himself 'as part of the world of sense'. He is elevated above himself, it
would seem, as human, that is, 'as living and at the same time
rational'. One is reminded of Aristotle's statement in De Generatione
Animalium which describes the active intellect as though it comes
from without, almost as though it were identified with God, leipetai de
ton noun monon thurathen epeisienai kai theion enai monon (ll. 3, 736b28;
cp De Anima Ill, 5, 430a10). This is relevant to the question asked by
Kant in The Conflict of Faculties whether the Philosophical Faculty is
ancillary to the Faculty of Theology or whether the latter is auxiliary
to the former, a question in the answering of which it would be
relevant to resall Hegel's assertion in the Logic of the Encyclopaedia
with reference tio logic that
the superexceitent is also the most useful, because it is the all­
sustaining principle which, having a subsistence of its own, may
therefore serve as the vehicle of special ends which it furthers and
secures. And thus, special ends, though they have no right to be
set first, are still fostered by the presence of the highest good.
(Enc. §20)
Is the anticipatory imbrication of the classification drawn up by Kant
in Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone, rationality being ahead of
itself in holiness, an anticipation of the dynamics of Hegelian
dialectic? If religion is within the bounds of reason, reason too
seems to be within the bounds of religion: a double bound - and a
double bind, like the tie to the radically Other in Levinas's quasi-
Critical Responsibility 79
analysis of proximity where this tie is also a tie to myself. In Le
malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel, in connection with
what Hegel says in the section on the spirit of Judaism in The Spirit of
Christianity, Jean Wahl, a philosopher to whom Levinas acknowledges
indebtedness and who is one of the dedicatees of Totality and Infinity,
writes:
If it is true that there is a need in man to surpass himself - and it is
that which explains why it is possible for there to be a
phenomenology of religious consciousness - it is none the less
true that there have always been spirits for whom this being that is
higher than man is absolutely separate from him.5
Kant's epekeina is not that separate. It is both contrasted with
humanity and identified with it, a predicament that is encapsulated
in the statement that 'man . . . must regard humanity in his own person
as holy', as though the study of man's rationality, hence of his
philosophical faculty, would be the study of God, and as though the
Philosophical Faculty and the Faculty of Theology were inside and
outside each other.6 This predicament has an ancestor in Descartes's
statement that it is by virtue of the human will that man is an image
of God, the will in Kant becoming identified with pure practical
reason. The will and freedom play no such role in Levinas's account
of the relation betweeen God and the Good, and we should resist the
temptation to say that for Levinas God is the image of man, since he
employs the words 'trace' and 'face' in order to break with or delve
more deeply into the HeUenic tradition which presumes to talk of
God and man as beings whose nature can be mirrored, if only darkly,
in an image or in an idea.
IV
Kant's assertion that man must regard humanity in his own person as
holy anticipates Heidegger's reference to the way in which Dasein is
foreign to itself, fremd and iibertrifftig in its very own home, in its
being zu Hause, as Hegel says of the spirit of Greece in the Lectures on
the History of Philosophy.7 The voice of conscience, Heidegger says, is
both my voice and yet comes from above and beyond. Der Ruf komml
aus mir und doch iiber mich (BT 275). According to Kant the call of,
80 · The Middle Voice of Ecological CortScience
from and to conscience is the call of reason, whereas according to the
Heidegger of Being and Time the call is of being and to the care of
being. According to Levinas conscience is the voice of the Other. not
of being, but it has the same angle of incidence. It tells us that the
Other is nearer God than I am (DEHH 174). The Other is not da,
indeterminately here or there, but i/lic, over and up there. I am his
humble servant, even if it is his humility that gives him the majesty
and height from which his eyes teach me that I am with respect to
him perpetually in statu pupillari. According to Kant the call is from
and to rationality, and because for him rationality is freedom of the
wilt· · the call would appear to be a recall to that from which
conscience, as understood by Levinas, would call us away: the 'I
can' of t!:te ego persisting in its will to life and power. This
. Further, the Heideggerian interpretation of Kant goes some way
appearance is false, for, as we have seen, the Kantian account of
personality is given in terms of reason and a moral law which, far
from inflating the ego, deflates it to the point of impersonality.
Levinas aims to show that such impersonality is inconsistent with the
ethical. This is one reason why Heidegger' s interpretation of Kant is
so significant. It offsets the threat of anonymity by underlining
Dasein's ]emeinigkeit and being towards death.
Neither in Kant nor in Heidegger is the mortality of the other man
given priority over my own as it is by Levinas. However, in Kant's
metaphysics of morals respect for the moral law does bring with it
the idea of a kingdom of ends, and if Heidegger takes this seriously
then what both he and Kant refer to as the proper or authentic self,
das eigentliche S�lbst as Kant writes in the Groundwork, 8 will be a being
that is ontologically being-with, whatever the ontic circumstances.
.
Although being , toward death may set Dasein apart from the
inauthentic self of das Man, this does not mean (as calling das Man
'the they-self' ·could lead the unwary reader to think) that Dasein is
isolated from others in authentic being towards death. Heidegger
writes: 'Dasein is itself essentially Being-with'. He also writes: The
expression "Dasein", however, shows plainly that "in the first
instance" this entity is unrelated to Others, and that of course it
can still be "with" Others afterwards' (BT 120). What follows from
these statements taken together is that although ontically Dasein may
be on its own, ontologically Dasein is with Others. Later on in Being
and Time he says: 'As the non-relational possibility, death individua­
lizes - but only in such a manner that, as the possibility which is not
to be outstripped, it makes Dasein, as Being-with, have some
understanding of the potentiality-for-Being of Others' (BT 264).
Critical Responsibility 81
The qualifying clause is important. Evidently the non-relationality
of my being toward my death no more cuts me off from others than
it cuts me off from. myself. What it cuts me off from is the purely
general possibility of the 'one', das Man, the merely constated fact
that one dies. Like Caius, Socrates et al. Heidegger emphasizes that
'Dasein is authentically itself only to the extent that, as concernful
Being-alongside and solicitous Being-with, it projects itself upon its
ownmost potentiality-for-Being rather than upon the possibility of
the they-self (BT 263). The other has to die his own death van ihm
selbsf, bur that does not exclude my being solicitous that he should
not die alone, where a lack of such solicitude would for Levinas be
tantamount to contravening the spirit of the injunction Thou shalt
not kill'.9
toward discovering in conscience and respect what it would not be
entirely inappropriate to characterize as, in the phrase Levinas uses to
describe ethical encounter, a passivity more passive than the passivity
which is contrasted with activity in traditional thinking about the
faculties and powers of the mind. The voice of conscience is a middle
voice, akin to the Greek voice that Heidegger finds most suitable to
express the mood of the phenomenological thinking called for in
Being and Time, a thin�ing which must be a cooperative and vigilant
listening obedience 1 0 Listening-to . . . is Dasein's existential way of
Being-open as Being-with for Others' (BT 163). Here and · in the
paragraph immediately following this sentence in Being and Time the
words used are Ju5ren and horchen, where along with the idea of
hearkening there are overtones of heed, gehorchen. Heidegger is
himself heeding here the demand that phenomenology must return
to the things themselves and heeding what is said about this heed to
the things themselves by Hegel when, speaking in the Encyclopaedia
about attention or heed (Aufmerksamkeit), he writes that
it demands an effort since a man, if he wants to apprehend one
particular object, must make abstraction from everything else, from
all the thousand and one things going round in his head, from his
other interests, even from his own person; he must suppress his
own conceit which would rashly judge the subject-matter, not
allowing it to speak for itself (mit Unferdrucken seiner die Sache nicht
zu Worte kommen lassenden), must stubbornly absorb himself in the
subject-maHer, must fix his attention on it and let it have its say (in
sich walten lassen) without obtruding his own reflections. Attention
82 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
contains, therefore, the negation of one's self-assertiveness and also
the surrender of oneself to the mntler in hand . . . . (Enc. §448, supp.)
The vigilance of Heidegger's attention to what Hegel sa� s he�e
reveals itself in the fact that in Being and Time conscience (Gew1ssen) IS
connected with certainty (Gewissheit) and thus its phenomenology of
conscience is by implication connected with and disconnected from
the dialectic of self-certainty worked out in the Phenomenology of Spirit
where, in the chapter on absolute knowing, Hegel writes that
conscience knows that its existence as such is pure certainly of
itself: es weiss, dass sein Dasein als solches diese reine Gewissheif seiner
selbsf ist. For Heidegger too Dasein, which in Being and Time is always
the existing of a capability of being, a Seinkonnen, is indeed capable of
self-certainty, but this is the certainty of its existing toward its death.
V Chapter 7 and Chapter 8) Heidegger's account of man finds much
The existed possibility which is being toward death is, Heideg�er
says, a possibility of impossibility. It is the possibility of non-bemg
and, because, as the 'Letter on Humanism' says. 'nihiling is the essence
of Being' (G9 360, BW 238), this is precisely why it can open
Dasein's eyes to the possibility of there being more than and other
than the common, universal beingness of beings like the entities that
preoccupied the members of the Faculty of Science sitting i� the Aula
. problem of safeguarding the dignity of man.
Maxima of the University of Freiburg when Heidegger delivered h1s
inaugural lecture 'What is Metaphysics?' Hence, when Heidegge: sa�s
1n anticipation Dasein can first make certain of its ownmost Bemg m
its totality - a totality which is not to be outstripped', the totality
here referred to is not a well-rounded whole but a detotalized totality,
at least for authentic Dasein. The hermeneutic circularity in which
Dasein is at home is one in which Dasein is not at home. The circle is
a broken circle. The home is a broken home. Dasein's home is
supplemented by the unhomely and its sameness is disrupted by
alterity. Dasein's enclosure is at the same time dis-closure, Ent­
schliessen, and disclosure, Erschliessen, of the finitude of its indefinite
certainty (BT 265). Hence the careful ambiguity of some of
Heidegger's sentences on the possibiity of death as when
:
e �
writes: 'The certain possibility of death, however, discloses Dasem
as a possibility, but does so in such a way that, in anticipating this
possibility, Dasein makes this possibility possible (ermoglicht) for itself
Critical Responsibility 83
as its ownmost potentiality-for-Being' (BT 264). As the translators
John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson explain, although they have
taken Die gewisse M6glichkeit des Todes to be the subject of the
sentence, das Dasein could be taken as the subject instead. There is
good reason to think that Heidegger wanted to leave open the
possibility of a double reading here. Likewise in the sentence two
sections further on: To lay bare the "upon-which" of a projection,
amounts to disclosing that which makes possible what has been
projected' (BT 324). As the translators again point out, 'what is
projected', das Entworfene, can be taken as subject or object of 'makes
possible', ermogliclzt, and there is good reason to take it at one and the
same time as both. In his translation of the 'Letter on Humanism'
Roger Munier draws attention to the link between m6glich, meaning
'possible', and miigen, meaning 'to like' or 'to love' - or in some
contexts even 'to desire', a link which is a sign that although in
comparison with Levinas (and other writers to whom we shall refer in
more to say about death than it finds to say about life, he is fully
aware that it must find room for a Daseinal equivalent; his problem
here is very much Kant's problem: how to understand the animality of
the classical definition of man as a rational animal without implying
that Dasein and the animal are species of a shared genus. The same
problem surfaces in Levinas's remark 'We understand the animal, the
face of an animal, in accordance with Dasein' (PL 169). Levinas,
Heidegger and Kant are all three preoccupied, like the Stoics, with the
Munier could well have noted th.at aimant means both 'loving' and
'magnet', an association that would not be easy to justify on
etymological grounds but one that conveys the idea expressed in
the dictum that has played so significant a role in the case for
utilitarian analyses of ethics: nothing is desired except sub specie boni.
Whatever we desire or like or love must appear lovely or attractive in
some way. This is a unidirectional conceptual truth, but the idea that
the one who desires or loves is so to speak magnetized by the object
of that desire or love is the idea of a psychological or phenomeno­
logical bidirectionality or reciprocity in which that object exercises a
certain power. It is from the idea of reciprocity and symmetry that
Levinas aims to break away when he stops talking about desire and
love in order to talk about Desire and responsibility. We can
safeguard the dignity of man only if we save the other man's
majesty. So when Levinas writes of a passivity more passive than
84 Tlte Middle Voice of Ecological Conscit11ce Critical Responsibility 85

that which is opposed to activity in interaction within a physical or
social (Kant would say mechanisch or vergleichend) system he does n�t
have in mind a neutral equilibrium of activity and passivity. He has m
mind an ethical imbalance in which I am subjected to the Other's
command, suffering a responsibility such that to assume it and make it
internal to a project of mine would be exactly to. fail . in my
responsibility. Such a failure is what Levinas re�ds m Be1�g and
Time. Or reads into it because he pays too little attenbon to
reason for this perhaps being that the prefix er- leans too far toward
the activity pole of the traditional opposition between activity and
passivity. He does not suspend employment of the term das Mtig­
liche, with its play between the idea of possibility and miigen, to be
disposed toward favourably. But he now introduces Vermogen to
perform a distinctive task. This word does not appear in the glossary
of German expressions drawn up by Macquarrie and Robinson in
their translation of Being and Time, nor is it listed in Hildegard Feick's

�
Heidegger's warning that the analyses undertaken tl ere are p�ovi­
sionaL anticipating a return from the existential analybc �f Das� m t�
index to that book.11 It does however reappear in what it is common
to regard as the promised third part of Being and Time, the essay
the thinking of Sein. Without denying that even when thts w�rung IS published in 1969 under the heading 'Time and Being'.12 Heidegger
fully heeded Levinas will continue to have cause f�r compl.amt over refers there to his assertion in the 'Letter on Humanism' that 'The esli
the
Heidegger's failure to pay due regard to the surpassmg altenty of gar einai of Parmenides is still unthought today' (G9 335, BW 215). It
whether there is an occasion al
other man, one cannot but wonder is unthought if Parmenides' saying is interpreted literally as 'Being is',
failure on Levinas's part to distingui sh what Heidegg er says about since that implies that only of a being does it hold that it is. And
praxis and the everyday way of being in the world fr�m state.ments Parmenides' saying is still unthought if we translate esti only, as the
and
about the foundational ontological structures to whtch praxrs Letter does, by 'It allows', unless we pick up the Es gibf implicit in it
though Heidegg er's fundame n tal
everydayness are but clues, as . which gives it the quiet force of donation and gift, as expressed in the
ontology were a transplan tation to the Black Forest of Sartnan prepositions kraft and vermiige meaning 'thanks to . . : or griice a . .
. .

existentialism or the pragmatism of Bergson, Dewey or James. Only then do we take the long route round from the psychology of
BW
Heidegger does say 'Thinking is a deed (ein Tun)' (G9 361, faculties, potentialities and powers of the animal rationale which, on a
239), but he goes on to say immedia tely that it is a deed that goes superficial understanding, are denoted by the noun Vermiigen.
beyond (iibertrifft) all praxis. It is to be expected that in a letter on humanism one will come
These statements are made in the 'Letter on Humanism'. By that across a word that Kant uses of the transcendental parallels he draws
time it has to be said, Heidegger explicitly distances himself from to the empirical faculties on which human nature depends. Vermogen
;
Sart e and announces that what he here means by the thinking which and Fiihigkeif are classical terms for classifying man's powers. This is
no
arises before the distinction between theory and practice should why what Heidegger does with the word Vermogen in the 'Letter on
longer be called by the traditional na e 'o t lo y' e �en if that is Humanism' has such far-reaching repercussions. The term traditionally
qualified by the adjective 'fundame
�
ntal, as
�� �
tt ts 1� Bemg a
. .
n� Tim� . used in psychology and metaphysics for what in his earlier
Metaphysical ontology , including that of Kanttan � nhC!Sm, lS vocabulary Heidegger calls an ontic faculty like the faculty of
conceptual. What Heidegger now calls essenbal thmkmg attempts hearing or sight is being asked to perform a role in what according
to think unconceptually the truth, a-letheia, that is to say, the �n­ to that earlier vocabulary is still called ontology. In the essay Wie
concealing of being. And this thinking of being is a thinki.ng of bemg wenn am Feiertage . . (1939-40) to which Heidegger refers the reader
.

where the 'of' is a double genitive (G9 316, BW 196). Hetdegger also of the Letter, vermogen and vermag are used several times intransit­
advises his reader that in spite of the risks run in continuing to ively with the meaning of 'is able', for example on pp. 59, 64, 65 and
he
employ the terms 'ontology' and 'ethics', there is still .room to ask � 71 of the Gesamtausgabe edition of Erlaulerungen zu Holder/ins Dichtung
question as to the relation between ontology and eth1cs, the · queshon (G4), but on at least one page the word vermiigen is employed with
.
that taxed Jean Beaufret, the recipient of the Letter, provtded that that the transitive meaning 'to enable', the meaning which, as suggested
question be thought in a more original way. The �ore original above, is expressed more actively perhaps by ermoglichen. However
of
thinking required leads Heidegger to suspend temp�ranly th.e use ermiiglichen is employed in the same lecture, for example on p. 62, and
the word Erm6glichung to express the notion of making posstble, one in later works, for example in the lecture The Essence of Language'
 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience Critical Responsibility 87
86

(1957), in conjunction with Moglichkeit, as in the sentenc�s repro­ schlage, 'I hit', to the passive ich werde geschlagen, 'l am hit', via the
. middle ich lasse mich schlagen, 'I get myself hit' or 'I let myself be hit',
duced above from Being and Time, the sentences to the duphC!ty and
reversibility of which Macquarrie and Robinson draw our attention. lupfomai. In borrowing this name from the grammarians we do not
In 'The Essence of Language' Heidegger writes: wish it to be confined to any or all of the many senses they have
given it, though the illustration we have just cited from Heidegger
Anything that gives us room and allows us to do some�hing �i�e� shows that the sense with which we are gradually supplying it alludes
us a possibility, that is, it gives what enables us.
.
�
ossibility
. .
to a reflexivity of some sort, as does one of the grammatical uses
(Moglichkeif) so understood, as what enables (das Ermogltchende), (louomai tas cheiras, I wash myself in respect of my hands}. The lasse11
means something else than mere opportunity (Chance). (Gl2 187, which exemplifies an aspect of the rapport in question has a hint of
US 199, OWL 92-3} what the grammar books describe, with for our purposes too strong
an implication of method or technique, as a causative function
These words are evidence of the aim which shapes the whole of (didaskomai, I get someone taught). The sense of lassen we find in
Heidegger's thinking: to find a way of saying the l�sen o Seinl�ssen � Heideggers treatment of Seinlassen and Gelassenheif - about which we
and Gelassenheit in which the lassen is neither qUite as mtrus1vely shall say more in a later chapter - is less that of causing than
forward as actively to get nor quite as reserved as passively to let. enabling, as we have tried in this section to bring out. That is why we
What he would have us overhear in this lassen is audible in what the have not been ready to follow Levinas in stressing as much as he
following sentences from the 'Letter on Humanism' say re�arding does the place of practical power in the interpretation of Heidegger's
Vermogen and the Element where, it should be noted, the meanmgs of ontology. The idea of belonging together and of mutual need which
these two words are already stretched well beyond the meanings they we shall continue to discover in Heidegger's musings on the fragment
have in Kant's Critical theory of the elements of knowledge: 'To of Parmenides which is glibly translated Thinking and Being are one'
enable something here means to preserve it in its essence, to maintain might be included among what the grammarians classify as reciproca­
it in its element' (G9 317, BW 197). tive uses of the middle voice (aspazesthai, to greet each other,
dialegesfhai, to converse), but this idea of reci procity must be
Thinking comes to an end when it slips out of its element. T e � attenuated if we are going to entertain the thought that Levinasian
element is what enables thinking to be thinking. The element IS proto-ethical responsibility is middle-voiced.13 One of the reasons
what prope�ly enables: the enabling. It emb�ace� thinkin� and so why we refer above to 'at least one of the services' of the middle
.
brings it info its essence. Said plainly, thin!Ong � s � he �hinkmg of voice is that we have spoken earlier of the middle voice of prophecy
Being. The genitive says something twofold. Thmking IS of B�mg . in expounding Levinas's doctrine of proto-ethica1 responsibility to the
inasmuch as thinking, coming to pass from Being, belongs to Bemg, Other, though when we return to this topic we shall see that Levinas
listens to Being (vom Sein ereignef, dem Sein gehiirt) . . . as well as Heidegger has problems avoiding an exaggeration of either
the activity or the passivity in the attempt to describe this 'relation'
er on (G9 359, BW 237), which is neither just the one nor just the other and for which we have
and, as Heidegger says forty pages furth
acknowledgment (Anerkmnen), that is to say
thinkin?, lii� s t das, worauf adapted the name 'middle voice'.
d wh1ch 1t goes come We have in this chapter invoked the middle voice in the context of
es gehl, auf siclt zukommen, 'lets that towar .
un refer s ambi guously to Heidegger's dogged thinking on the dictum of Parmenides to gar aufo
toward itself', where the reflexive prono
(as thoug h Being needs noein esfin te kai einai. Beginning with the next chapter we shall be
both the thinking and the thought, Being
izing at l ast one of embarking on an analysis of Heidegger's thinking on the experience
· thinking if it is to become itself), thereby epitom �
tion for wh1ch we are of hearing these words said in the middle voice of poetry. Levinas
the services performed by the enabling condi
borrowing the title 'middle voice'. The media
� �
lity of t e midd � voice and Heidegger seem not to speak in the same voice about poetry and,
s is approxamated �� sor:'e more generally, art. Therefore when we have examined what
in relation to the active and passive voice
seque nce from the active ICh Heidegger says regarding the relationship of essential Denken and
contexts in German by lassen, as in the
88 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience

Dichten we shall need to

ask whether the middle voice of prophecy
5
and the middle voice of poetry are or are not one and the same. So

Post-Critical Poiesis and

the present chapter on Critical Responsibility has been critical in the
sense that it raises a matter for decision (krino, to separate). It marks a
turning point also in that it is preceded by a chapter in which the first
of our chief reservations regarding Levinas's teaching is aired
Thinking
(regarding what he says about the animal) and is followed by one
in which the second of our two main queries concerning that teaching
is posed (concerning what he writes about art). It will be recalled that
Who today would presume to claim that he is at home with the
we have expressed the hope that consideration of the second of our
nat�r� of poetry as well as with the nature of thinking and, in
difficulties may point in the direction of a solution or at least
add1bon, strong enough to bring the nature of the two into the
diminution of the first. If and when that hope is fulfilled we shall
most extreme discord and so to establish their concord?
be in a position to see how some of the things Heidegger and Levinas
say regarding animality and art stand out in relief when viewed
Martin Heidegger, What are Poets forr
against the backdrop of Kant's threefold Critique.
Das Schaudern isf der Menschheit bester Teil
Goethe, Faust (cited by Levinas as exergue under 'In Other Words',
the last chapter of Otherwise fhan Being or Beyond Essence)

From the middle of

the 1930s Heidegger's thinking of the belonging
together of Dasein and Sein becomes a thinking of the belonging
to�ethe: of the thinker and the poet, especially the poet of poets
Holderlm who mourns the separation of the gods from their templum
of
and te':'enos, the holy precinct set apart. But for this poet the time
moumm the departed gods is a time. of prayerful waiting for the
�
new. It 1s a between-time in which the poet who medjates between
the im�ortals and the mortals awaits a second coming with a
prese�t�ment of a presence that will inaugurate another epoch of
the h1story of being that will be discontinuously continuous with an
� �
ea�lier, houg it may take a reflective thinker to recognise this. Even
.
Holderlm, He1degger maintains, was unaware of the force of the
primal word phusis and hence was not trying to recapture that force in
the word Nature, the name he nvoked
i for the light which, since what
the poet invokes itself puts the poet under an obligation to say it'
Holderlin also called the holy.
How do�s Heidegger understand the relationship between the poet
and the th1nker? What we have just said about this suggests that
although the poet performs the seriality of the historically having-

89
90 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
been with the historically to-come, knotting together the end of one
epoch and the beginning of another, if we may here use the metaphor
from Levinas which is analysed by Derrida in 'En ce moment meme
clans cet ouvrage me void ', the thinker, like Hegel's Owl of Minerva,
constates how the knot ties the severed past to the present and how
other epochs of the history of being have been discontinuously (and
undialectically) tied, even if not even he can prophesy how a present
epoch or interregnum will tie up with whatever is to come. Not that
this suggestion amounts to much until from Austin's How fo do things
with Words, Derrida's Mochlos and some of the essays included in his
Psyche we have learned how complex is the relationship of constating
and (other kinds of) linguistic performance.
The relationship of poet to thinker on Heidegger's conception is
not without its complexity. He says that the thinker prepares the way
for the poet. That preparation could be understood along the lines
just suggested. If the poet learned something from the reflective
thinker about the forces that shape the past and the present, that
would already give a head start to his prophetic vision. But does that
mean that the poet needed in the time of need is the one who has
read the reflections of the philosopher, as Holderlin was a reader of
Fichte, Schelling and Hegel7 Or is he perhaps the poet who is a poet
and thinker rolled into one, as Holderlin also was: a denkende Dichter 1
Denken and Dichten do not belong to each other through some
historico-biographkal contingency. The poet and the thinker belong
to each other, Heidegger says, because the vocation of each is caring
for the word. It follows that they must care for each other. Yet, as
Heidegger says 1n the lecture 'The Essence of Language' where the
question of the neighbourhood of the thinker and the poet is
resumed, 'We find ourselves at a loss for words (ratios) between
two wholly different kinds of saying' (G12 18 4 US 195, OWL 89)
, get together on one summit or in the cleft between, Gedachfes would
and at a loss for words of advice. The thinker does not speak the
language of the poet and the poet does not speak the language of the
thinker. Heidegger's readers may well find themselves at a loss, for
whereas in the Postscript, dating from 1943 and 1949, which
Heidegger appended to 'What is Metaphysics?' we read that while
the thinker says being, the poet names the holy, in the lecture given
in 1939 and 1940 on Holderlin's hymn Wie wenn am Feiertage . . . we
read Das Heilige ist das Wesen der Natur (G4 59). If we translate Wesen
by 'essence', 'essencing' or 'presencing' we have The holy is the
essence (essencing, presencing) of nature', and the immediately
following sentence, Diese enthullt als das Tagende ihr Wesen im
Post-Critical Poiesis and Thinking 91
Erwachen, becomes 'In awak(en)ing nature as break of day unveils
its essence'. Similarly with what Heidegger calls the guide-word Das
Wesen der Sprache: Die Sprache des Wesens (G12 189, US ZOO, OWL
94). If this means that the essence of language must be understood
through the language of essence or essencing - as confirmed by what
Heidegger writes in the Note to 'On the Essence of Truth' which says
'the essence of truth is the truth of essence' (G9 101, BW 140) - then,
taking this statement with the statement in 'Holderlin and the Essence
of Poetry' that 'the essence of poetry must be understood through the
essence of language' (G4 43, EHD 40, EB 307), it is not rash to infer
that if the thinker is to understand the essence of poetry he must
understand the language of essence. It is not rash to suppose also that
if he is to understand the essence of poetry he must be a reader of the
poetic or, since by poetry here is meant originative art of any genre,
he must have first-hand experience of poiesis, as Heidegger does. Is
he not a thinker and, in the specific literary sense of the genre, a poet
rolled into one, a dichtende Denker? Do the verses published under the
heading Gedachtes constitute a new genre? Or do they defeat
classification? That they do is perhaps what one of them, the one
entitled 'Cezanne', indicates when it asks
Zeigt sich hier ein Pfad, der in ein Zusam­
mengehiiren des Dichtens und Denkens
fuhrt?
where the abrupt Aus-einander-setzung of the hyphenated parts of the
word Zusammengehiiren mimicks the deep cleft between the summits
opt which the poet and the thinker, as Holderlin's poem 'Patmos' says,
dwell near one another on mountains quite separate.1 If they cannot
seem to b e the name for a wishful thinking for the offspring of an
impossible union of Dichten and Denken.
Although, in so far as it is a task of thinking to understand the
essence of poetry, the poet must prepare the thinker's way, it is
usually to the thinker that Heidegger assigns the role of Wegbereiter.
For example, near the end of The Origin of the Work of Art' he says
that only 'reflective' or way-making knowledge, das besinnende Wissen,
as illustrated by the work of thinking on the work of art that has been
going forward in his preceding pages, 'prepares its space for art, their
way for the creators, their location for the preservers' (GS 66, H 65,
PLT 78). And in his discussion of Holderlin' s hymn The Rhine' he
92 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
writes: The ring has dosed itself. The poet calls for (fordert) the
thinker. The thinking of the poet - "Half-gods do I think" - grounds
itself in the poetic saying of the thinker' (G39 286). Are we to
understand that when in The Saying of Anaximander' Heidegger says
'Thinking however is poetry', Das Denken jedoch ist Dichten (G5 328,
H 303, EGT 19), he means that thinking calls and is called by poetry,
that Denken heisst Dichlen and Dichten heisst Denken, that Heidegger
considers Dichten to be always as much the ancilla of Denken as vice
versa? That this is so is at least not contradicted by the following
sentences of the Introduction fo Metaphysics :
The thinking of Parmenides and Heraclitus was still poetic, which
in this case means philosophical and not scientific. But because in
this thinking the thinking has priority, the thought about man's
being follows from its own direction and proportion. In order to
gain enough light for us to be able to begin to understand how this
poetic thinking belongs together with and hearkens to its counter­
partner (van seiner ihm zugehdrigen Gegenseite), let us ask after the
poetic thinking of the Greeks, in particular that podry in which the
being of the Greeks and their Dasein (which belongs and hearkens
to it) was authentically founded: the tragedy. (G40 153, EM 110,
IM 122)
We are told here that thinking has priority over poetry in the poetic
thinking of Parmenides and Heraclitus. In some other poetic thinking,
perhaps that of �eidegger or a thinker thinking after him, the thinker
and the poet might each whisper into the other's ear. Is not that
possibility suggested by the statement that poetic thinking hearkens
to thinking poetry and that it belongs with it?
In the lecture on Holderlin's 'The Rhine', a lecture of approximately
the same period as the /nfroduction fo Metaphysics, Heidegger says:
The basic temper of a people, and that means the truth of its
existence (Dasein), is originally established thanks to (durch) the poet.
But only thanks to the thinker is this uncovered being of beings
comprehended, ordained and opened as such . . .' (G39 144). Here the
'But' (aber) is the mirror image of the 'however' (jedoch) in the
sentence Thinking however is poetry' cited above from The Saying
of Anaximander'. The latter sentence tells us not to overlook the
place of poetry. The former sentence tells us not to overlook the
place of thinking. Putting the two sentences together would �eem to
yield an argument for equiprimordiality. That this is what He1degger
Post-Critical Poiesis and Thinking 93
intends is confirmed in the following passage from 'The Saying of
Anaximander':
The thinking of being is the originative mode of poetry. In it above
all does language first come to language, that is to say, into its
essence. Thinking is originative dictare. Thinking is primordial
poetry, prior to all poesy, but also to the poietic in art in so far
as (insofern) the work of art is brought into being within the
precinct (Bezirk) of language. All poetry in this wider sense as well
as in the narrower sense of the poetic is in its ground a thinking.
The poietic essence of thinking preserves the sway of the truth of
being. (G5 328-9, H 303, EGT 19)
Heidegger does not give us definitions of thinking and poetry.2
There is no classification. Why not? One answer to this question is
that classification is about the beingness of beings, whereas since at
least as early as Being and Time he is asking after a sense of being
which is not just that; he is asking after the sense in the sense of the
direction (Sinn) and history of being in which beingness is but the
metaphysical phase. In the sentences just reproduced it is the non­
conceptual sense of being that is at stake, and the thinking in question
there is the thinking of being in that primordial sense. So it will be
with being in that primordial sense that we are concerned when we
ask after the being of poetry. Although, as Heidegger writes n i the
Postscript of What is Metaphysics?', the poet and the thinker reside,
in the phrase he quotes from Holderlin, near each other on mountains
deeply divided,3 the essence of poetry cannot be split off from the
essence of being since essence or essencing is the sway of being. The
passage now n i question does, we must note, distinguish primordial
from non-primordial poetry, or, more generally, art, a distinction
which is not to be confused with the distinction between poetry,
which may be primordial or non-primordial, and poesy, which
likewise may be primordial or non-primordial in that it is one,
though maybe a privileged, form of art. No parallel distinction is
made in this passage between primordial and non-primordial thinking.
Heidegger is concerned here only with that thinking which is the
thinking of being in the pre-conceptual sense, prior to the idea of
beingness. This follows from the fact that, as he has told us elsewhere,
the 'of in the phrase 'thinking of being' marks a double genitive.
Poetry or art or political legislation may be more or less institutive.
But 'in their ground', essentially, they are primordially institutive. To
 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
94
state this is to state a tautology. Essence, being, presencing is, as the
saying of Parmenides says, thinking, and belongs together with the
thinker, with Dasein. And here thinking, logos, is language, logos, since
only essential thinking or the thinking of essences is intended, only
originative dicfare, dighting, Dichten, poiesis.
ll
So is there no difference between the dichfende Denker and the
denkende Dichter 7 It is not enough to say that the poet sings his
words while the thinker just says them. This might be no more than a
difference between poesy and prose, whereas Dichten can be either.
There is also another possible source of confusion. At the end of the
lecture 'Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry' Heidegger says, referring
to the seventh stanza of Holderlin's 'Bread and Wine', What it has
only been possible to analyze intellectually is expressed there
poetically.' He then brings what he has to say to a close by citing
that stanza. In the lecture on 'The Essence of Language' he quotes the
first stanza of Holderlin's elegy 'Walk in the Country', then breaks off,
saying 'It must be left to you, my audience, to think about these
verses in the light of what my three lectures are attempting.' In the
Freiburg inaugural lecture he quotes not a single line of poetry, but
on the final page of the Postscript to it written four years later he
finds himself citing Sophocles. That even the Professor of Philosophy
cannot help breaking into song tells us something about the
difference betweien poetry, which just happens here to be also
poesy, and the assertive style of the lecture. It tells us little about
the difference between Dichten and Denken because the assertive style
of the lecture is no friendlier to the latter than it is to the former.
They both call for the non-assertive, monstrative saying for which
Heidegger uses the word 'say' with the force of the Old Norse sagan,
meaning 'to show: to make appear, set free, that is, to offer and
extend what we call world, lighting and concealing it' (G12 188, US
200, OWL 93). Sagan (or Sagen in this sense) is the common root of
Dichfen and Denken, the previously mentioned dictare. From that root
spring the two stems of which Heidegger speaks when in the
Postscript to 'What is Metaphysics?' he writes The thinker says
being, the poet names the holy' (G5 9, W 107, EB 391). If 'saying'
here is primordial Sagan we should expect Heidegger to allow that
the poet also says. He does allow this. In Das Gedicht he writes
i and Thinking
Posf-Crifical Poies s 95
'Naming is a Saying, namely a showing . .' (G4 188}. In 'What are
.
Poets for?' he writes 'the poet in the time of the world's night says
the holy' (G5 2 72, H 251, PLT 94).
Most surprising of all is the statement in 'Hi:ilderlin and the Essence
of Poetry' that 'poetry is the inaugural naming of being and of the
essence of all things' (G4 43, EHD 40, EB 307). lt seems that
Heidegger is licensing an interchange not only between naming
and saying but also between the holy and being in these contexts,
as Robert Bernasconi maintains.4 This does not mean however that
the thinker and the poet differ only in name and that we have to
surrender the one substantial point of difference we believed we had
established by which to maintain the separateness that according to
Heidegger himself qualifies the nearness of the poet and the thinker,
the extreme discord of their concord, as he expresses the relationship
in 'What are Poets for?' The thinker, in so far as he attempts to grasp
the essence of poetry, must still wait upon the poet to prepare the
way. Although Heidegger says 'the essence of poetry must be
grasped through the essence of language', lower down in the same
paragraph he says 'the essence of language must be grasped through
the essence of poetry'. This magnifies the contribution poetry makes
to thinking. It allows us to subshtute 'in that' or 'because' for the
uncommitted 'in so far as' (insofern) in the fourth sentence of the
passage reproduced from 'The Saying of Anaximander'. Although in
this passage Heidegger speaks of primordial poetry, implying that
there is also a non-primordial kind, all poetry is in its ground a
thinking. A thinking (ein Denken), he says: a thinking which is a
thinking of being, but a thinking for and in which the appropriate
mode of monstrative saying is naming, 'the inaugural naming of being
and of the essence of all things'.
There appears to be at least one limit on the interchangeability of
'naming' and 'saying', and of 'the holy' and 'being' in the aphorism in
the Postscript to 'What is Metaphysics?' Although Heidegger leaves
open the possibility of making both substitutions in the second half of
the aphorism, 'the poet names the holy', we have discovered no
evidence that in the first half, 'the thinker says being', he would allow
either. The poet says namingly the holy and the being and the
essence of all things. The thinker, as such, says being non-namingly.
What is non-naming saying? It is saying the as such. The poet names,
but he does not grasp what naming is. This does not mean that he
cannot name names. This is what the poet of poets does. Hi:ilderlin is
the poet of poets because he names the essence of poetry. The thinker
 96 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
grasps the essence understandingly, though this Begreifen is no more a
classification by genus and differentiating properly than is the poet's
naming. One reason why it is not is the dependence of the thinker on
the poet. The thinker thinks and says being, language is the house of
being, and 'the essence of language must be understood through the
' essence of poetry'. That is, the essencing of language must be grasped
through the essencing or presencing which is the enabling of a world,
the world-forming, Weltbildung, which is one and the same with the
word-forming, Wortbildung, of the poet. especially the poet 'in the
world's night', the night of pre-Adamic chaos or the night of the time
of need when the names of the gods are missing from the precinct of
language and, to say the same thing in another way, the gods have
forsaken the precinct of the temple.
So according to Heidegger essential thinking calls for primordial
poetry; the latter is ancillary to the former. In Holderlin's words,
thinking is Zu Sorg' und Diensf den Dichtenden arwertraut, 'entrusted to
the care and service of the poets' (G4 41, EHD 38, EB 304), in that
the thinking of being cannot come to pass without primordial poetry.
Being's thinking is poietic. As noein corresponds with einai, so Dieting
and being correspond, since Dieting is how being thinks, and how
being 'is' or gives itself. Being gives itself in thinking and thinking
gives itself in language. Thinking is the way the verbality of being's
participiality presents itself. H is adverbial to that verbality. Dieting is
adverbial to that adverbiality, as is marked in the phrase dichtendes
Denken des Seins, poietic thinking of being, where what Heidegger
wants to say is concealed if we parse this as an adjective followed by
two nouns. Ho"vever, although when properly parsed the poietic,
because it is adverbial to an adverb, appears to be allotted a lowly
third place, our analysis shows that it has the dignity of being a sine
qua non of the thinking of being. It has at least as important a place as
Hegel allots to art in the history of the appearing of philosophy.
Since according to Hegel it is no more than philosophy's self-effacing
servant in spite of its being conserved by philosophy, art according
to Heidegger has a much more important place. Before asking in the
following section of this chapter how important a place is given to art
in the philosophy of Levinas, let us put into the Critical context
treated in our immediately preceding chapter what we have been
saying so far here, highlighting the thesis we draw froin what we
have been saying in this chapter in anticipation of what we shall be
saying in the next.
Post-Critical Poiesis and Thinking 97
By the poietic. Dichten, Heidegger means not the arts as such, for
example p9esy. architecture or painting. He means the origin of
language, the way in which language is an origin, as the originativity
of art is referred to in the title 'The Origin of the Work of Art'.
Heidegger's thinking of poiesis is a rethinking of that poiesis which
Kant had in mind when he spoke of the productive imagination as an
art concealed in the depths of the human soul. What emerges from his
attempt to uncover this art is that both the bifidity of Kant's
temporalising schema, torn between the sensory particularity of
reference or nomination and the universality of predicative descrip­
tion and intellectual sense, and the duplicity of Kantian respect,
straddled between feeling and reason, are traced back to a letting be
of monstrative language where this 'of is a double genitive prior to a
division that might generate a conflict between the faculties
( Vermogen) of reason, will, understanding and sense, between the
faculties of philosophy, letters, theology, law, science and fine art,
between the de facto and the de jure, between the constative and the
non-constative performative, between theoria, praxis and poiesis
conceived narrowly not as primordial techne but as superstructural
and structural technology and Gesfell. Having in tcye last chapter
referred to Heidegger's response to what Kant says in the Critique of
Pure Reason about the belonging together of sensibility and under­
standing through the productive imagination, and having considered
there Heidegger's response to what Kant says in the Critique of
Practical Reason and other ethical works about the belonging together
of feeling and reason through will and moral respect, our grasp of
how Heidegger conceives the belonging together of these two mutual
belongings stands a chance of being made more secure if in
conjunction with the comparison, to be made in the next section,
of Levinas's and Heidegger' s estimations of art we consider the
latter's response to Kant's account in the Critique of judgement of the
belonging together of feeling. reason and understanding. We shall
find confirmation there and in later chapters of what in the first two
sections of this chapter we have found Heidegger affirming, namely, a
discordant concord, a non-neutral gathering (Sammeln, legein) which is
neither blank identical sameness nor unheeding separation, an
unindifferent belonging together of dichtendes Denken and denkendes
Dichten which unites them as mutual ancillaries in the difference of
their responsibilities: respectively, the saying of the being of beings
and the saying of the being of beings.
 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
98
Ill
5 the term des-interesse-ment in a (lOn-Kantian sense to refer to the
The work of art, Levinas says in 'Reality and its Shadow' (1948), is
disengaged, essentially musical and irresponsible. This statement that
art is disengaged is probably directed at Sartre among others, and it is
an endorsement of the theory of the disinterestedness of art for
which, for good or ill, Kant's third Critique is best known. The
disinterestedness of art, Levinas argues, is a corollary of the fact that
the medium of art is the image. The image suspends the tie with
reality. Reality is replaced not by a concept but by an image which is
pure, unconceptualized sensuous quality and is blind, Levinas says,
applying to art what Kant says about intuition without concepts at
875 of the first Critique and making tacit reference to the thesis
defended in the third Critique that the beautiful is what pleases
universally without being subsumed under a concept.
The kind of pleasure Kant mentions here is not that of any
sensuous experience whatsoever. It is that of the sense of harmony
between the appearance of organic unity in something and my
imagination which produces organically unified patterns by its own
free play. One takes this sense to be a shared sense and, although the
object of aesthetic experience is singular and the experience
subjective, a judgement of taste makes a claim to universality. No
transcendental concept or principle can be deduced to warrant this
claim, but in the case of what Kant terms appendent (adhiirierende)
beauty a concept may be involved in the play of imagination, as
when I perceive/ a picture as a picture of a jug or perceive the utensil
itself. Pure beauty however is beauty unassociated with either the
pleasure of non-aesthetic sensations or the notion of an object's
utility. Pure beauty is purposefulness without purpose. Hence Kant's
preference for beauty where the concept involved is indeterminate, as
in the case of a purely formal organization, for example the pattern of
notes in a piece of music. Nevertheless, because Kant takes music to
deal only with sensations, he rates it the lowest of the fine arts.
Levinas, at least at the time of writing 'Reality and its Shadow',
does not rate music much higher, yet he, like Waiter Pater, considers
it to be the paradigm of art, especially because rhythm is what
explains why art has the magic power to bemuse us and absorb our
interest. Thus, although he agrees with Kant that art is disinterested,
in the sense of being of no utiljty, he maintains at the same time that
art is in a special sense interesting. In maintaining this he is thinking
Post-Critical Poiesis and Thinking 99
of the etymological root inter-esse. In contemplating a work of art I
am outside myself among things. However, this being outside myself
must not be confused with the exteriority for which Levinas employs
exteriority of the Other in the ethical face to face. The work of art
does not lead even to dialogue. It is outside society. It is not even
being in the world, he says, with an unmistakable allusion to
Heidegger which leads us to ask how Heidegger would receive the
ideas. about art expressed in 'Reality and its Shadow' as we have
expounded them so far.
First, with regard to the statement that contemplation of a work of
art is not a way of being in the world, Heidegger's lectures on
Holderlin and The Origin of the Work of Art' contend that if great
originative art is in some sense not in the world it is because it is
between worlds, holding a passing world in remembrance and
enabling the institution of a world to come. Its time is the moment
before the dawn. Levinas himself states that art belongs to a between­
time, but the between-time he describes is the middle of the night,
not that of the moment before dawn. Or else it is the time of the
waking dream between consciousness and unconsciousness, a time
outside of time, a time of petrification, of idolatry and of a rehearsal
of death in which all initiative is sapped and all responsibilities
evaded.
Art can indee�}e evasion, and much that Levinas says rings true
of much that pa"s"Ses for experience of art, but what Heidegger has to
say in the lectures we have mentioned is expressly restricted to what
he calls the great and inaugurative work, art which, in revealing the
opening of a world and the conceaHng withdrawal that he argues is
concomitant with all disclosure of truth, reveals, unlike the fabricated
utensil, its having been created. Is Levinas's reluctance to grant that
art can be disclosive and originative in this way a consequence of
regarding the artist and those who approach his work as no more
than passive recipients? He says that all art is plastic image and that
imaging is inertial passivity. lmaging understood in this Berkeleian
way is contrasted with the free initiative and power of 'I can' which
Levinas takes to be implied in Heidegger's notion of Seinkdnnen. As
we argued in the last chapter, this reading of Heidegger has too little
regard for the possibility of Seinlassen which Heidegger's Seinkdnnen
must admit. It does not tally with the way Heidegger reads Kant's
first and second Critiques to articulate letting-be. Heidegger's
Seinlassen is outside the opposition of praxis and pathos and, while
100 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
it is some distance (how great a distance remains to be seen) from
what Levinas describes as a passivity more passive than the pas� ivity
traditionally opposed to activity, the ambiguous, januarial and �Iddle­
voiced logic of Seinlassen makes it easy to under� tand �hy � n he � Paradoxically, however, the peak of humanity, the real wonder of
1930s the poet comes to occupy a place in Heide�ge� s tht�kin�
which in some respects corresponds to the place occupied m Levmas s
thinking by the feminine, which he locates at the portico �o the law,
as women were once confined to the narthex of the basthca. _
Does Heidegger's reading of the third Critique imply that he would
find Levinas guilty of the misreading with � hich he charg:s
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche? ln the study of Ntet�sche b;gun m
1936 Heidegger picks up what in the lectures on Holderh _ _ s h�n
� Heidegger ascribes and believes Kant ascribes to man's relation to the
Germanien delivered in 1934-5 he says about the mubhty
(UneigenniUzigkeil) of the holy (G39 86-7). He maintains th�t
_
�
Schopenhauer and, following him, Nietzsche are dou ly wrong m
their interpretation of Kant's doctrine of the beautiful Ftrst, they take
:
the positive part of that doctrine to be the idea that tt _IS what ts free
of interest which pleases us in the experience of the beautiful,_ whereas
this is only the negative and preliminary part of Kant's account.
Second, having thus mistaken the part for the whole, they go on to
suppose incorrectly that the suspension of 'inter�st' amo�nts to the
exclusion of any essential relationship to the object. Levmas, as we
have noted, does at least insist that the so-called suspension of
interest does not rule out interest in the sense of an involvement with
the object. He even adds that this involvement is essentiaL of the
essence, because it is involvement in being; though he denies, as we
have also noted, that it is being in the world. This involvement is a
sort of being lo�t to the world, a condition he describes with the help
of a term he borrows from Levy-Bruhl. Levy-Bruhl uses the term
'participation' of what he describes as the primitive, 'pre-logical'
affective mentality for which 'the opposition between the one and
the many, same and other, etc., does not impose the necessity to
affirm one of the terms if the other is denied, and vice versa'. Thts _
statement of the 'law of participation' is made in a book entitled Les
fonctions mentales dans les societs e inferieures.6 Although, like Freud
when he writes that the principle of contradiction is suspended in
dreams, Levy-Bruhl does not mean that this state of mind is pr� ­
�
logical in the sense of anterior to the logic of co�tr_adiction ut that tt
_
is one into which members of so-called non-pnmibve societies may
lapse, the last word of the title of the book suggests that _this would
indeed be a lapse. It must already be plain that when Levmas adapts
Post-Critical Poiesis and Thinking 101
Levy-Bruhl's term to interpret the aesthetic state of mind in which, as
the poet says, one cannot distinguish oneself from the music, he gives
far lower marks to art than does Heidegger or even Hegel.
all wonders, that I am face to face with another human being, the
ethical and metaphysical relation of all relationships, in its way defeats
the logic of the law of contradiction as that logic is defeated by the
primitive mental state that conforms to Levy-Bruhl's law of participa­
tion. If this Gipfel of humanity is, as Levinas maintains, exterior to the
exteriority of the experience of art, the essentiality of the relation, if it
is right to talk of a relation here, cannot be the essentiality which
work of art.
One of Levinas's reasons for maintaining that this height of
humanity is exterior to the exteriority of the experience of art must
be put in proper perspective. When he speaks of the face to face
encounter he is not speaking of a state of mind such as might be
enjoyed by someone listening to a sonata by Vinteuil when, as Proust
writes, 'the imagination is freed from time'. But it has to be said that
what Heidegger means by the coming to pass of truth in art is not a
state of mind either.
When Levinas says that the between-time of art is a rehearsal of
death it is a rather less dignified rehearsal of death than that as which
the Phaedo regards philosophy. The dead time of art on Levinas's
view is the time of my being toward my death as described in Being
arul Time, my precipitate elan de mort. It is as though in 'Reality and
its Shadow' Levinas were saying that a philosopher whose interpreta­
tion of time and of Dasein's being in the world takes its guideline
from Dasein's being toward its own death could be expected to be
recasting his interpretation before long in the light of what he thinks
about the work of art. It is only by placing the death of Dasein and
the death of art within the contextless context of the death of the
other that we can hope to arrive at a viable interpretation of time in
which the coming to pass of death is itself surpassed, overcome by an
immemorial diachronic past which has no need of art to console us for
the death of god.
Referring to the 1948 article, with no sign that in the interval he
has changed his mind about anything he says in it, Levinas writes the
following sentences in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974)
about the immemorial past and my incontractual responsibility to the
orphan, the widow and the stranger not to let them die alone:
102 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
The immemorial past is intolerable for thought. Thus there is an
exigency to stop: arumke sfenai. The movement beyond being
becomes ontology and theology. And thus there is also an idolatry
of the beautiful. In its indiscrete exposition and in its arrest in a
statue, in its plasticity, a work of art substitutes itself for God . . . .
By an irresistible subreption, the incomparable, the diachronic, the
non-contemporaneous, through the effect of a marvellous schemat­
ism, is 'imitated' by art, which is iconography. The movement
beyond being is fixed in beauty. Theology and art 'retain'
(retiennenf) the immemorial past. (AEAE 191. OBBE 199)
That is to say, theology and art hold back the immemorial past as one
holds back a word, the word hineni, 'Here am l; send me'.
So the thinker of the death of god, Nietzsche, is a theologian. How
does this portrait of the artist-philosopher compare with the portrait
Heidegger paints of the/poet-thinker?
In the section of the study of Nietzsche to which we have referred
Heidegger quotes from The Will to Power (804) the statement 'The
beautiful exists just as little as the good, the true', commenting that
this is also very much the view of Kant (G43 129, N I 131, trans. I
111). That would not prevent Nietzsche and Kant being polytheolo­
gians, we can imagine Levinas saying in line with his assertions that
poet�thinkers are polytheists and that 'The proscription of images is
truly the supreme commandment of monotheism', that is to say of
non theological ethics which holds not that we are waiting for the
- part? Having spoken of this 'thrill that comes of being in our world
advent of a being but that the one and only god has already come in
the person of the other man, the only imago Dei that is possible since
this imago is the ethical human face, not a plastic image or fa<;ade. The
poet-thinker, Levinas implies, is inclined to think that the artist
himself is a god in so far as he takes himself to be a creator or at least
a messenger of the gods to the extent that he believes himself to be a
revealer. Indeed, it might look from what Heidegger goes on to say
about Kant and Nietzsche that this man-god or revealing archangel
makes the world in his own image or reveals his own image in it. And
lo, he sees that it is good:
The beautiful is what we find honourable and worthy, as the image
of our essential nature. It is that upon which we bestow
'unconstrained favour' (die freie Gunst), as Kant says, and we do
so from the very foundation of our essential nature and for its sake�
(G43 131, N I 132, trans. I 112)
Post-Critical Poiesis and Thinking 103
Once we make allowance, Heidegger continues, for Nietzsche's
misconstrual of Kant which, as we might put it, confuses disinter­
estedness with uninterestedness, we realize that what Nietzsche
describes as 'the thrill (das Enfzucken) of being in our world now' is
nothing other than what Kant calls the 'pleasure of reflection' in our
experience of the beautiful. This experience must not be conceived of
course as a psychological state of mind. It is a fundamental way of
being.
Kanfs interpretation of aesthetic behaviour as 'pleasure of reflec­
tion' propels us toward a basic state of human being in which man
for the first time arrives at a well-grounded fullness of his essence.
It is the state that Schiller conceives of as the condition of the
possibility of man's existence as historical, as grounding history.
Why is this reference to Schiller so significant? Because of his
doctrine of the sublime. The word 'sublime' does not occur in the
sec tion of Heide ��er's :Vietzsche which we have been considering.
.
Th1s 1s not surpnsmg g1ven that the title of the section announces
that it is about Kant's doctrine of the beautiful. However, in both
Kant's and in $chiller's Kantian doctrine of the sublime there is a
pronounced tendency to try to capture the sublime in art and nature
for humanity. Is this tendency manifest in the sentence from
Nietzsche which Heidegger cites and of which we have cited a
now' Nietzsche immediately adds that this thrill is the thrill of
'getting rid of the anxiety in the face of things foreign (die Angst
vor dem Fremden loszusein)'. When we get rid of our anxiety in the face
of things foreign do the things foreign become things in our world? It
is not obvious that they do. What would Heidegger's answer to this
question be? He writes:
According to the explanation by Nietzsche which we have cited,
the beautiful is what determines us, our behaviour and our
capability (unser Verhalten und Verm6gen), to the extent that we
are claimed supremely in our essence, which is to say, to the extent
that we ascend beyond ourselves. Such ascent beyond ourselves, to
the full of our essential c a p ab ility (in der Fulle unseres
Wesensvermt5gens) occurs according to Nietzsche in rapture
{Rausch). The beautiful itself is what transports us into the feeling
of rapture.
104 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
Is the ascendence beyond ourselves (uber-uns-weg-Steigen), is the (to
borrow the word Levinas borrows from jean Wahl) 'transascendence'
here attributed to the sentiment of the beautiful a foretaste of the
sublime, an imbrication of the sublime upon the beautiful? Schiller
seems to give two answers to this difficult question. The so-called
energetic or energizing (energische) beauty mentioned in the Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Letters of On the Aesthenc Education of Man is
difficult to distinguish from what he elsewhere entitles a form of the
sublime.7 It is as though he were wittingly or unwittingly assimilating
the sublime to the beautifuL binding the unbounded. Kant makes the
distinction, corresponding to his distinction between the understand­
ing and reason, between the beautiful in nature as the property of a
bounded object and the sublime as the property of what _IS
unbounded supplemented by an idea of the finality grounded in
our reason rather than in our sensuous experience of nature as in the
conception of natural beauty. This idea of finality grounded in reason
is what is missing from our experience of the terrifying (griisslich), and
is what makes the difference between it and our experience of the
sublime. The stormy ocean is terrifying but not sublime. Perhaps
Schiller is thinking of such manifestations when he distinguishes
energetic from melting (schmelzende) beauty. Kant remarks that r:'an is
_
prone to regard a storm at sea as though it were a mamfestahon of
the wrath of God. But the God thus fancied is a god of human
superstition. If the idea of God is present in the experience of
sublimity it is the idea of God within the bounds of reason, the God
in whose holiness man shares, in that both are citizens of the kingdom
of ends where the only fundamental principle is the moral law.
Sublimity even in nature is really sublimity in the rational aspect of
human nature. The feeling of sublimity arises from one's sense of
being more than sensibility. It is a recognition of a human disposition
that is consonant with God's will.
Sublimity, therefore, does not reside in any of the things of nature,
but only in our mind, in so far as we may become conscious of our
superiority over nature within, and thus also over nature without
us (as exerting influence upon us). Everything that provokes this
feeling in us, including the might (Macht) of nature which
challenges our strength, is then, though improperly, called
sublime, and it is only under presupposition of this idea within
us, and in relation to it, that we are capable of attaining to the idea
of the sublimity of that Being which inspires deep respect in us, not
Post-Critical Poiesis and Thinking 105
by the mere display of its might in nature, but more by the faculty
which is planted in us of estimating that might without fear, and of
regarding our estate as exalted above it.
The section of which this is the final paragraph, §28 of the Critique of
Aesthetic ]udgement,8 is entitled 'Nature as Might' and is perhaps what
Heidegger is thinking of when on page 70 of Being and Time he uses
the phrase 'the might of nature'. The last sentence of this last
paragraph is perhaps what Nietzsche is thinking of when he writes
of 'getting rid of our anxiety in the face of things foreign', one of the
phrases Heidegger cites in his discussion of Schopenhauer's and
Nietzsche's interpretation of Kant's doctrine of the beautiful. The
paragraph must be one Schiller is thinking of when he writes in On
the Ground of the Enjoyment of Things Tragic that the feeling of the
sublime is in part a feeling of the limits of our own power to master
an object, in part a feeling of our power to master it thanks to our
moral or, as he says, spiritual (geisfig) superiority. Having distin­
guished the beautiful from the sublime by saying that the former is
bounded and the latter unbounded, Schiller and Kant endeavour to
bind the unboundedness and, as we expressed it earlier, to subjugate
nature to man. On the one hand, especially in his writings on ethics
and in Religion wifhin the Bounds of Reason Alone, Kant underlines the
way in which human nature transcends itself. On the other hand, he
underlines the way in which this transcendence--is ..immanent. This is
very Greek, as the Greek is described by Heidegger in the Introduction
to Metaphysics, where he says 'Among the Greeks there were no
personalities (and for the same reason no supra-personality). Man is to
deinotaton, the strangest of the strange' (G40 158, EM 114, IM 125).
_ 9
Heidegger is commenting on the first chorus of Sophocles' Antigone:
There is much that is strange, but nothing
that surpasses man in strangeness.
So is man's transascendence an ascendence beyond himself and to
himself such as Heidegger believes he discerns, with good reason as
we have seen, in Kant's acccount of the relation of man's personality
to the holy? We have also seen now that the account of the sublime
with which the third Critique expands on the second and articulates its
link with the Critique of Pure Reason retotalizes a detotalized totality,
and that although being toward nothingness and death is what makes
possible the totality of Dasein, this is a totality that is never at home
106 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
with itself The dei non of Sophocles is 'the strange, the uncanny (das
.
Unheimliche) . . . which casts us out of the homely
" ", i.e. the
customary, familiar, secure.' It is not any thing that can be grasped
by the scientific understanding, for example by psychology. 'What is
meant by deinon here . . . must not be interpreted as invention or as a
mere faculty (Verm6gen) or disposition of man.' It can be disclosed
only to poetic thinking. The poetic comprised in denkendes Oichten
and dichtendes Denken is an enseignemenf, whatever hesitation Levinas
may manifest over whether the poetic can teach. Whether it can will
depend on what one means by 'ensignment'. Before asking what
Levinas means by this we must take note of his response to what
Heidegger says regarding the gift, grace or favour of being.
In llber Anmut und Wurde Schiller asserts that 'Grace can be said to
be a favour (Gunst) which is granted to what is sensuous by what is
moral' and in the Critique of judgement Kant sp eaks of 'unconstrained
favour', a phrase we have found Heidegger mentioning in his study of
Niet zsche. In the Postscript to 'What is Metaphysics?' he writes:
Original thin king (the fourth edition of 1943 has 'thanking') is the
echo of the favour of being wherein. a space is cleared and an
advent effected by the unexampled truth: that what has being is.
This echo is man's response to the word of the soundless voice of
being. The response of thinking (the fourth edition has 'The
speechless response of thanking through sacrifice') is the origin
of the human Word, the Word that first enables la�§uage as the
bruiting abroad of words to anse. (G9 310, EB 389)
Levinas's response to these words is to say that prior to the favour
of being to which original thinking responds is the immemorial past
of the response that is prior to any question: 'Here am l; send me'.
This response is the responsibility anticipating the command of
another mortal human being. The response of original thinking of
which Heidegger speaks here is the responsibility toward being - or
toward existence as the title of one of Levinas's early books
somewhat riskily says. Now although it looks as though Heidegger
agrees with the chorus of Antigone that there is nothing more strange
than man, there is no suggestion that more strange than man as
Dasein is man as the Other, as the stranger. Nowhere is there a hint
of the fearful asymmetry of the face to face. Therefore nowhere
should we expect to find in the writings of Heidegger an endorse­
ment of Levinas's claim that I am more respo nsible than anyone else.
Post-Critical Poiesis and Thinking 107
On the other hand, although it might seem possible to mark the
radical difference between Heidegger's teaching and Levinas's by
saying that in the former the donation of being is primary whereas in
the latter what is primary is my respon sibility to give myself to the
other man, we must not forget what he says in the paragraph we
have just read, that responsib il ity toward being for Heidegger is at
the same time res ponsibility toward the word. We must not forget
the double genitivity - of which the word Da-sein is already a
reminder - which means that our, Dasein's responsibi lity toward
,
being and the word is a responsibilit y of being and the word. Now f i
Heidegger's texts support the reading that responsibility toward
bein g is inseparable from responsibility toward beings, there may
be room in Heidegger's thinking not only for responsibilit y toward
those beings that seem to get short shrift in Levinas's thi nking ,
namely the non-human and non-divine, but responsibility too for
those beings that are at the centre of Levinas's thinking namely ,
human beings the human existents Levinas refers to in the title of his
,
early book. Further, this latter responsibi lity will be as basic a s
res ponsibility toward being, since it will be part and parcel of what is
meant by responsibility toward being. Responsibility toward beings is
blind if it is not at the same time responsibility toward being; but
responsibility toward being is empty, abstract and irresponsible if it is
not at the same time responsibility toward beings. The responsibilit y
here will not be that of specific ethical obligations. Just as Levinas's
'first word', Thou shalt not kill', is not regarded by him as a specific
ethical imperative but as having a status more like that of the
fundamental principle of Kant's metaphysics of morals (excep t that
it is not a pri nciple, but the n
i finite signifiance of the other's dire), so
when we seek in Heidegger an ontology or quasi-ontology of
obligation we shall be concerned not primarily with the specifically
ethical but with the being with others in the being toward death
which manifests itself in the historical social institutions and structures
which enable my being toward and for others (G39 73).
This proposal for a readi ng of Heidegger would do justice to the
human, the animaL the plant and the inorganic world in the way that
appears not to be done at least on our reading of Levinas so far.
Objections to this reading of Heidegger will be considered more
closely in later chapters Let us deal immediately with two of them.
.
First, what about the obstacle which migh t appear to be presented
by Heidegger's remark The thinking of bei ng seeks no hold in what
is' (G9 311, EB 391)? Whether this is an obstacle depends on what
108 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
Heidegger means by 'hold', Anhalt. If an Anha/t is a Haltestelle, a
stopping place, then we are indeed not to stop at beings. There is no
ananke stenai here. And if what is meant here by Anhalt is a mooring,
prop or support, then of course a being cannot be a support of being.
A being cannot be more fundamental than being either in traditional
onto-theology or in Heideggerian ontology, if we may use this word
of the Heidegger of 1943.
Second, what about Heidegger's statement 'The need is to preserve
the truth of being no matter what may happen to man and all beings'?
Does this mean that responsibility toward being is compatible with
irresponsibility and indifference toward human and other beings? If it
does mean this, what Heidegger is saying in 1943 is incompatible
with what he says in Being and Time about the way care (Sorge)
regarding being implies a certain kind of authentic solicitude (Fiirsorge)
regarding other human beings, even unto their death. It will also be
incompatible with what he says in the 'Letter on Humanism' about
what he appears to be prepared to describe, if somewhat reluctantly,
as a new humanism. Finally, and most relevantly to our present topic,
it will be incompatible with what in The Origin of the Work of Art',
in the essay on The Thing', in 'Building Dwelling Thinking' and in
many other places Heidegger says about non-human beings, whether
natural ones or works of artifice and art. Heidegger's meditation on
the saying of Parmenides regarding the belonging together of being
and thinking can hardly be read as an invitation to {orget the kind of
being whose way of being is to be there, da sein. His later thinking is
incomprehensible unless it is a call to remember also non-human
beings. The insist'ence on concreteness at the beginning of Being and
Time is an insistence on the concreteness of what reflection on that
beginning reveals, and that stress on the concreteness continues to
make itself felt in Heidegger's later work. The requirement of
concreteness is one reason why the poet is the thinker's ancilla.
The sense of the sentence The need is to preserve the truth of
being no matter what may happen to man and all beings' is perhaps
that sacrifices may have to be made in some quarters (and it is of
sacrifices that the sentences following this one speak), if we are to
meet our responsibility to being and to language, a responsibility
without which there can be no question of responsibility to human
and other beings. Further, when in Time and Being' he writes that 'to
think Being without beings means to think Being without metaphy­
sics' (ZSD 25, TB 24) this does not mean that we are not to think of
beings; it means that we are not to think of being as a being, as, for
Post-Critical Poiesis and Thinking 109
example, beingness, but to think it from Ereignis, the advening of
truth. If we are misreading Heidegger here, so be it. That we are not
misreading him is confirmed by his statement in 'The Origin of the
Work of Art' that We ought to turn toward the being, think about it
in regard to its being, but by means of this thinking at the same time
let it rest itself in its own being' (G5 16, H 20, PLT 31). This holds for
the being of all beings in the so-called great chain of being, beginning
with the being whose hand hardly appears at the top of the apsidal
mosaic at Classe, through the two Jews pointing at the man-God on
the mountain, to the symbols of Peter, James and John, and to the
sheep, the birds, the trees, the flowers (are they perhaps Alpine lilies,
campanulas or orchids?) and the rocks on the slopes of the mountain
itself. It holds for any being of which the work of art may speak, so it
holds for this mosaic itself, not only for the tablets of the Mosaic law.
There are lessons to be learned from the work of art, from what in the
wide sense of the word is called Dichtung in Heidegger' s defence of
poetry. Poetry can be an enseignement.
Anticipating what Levinas writes in 'Reality and its Shadow' about
art as bemusement and dream, Heidegger writes in 'Holderlin and the
Essence of Poetry': 'Poetry looks like a game and yet it is not'.
Poetry presents the appearance of the unreal and of dream in the
face of the palpable and clamorous reality in which we believe
ourselves to be at home. And yet in just the reverse manner, what
the poet says and undertakes to be (zu sein iibernimmf) is the real
(G4 45, EHD 42, EB 310).
Anticipating what Levinas writes passim about the face to face
encounter, Heidegger writes in 'The Nature of Language':
We tend to think of face to face encounter exclusively as a relation
between human beings. These lectures too have indeed restricted
face to face encounter to the neighbourhood of poetry and
thinking as modes of saying. We shall for now leave open
whether what we have done here is a restriction or a release.
Yet being face to face with another has a more distant origin; it
originates in the distance where earth and sky, the god and man
reach one another. (G12 199, US 21 1, OWL 103)
What Heidegger seems to be saying here and elsewhere is that the
work of art - and that is what originative discourse is - can teach us
110 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
what it is to be face to face with human beings and with beings that
are not human. This allows at least in principle for the possibility that
man may be in a moral relationship with things of his natural and
artificial environment, in the way that adam, meaning man, and
humanus are said to be cognate with adamah and humus, meaning
earth or dust. Nowhere in our reading of Levinas so far does he seem
to show any sign of admitting such relationships except in so far as
they are derivative from my responsibility to the other man or to
God. And he usually regards works of art as he regards works in
general, works as opposed to what he calls expression. The work is
set loose in the world for anyone to make of it what he or she will,
without the possibility of guidance like we have when the person
addressing us is still there at our shoulder to assist. The work of art is
at the mercy of those who wish to treat it as a commercial product or
a topic of historical, sociological or psychoanalytic research (Tl 201ff.;
226ff.). Heidegger would be the first to agree about the baneful
intrusion of collectors, merchants and even museums into the precinct
of art. But although art can be cunning when it hides itself as Kant
says in the depths of the soul, the Kunsfwerk can also be a Gunstwerk.
And Levinas admits as much when he writes 'As long as the will, in a
being who speaks, takes up again and defends his work against a
foreign will, history lacks the withdrawal it lives from' (TI 203; 229).
Under these circumstances art is expression. The scene is Platonic, up
to a point. There is expression where the other is present, not as in
Plato to ask me questions that will prompt me to discover the truths I
already have stored inside me, but to teach me what is ever new and
ever resists formulation; not to teach me maieutically what is waiting
to be said, but to teach what is not a what, to teach the saying not
the said. That i� why in Totality and Infinity Levinas does not allow,
the assistance of the author to take the form of what the author has
written elsewhere in the 'Complete Works' he leaves 'at the mercy' of
his interpreters. However, we have noted that in Otherwise than Being
or Beyond Essence he stresses that no work is ever complete and that
interpretation is always interruption of the book because, like
scepticism, the author always returns to address his affiliated
posterity. And as early as 1947, a year before the publication of
'Reality and its Shadow', Levinas writes:
But Proust's most profound teaching (enseignement) - if, that is,
poetry (poesie) is capable of teaching - consists in situating the real
in a relation with what remains for ever other, with the Other
Post-Critical Poiesis and Thinking 111
(autrui} as absence and mystery, finding that relation i n th� very
intimacy of the T, and inaugurating a dialectic that breaks
definitively with Parmenides. (NP 156)
Proust was long dead, yet here is Levinas not ruling out the
possibility that A la recherche du temps perdu may be an
enseignement, an ensignment or teaching or token, that is to say a Dire.
By 1972 the not ruling out has become an unhesitant ruling in. His
essay on Paul Celan significantly subtitled 'from being to the other',
takes us to a mountain, not presumably Tabor, nor necessarily Horeb
or Sinai, and apparently not the mountain on which stands
Heidegger's thinker or his poet, the thinking poet who said 'Art is
the passage from nature to culture and from culture to nature' (G39
20}, but a mountain on which two Jews - or one Jew tragically
divided against himself - walk and talk oblivious of the grandeur of
the mountain and blind to the charms of the Alpine carnpanulas and
lilies growing round about. Blind to nature, for, as Celan says,
'always, even today and even here, a Jew and nature, that makes
two'. There is no sign that Levinas, who remarks that in Heidegger's
Feldweg 'there is a tree; we encounter there no men',11 would disagree
with this other Jew, the poet who once walked with this Gentile
thinker on the slopes of Todtnauberg
Orchis und Orchis, einzeln.
There is no sign yet that what is called Levinas's messianism -
which, because 'ethics has a sense even without the promises of the
Messiah' (El 122; 114), no more expects an arrival than Derrida's
post-Johannine and post-Critical Apocalypse expects an Apocalypse
Now - provides for the possibility of a second coming when man is
so transfigured that he sees himself having underived responsibility
toward such things of the natural world as are depicted in the mosaic
at Classe which proclaims 'Hagios, Hagios, Hagios' or 'Qadosh,
Hagios, Sandus' as we prefer to say in memory of Heidegger's
statement that the default of God and the divinities is absence, but
absence which is 'precisely the presence, which must first be
appropriated, of the hidden fullness and wealth of what has been
and what, thus gathered, is presencing, of the divine in the world of
the Greeks, in prophetic Judaism, in the preaching of Jesus' (VA2 57,
PLT 184). According to one interruptive interpretation, the apsidal
mosaic at Classe represents the second coming predicted by Elijah
112 · The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience Post-Critical Poiesis and Thinking 113

that will be salus mundi, the saving of the world (the words are in the
12
mosaic for those who have eyes to see).
Yet there is a sign of an astonishing transfiguration in Levinas's
thinking of art. In 'Reality and its Shadow' the shadow is reconnected
with reality only by criticism. In the essay on Celan, a quarter of a
century l ater, Levinas agrees with the poet that a poem is no different
from a handshake. A handshake is a convention by which two human
beings , Jews or Gentiles, say Hullo and wish each other Goodbye. It
can also be a gesture by which they clinch a deal. But if a poem is no
differen t from a handshake, it is no other than an encounter with the
other, a face t o face with the real. The shadow, the revenant, need
never have lost its grip on the reality of all realities, the wonder of all
wonders, my responsibility to the other man. Not an interlude, but an
interruption of p lay, the poem is both the extreme of receptivity and
the extreme of donation: 'a song reaches upward in giving, in the
one -for-t he other (NP 62, 66), like a hand reaching up to the hand
- '
that reaches down from the apex of the mosaic, the hand of God
which for Levinas is always the hand of the other man.
The wonder of all wonders for Levinas is my responsibility to the
other man. This is a resp onsibility greater than that of anyone else
according to his paraphrase of the lesson he hears being taught in o ne
of the works of art he most frequently invokes to help him express
what he himself would wish to teach. However, his paraphrase
conflates two statements that Dostoevsky has Markel make in The
Brothers Karamazov, and he is prone to omit the three words at the
end of the second of these. What Markel says is, first, 'every one of
us has sinned'. against all men, and I more than any', and then
'everyone is responsible to all men and for everything'. Markel believes
that he has sinned against 'birds, trees, meadows sky'.
,
thinking of poetry, however, we can take some encouragement from
the knowledge that we have the word of Levinas that the voice of
poetry is the voice of pro-phetic responsibility for the other. In asking
whether the other for whom poetry voices responsibility can be other
than the other human being, we shoul d remind ourselves that when
Levinas agrees with Celan and Blanchot that a poem is an affirmation
of the one-for-the-other, no more than Heidegger is he speaking of
poetry in the sense of poesie or Gedicht as a genre of art (SMB 79),
though for much if not all of 'Reality and its Shadow' this does seem
to be the case. This does not mean that it is an accident that poetry in
· the more generous sense, poiesis, is embodied almost exclusively
throughout the n ext chapters in poetry as an artistic genre. Nor does
it mean that t he agreement of Levinas and Heidegger that there is this
more generous sense is an agreement on what that sense may be. At
the moment the c hance s of this seem slight. At the moment it appears
likely that while Levinas attributes the generosity of poetry in the
more generous sense to its being a giving to the stranger, Heidegger
will attribute i t to its being a gift of the strange, this difference being
marked by the title of the book in which Levinas opposes the sacri to
the saint. But as Blanchot advises at the beginning of his article
'L'etrange et l'etranger' about the distinctions between philosophy,
poetry and literature, perhaps we should not make any of these
distinctions too clear-cut.14

Suppose we remember the 'for everything', as Levinas does not

always do when he reproduces Markel's words to assist him in his
exposition of responsibility for the other.13 Suppose we take seriously
his s tatement, p assed over in silence when we cited it in Chapter 3, Je
soutiens le monde (assuming that what I am s ai d to support here is not
only every human being, tout le monde). In that cas e we shall be
confronted with an embarrassing exegetical dilemma. If we seek
reasons spelled out by Levinas why we should widen the range of
pro to e thical responsibility to include direct, unmediated respons­
-

ibility for non-human (and non-divine) beings, we shall more easily

find him spelling out reasons why we shoul d not attempt to do this.
We must therefore look elsewhere. As we now look to Heidegger's
 Ontological Responsibility 115

6
Poetry can awake a sense of responsibility toward nature by
Ontological Resp onsibility and describing the aesthetic beauty of natural things. One cannot be
indifferent to the survival of something of whose beauty we are
the Poetics of Nature aware. Holderlin's poetry of nature is not nature poetry of this kind,
at least not predominantly, nor is it for descriptions of the
aesthetically beautiful that Heidegger turns to it. In the essay on
Andenken included in Erliiulerungen zu Holder/ins Dichrnng Heidegger
writes that as early as the date of Hyperion Holderlin evinces a
Insofar as beings which linger awhile do not entirely dissipate distaste for descriptive poetry. This is one of the attractions Holderlin
themselves ni the boundless conceit of aiming for a baldly insistent holds for Heidegger. The former's distaste is matched by the latter's
subsistence, insofar as they no longer share the compulsion to aversion to the contemplation of landscapes, an aversion that
expel one another from what is presently present, they let order becomes easier to comprehend when we learn that Heidegger thinks
belong, didonai diken. of Betrachtung, contemplation, as an entrapment in representation
, . . ,
Martin Heidegger, The Saymg of Anax1mander CVA3 47-8. QCT 166-7). As thinker Heidegger is no more likely to
admire the spectacle of his surroundings than are the Swabian farmers
and foresters to whom he refers in 'Creative Landscape: Why do We
Stay in the Provinces?' (G13) or the peasant referred to in the first
Levinas argues that Heidegger is so preoccupied with. giving be ng
its � verse of Holderlin's Wie wenn am Feiertage . . . who, although it is on
bemg who IS my
due that he fails to do justice to the human the morning of a holiday that he is visiting his fields, is not there to
neighbour. It is arguable that Levinas is so preo�cu�ied with doing gaze at the view but to check how well his crops have stood up to
justice to the human being that he fails to do JUShce to . t � n?n­ � the thunderstorm that raged during the night. His main concern is for
human being, for despite his rare references to our responstbtltty for the future. 'Assured, he looks forward to the coming gifts of the field
.
everything' which we noted in the last chapter, these go unexplamed and the vine. Fruit and man are protected in the favour that prevails
and stand out as anomalies in writings which say or imply that d1rect, through earth and sky, securing what endures' (G4 51).
unmediated resppnsibility is responsibility to the other human being. Is not the first verse of Holderlin's poem descriptive? Heidegger
n ith
The question therefore arises whether Heidegger's pre.occupatio � himself says that i t is as though its aim were to describe a picture.
giving being its due allows human and n� n-hum n bemgs .to be gJVen However, it is not description for its own sake or for the sake of
�
their due? More particularly, does He1degge r s reflechon on the recording or impressing the reader with the aesthetic beauty or
question of being through Heidegger's poetics
.
of the holy
.
a l?w,� picturesqueness of the scene. The point of the description is to draw
perhaps even imply, a less exclusive view of dtrect re�pons1bthty? an analogy between the poet and the peasant. Like the countryman,
a�d
What light is shed on the Auseinandersetzung b�tween He1de��er the poet is supported by nature. Nature for Holderlin is not the
Hetdegg er and Holderlin ?
Levinas by the Auseinandersetzung between aggregate of stones, trees, animals, etc. The aggregate of such real
tion through the second is all the
An approach to the first conversa entities is the outcome of nature. Hence, although elms, poplars,
more apt on account of the tendency we ha�e found. �vinas � clouds, lightning, rivers and streams figure in his poems, they do not
to
displaying in some of his writings to impute 1rrespons1btlity do so for their own sakes. This might well be a disappointment to
poetry and to art in general. It is to be expe ted that he would anyone hoping to find in Holderlin a foundation for the construction
� .
find the poetry of Holder!in especially lackmg �� � sense of
.

. of a concept of direct human responsibility toward non-human beings,

of nature. Respons 1bthty, Levmas
responsibility in so far as it speaks that is to say, a responsibility to non-human beings which is not
maintains, is beyond nature, beyond phusis, metaphysical. derivative from responsibility to human beings (or to a super-human

114
116 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
being). Such disappointment would be misplaced if �t were the result
of supposing that something can be approached for tts own sake only
if it is approached in isolation from other things. Just as othe� human
.
beings can be esteemed for their own sakes although the1r hve� are
inextricably bound up with those of other human bemgs and w1th a
non-human environment on which they depend for their existence, so
non-human beings can be cherished for their own sakes despite or
because of such interconnection. True, it is not an ecolog1cal
connection of a biological or social kind that Holderlin and
Heidegger have in mind when they speak of the interconnectedn�ss
.
entailed by their notions of nature; but the latter m1ght be an enablmg
condition of the former: the ontological origin of the ontic relation-
ship, the relationship of all other relationships.
. .
If the poetry of Holderlin is nature poetry 1t 1s bec�use for
Holderlin nature is the always and already present. Ommpresent,
�
nature is present not only in what is set over ag.ains th� human.
Nature, in Wordsworth's phrase, 'rolls through all things . It 1s present
not only in stones, plants and animals. Its presencing embraces also
the work and works of man, the history and destiny of peoples and
the so-called supernatural and divine. Nature as understood by
Holderlin has a beauty that is, he says, divine, but nature IS not a
goddess or a god. Nature in his sense holds together what are usually
contrasted as the natural and the supernatural. But this holding
together is not a neutral synthesis or undifferentiated intimacy.
Although in Hyperion Holderlin treats of a desire to become absor ed�
in an undifferentiated one and all, very soon thereafter he emphas1zes
the importance ;of difference, a shift that anticipates Hegel's dis­
satisfaction with the alleged night of Schellingian identity. Like Hegel,
Holderlin stresses the alterity (Andersheit) that invests the unity of
nature. In this apartness the extreme opposites, the higher and lower
in the classical chain of being, are at their most conspicuous and most
captivating. In the second edition of the Erliiuterungen (1951)
Heidegger notes, with Phaedrus 250 in mind:
ekphanestaton
to /m/on
t
eras mio aton . objects and things. Conversely, the interpretations of Holderlin
Highlighted through extreme opposition, the appearance� are l�vable,
lovely and captivating, das Beriickende. If this lovelmes� �s the
loveliness which the gods are capable of making appear 1t IS not
Ontolcgical Responsibility 117
pure beauty. Where there is pure beauty there is an accord of
captivation and setting free, En.frr�ckung. Of all the beings there are
it is the gods who are pre-eminent in the capacity to make manifest
the captivatingly beautiful, as when one of them shows himself, like
the god incarnate in Christ. A god is also the being best able to
provide mortals with an experience of Entri4ckung, as in the transport
of mystical abandon. That is why the beauty of nature is called
divine. It is called divine by analogy with the impure beauty of which
the gods are capable. Only nature is capable of pure beauty, for this
requires not captivation masquerading as setting free nor setting free
masquerading as captivation but both captivation and setting free
simultaneously, yet without the clear distinction between them
getting lost to view. It is as though Holderlin, after dreaming with
his Hyperion and Empedocles of saving himself by losing conscious­
ness of himself through immersion in nature or death, realizes that he
is dreaming and that he must wake in order, like Empedocles, to
shoulder his responsibilities, among then:� the special responsibility of
the poet in the time of need. It is as though, having been inclined, like
Levinas, to equate art with reverie, intoxicated revelry, magic or
mystical confusion, a Dionysian pick-me-up against the il IJ a, he
wants, like Celan, to show that a poem can reach out soberly to shake
its reader by the hand.
What Holderlin calls the pure and divine beauty of nature is not
what we have been calling aesthetic beauty. The latter is the beauty
of the appearance of entities taken in isolation and framed, the beauty
of the world dismembered, in seiner Widerspenstigkeit auseinanderge­
spannt, as Heidegger says, or, as Michel Deguy and Fran\ois Fedier
translate this phrase, icarte/e, rent in four. Their translation is inspired
perhaps by the conception of nature as a fourfold (Geviert) which
Heidegger draws from his reading of Holderlin. 1 An understanding of
Heidegger's studies of Holderlin's poems and of the notion of the
fourfold of earth, sky, mortals and immortal divinities is advanced by
the reading of such pieces as 'The Thing', 'Building Dwelling
Thinking', The Origin of the Work of Art' and The Question
Concerning Technology'. In addition to mapping out the topography
of the fourfold the latter essays elaborate the difference between
explain the role that the thinking poet plays in enabling the turn
from regarding beings as objects to treating them as things. This
turning is a turning from the everyday mode of seeing entities as
either subservient to the achievement of human interest (zuhanden) or
118 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
else temporarily disengaged from such service so as to become the
object of disinterested description and pure science (vorhanden). The
alternative way of being with beings to which the thinking poet and
the poet-thinker would have their readers attend puts the refere�tial
context (Verweisungsganzheit) that serviceability and even the project
of pure science presuppose in its place, locating it in the perspective
of a quite differently structured whole. Perhaps encouraged by the
thought that as well as meaning 'to refer' venoeisen can mean 'to
displace', Heidcgger would say that the Venoeisungsganzheiten of
handiness and scientific method and system are ontologically second­
ary to the totality hinted at when on page 70 of Being and Time he
writes of the power of nature, Nahmnacht, an allusion picked up
twelve years later in the lecture Wie wenn am Feiertage . . . where
nature is called powerful precisely because it is divinely beautiful and
omnipresent. Its omnipresence is an aspect of its beauty in that the
beautiful, the schiin, is the appearing, the Erscheinen, that shines from
each thing regarded as a point of convergence of each region of the
fourfold. This belonging together of each partner in the fourfold is
what makes the difference between a being's being an object and a
being's being a thing. The Ding is the meeting-place of the four
members through .whose belonging together and responding to one
another the Ding is constituted a Ding : bedingf. (The Scottish town
Oingwall gets its name from the Norse Thingvollr meaning parliament
field.)
Just as pure beauty is beauty of nature, not of the gods, and the
beauty of nature is called godly by an analogy in which an attribute
of a being is ektended to what is not a being, so the power which is
ordinarily attributed to the gods devolves upon them thanks to
nature. Their life comes from nature which is divine and is now
named the holy, das Heilige (G4 64). The heil is the unbroken, the
whole. The holy is also pure on Heidegger's interpretation of
Holderlin according to which, as we have seen, beauty is pure
because it respects the distinctness of the partners that belong in
the holy. Impure beauty is manifest where nature is confused with a
natural being, hence where nature is identified with a god or an object
of mystical communion. The holiness of which Holderlin and
Heidegger speak shares with the Hebrew qadosh and its Arabic
equivalent this implication of apartness and. purity. The holy i: the
radicalJy other, das Un-nahbare (G4 63), the untouched and map­
proachable. However, its apartness is not the apartness of a being
such as the God of the Old Testament or of the rabbinical mysticisim
Onfological Responsibility 119
that emphasizes God's utter and unutterable remoteness and denies
the possibility of mystical union. On Heidegger's interpretation of
Holderlin the holy is beyond habitual experience and deprives every
experience of any firm base. Nature is no more a ground on
Heidegger's reading of Holderlin than earth in The Origin of the
Work of Art' is a sufficient ground. Only a being can be a sufficient
ground. What the denkende Dichter Holderlin calls nature is not a
being. It is what the dichtende Denker Heidegger calls being, and it is
what calls to be reflected on in its difference from beings. What
Holderlin helps Heidegger to say is that the relationship between man
and nature is a belonging that does not annul the distinction between
the regions of the fourfold of which man is himself one member.
Rather as Sein in Being and Time is already presencing in Da-sein, so in
the later writings man belongs to himself only when he belongs
listeningly to the other members of the fourfold. The fourfold is at
the same time a onefold. It is a four in one. Having proceeded to a
fundamental ontology judged to be neglected in Husserl's regional
ontology Heidegger becomes discontented with the fundamental
ontology of Being and Time and, assisted by Holderlin, outlines a
quatemitology that takes up again the question of regionality and
insists that the regions are in-finitely (un-endlich) and internally (innig)
related (G4 163, 170).
But if only the regions as regions are internally related what hope is
there of deriving from Heidegger's quatemitology pointers toward a
proto-ecological conception of responsibility? It is already beginning
to become plain in 'The Origin of the Work of Art' and the study of
Wie wenn am Feierfage . . ., and it has become quite clear in The
Thing' (1950) and Holder/ins Erde und Himmel (1959), that the
belonging together of the regions has immediate consequences for
the interrelationships among things in the regions. The thinker as
such is primarily concerned with how the reciprocity among
individual things of different regions exhibits the so to speak
'categorial' reciprocity among the regions, whereas the poet as such
is primarily concerned with the reciprocity among individual things.
This is why we can formulate the difference between dichtendes
Denken and denkendes Dichten by saying that whereas the vocation
of the former is the being of beings, the vocation of the latter is the
being of beings. And this is why Heidegger can say that neither while
'nature' is a basic word for Holderlin nor when it is no longer a basic
word for him does Holderlin understand being as such; any more than
plrusis is being as such for Heraditus. This does not mean that they do
120 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
not have what in Being and Time is called pre-ontological. that is to
say pre-analytical, understanding of being. All mortals have that:
Because the difference between the poet and the thinker is one of
emphasis, a particular person may be both, as are both Heidegger and
Holderlin. Heidegger's relationship with Holderlin is an aspect of his
relationship to himself. an aspect of his own identity. But this notion
of identity must be interpreted in the light of the fourfold. It cannot
be based on a . constatation of scientific or metaphysical properties.
Science, lay or professional, can provide an account of the identity of
an object or subject, but an object or subject is not a thing in the
sense explained by Heidegger in the essay entitled The Thing' and in
'Building Dwelling Thinking'. When in these essays and elsewhere
Heidegger writes of what makes a jug a jug or a bridge a bridge he is
not substituting for descriptions of objects in terms of primary and
secondary qualities descriptions in terms of functions. He denies
explicitly in his discussion of Wie wenn am Feiertage . . . that a thing is
what it does. The truth of the matter is that a thing does only what it
is' and every thing, including every human being. '"is" only according
to the "way" nature, the holy, which draws its essence from itself,
remains present in it' (G4 65). Hence in the paragraphs where
Heidegger writes that a jug, unlike a hammer or a scythe, permits
the pouring out of a drink or libation provided it is not empty,
whereas the hammer and the scythe neither succeed nor fail in
permitting this, he is not aiming at a classificiation of the functional
properties that provide criteria by which jugs are distinguished from
other artefacts. What he is primarily concerned with is not properties
that are possessed by objects and define their nature, but the
belonging of a thing within the fourfold of nature or being as a
whole in relation to which identification and classification into natural
or artificial kinds are of ontologically secondary concern.
These may be of primary concern to what Heidegger calls
metontology in The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic where he says
in an Appendix that it is a part of metaphysics along with
fundamental ontology and that it is the result of the sudden
overturning (Umschlag) of the latter. Not an ontic positive science,
metontology aims 'to make beings thematic in their totality in the
light of [fundamental] ontology'. It would seem to be a prefiguration
of the thinking of things within the fourfold and a refiguration or
reversal of the analysis of being towards death undertaken in Being
2
and Time. While, we are suggesting, in Being and Time fundamental
ontological responsibility or proto-ethics is already on the scene,
Ontological Responsibility 121
only, Heidegger says, 'in the domain of metontological-existentiell
questioning . . . the question of an ethics may properly be raised for
the first time' (G26 199, MFL 157). This preserves at least something
like a structural parallelism between Heidegger and Levinas -
something like only because what looks like a parallel turns into a
chiasmus which preserves the deep difference between the two. The
way for this Umschlag is prepared by Heidegger's statement in the
Appendix that 'only the person who, in the course of action, can treat
what is in each case seized upon as wholly singular, who at the same
time nevertheless realizes the finitude of the activity. only such a one
understands finite existence and can hope to accomplish something in
it'. Singularity and concreteness are the point of departure both for
Heideggerian fundamental ontology and Levinasian metaphysics. But
whereas Heidegger says 'Metontology is possible only on the basis
and in the perspective of the radical ontological problematic' hence.
we are arguing, on the basis of fundamental ontological responsibility
or proto-ethics regarded as parts or aspects of fundamental ontology,
Levinas says that the basicness of fundamental ontology is taken
away by what he calls metaphysical ethics and what, to distinguish
this from ethics in a traditional understanding of the term, we are
calling proto-ethics and might now consider calling metethics. What
complicates this scheme is Levinas's readiness in Totality and Infinity
to announce that 'Being is Exteriority' and to describe the face to face
as the entry of what is 'ontologically new' (TI 266; 290. 148; 17.3).
Levinas's ontology of metethics only escapes being sucked · back into
Heideggerian ontology or metontology if the ontology of the former
is, as Levinas maintains, the 'emphasis' of the latter, the superlation
that takes being to its extreme, rather as the superhuman is taken to
be the essence of the human by Kant and the traditional via eminentiae
to which Levinas compares his own way of hyperbole.3 This does not
mean that we shall find 'emphasis' and 'superlation' easy to under­
stand.4 But the difficulty of these notions may be diminished if we can
reconcile ourselves to the idea that the destruction or deconstruction
of ontology may have to be conducted in the language of ontology.
This is what Levinas reconciles himself to in Totality and Infinity. In
Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence what the earlier book calls the
ontologically new is the saying as opposed to the said, but this
opposition is not one that enables the saying to dispense with the
said. This indispensability is one kind of con-cretion: the inseparability
of separateness, alterity, difference, exposition and face from same­
ness, proposition and phenomenal countenance.
122 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
Without the inseparability of the goodness of the nakedness of the
face from the empirical factuality of the world from which I live and
whose goods I enjoy I should have nothing to offer. Without
concrescence in incarnation there is no enjoyment, vulnerability and
suffering: no passion; hence no passivity more passive than passion,
no emphasis of responsibility in substitution for the other (AEAE
86-9, OBBE 68-71; OOVI 142). Inversely, the face o f the other is the
other's vulnerability, above all his exposure to being hurt by me. That
alone, the other's neediness, whatever his specific needs may be, is
what faces me with my proto-ethical responsibility for the other. We
shall return in the Postface to this idea of the other's need. But our
immediate task is to enlarge the idea of need in step with our
enlargement of the idea of the other. For help with this task we return
now to Heidegger.
11
We are asking whether, following the account of belonging within
the fourfold that Heidegger derives from Holderlin, we can derive or
forge an account of responsibility broad enough to accommodate
direct responsibility toward non-human beings.
Is not Heidegger's account too accommodating? For is not the
reciprocity and mirroring of which his account speaks a correspon­
dence among all members of the fourfold? Hence, if an account of
responsibility is to be derived from the Holderlin-Heidegger account
of the fourfold will it not be one that permits a responsibility not
only of human beings toward other human beings and non-human
beings, but also a responsibility of non-human beings toward other
beings?
To meet this difficulty we must look in what Heidegger and
Holderlin write for what they consider makes a difference between
the belonging of mortals to the fourfold and the belonging of
immortals, sky and earth. This distinguishing factor must not be the
ethical character of man's responsibility, for Heidegger denies that he
is dealing with a question of ethics. Of course, if he denies this
because, like Levinas and Kant, he holds that ethical responsibility, or
at least direct ethical responsibility, is always responsibility of human
beings toward other human beings, this bodes ill for our hopes of
learning from him how to see our way to a conception of direct
Ontological Responsibility 123
responsibility toward non-human beings, including non-human beings
that are not divine. We should be put on the way to such a
conception however if the mode in which human beings belong to
the other members of the fourfold could be specified so as to yield a
conception of what we might call ontological responsibility that a
human being could have toward a jug or a tree but that a jug or a
tree could not have toward a human being. Is this specification
provided by letting be or letting belong? Is Seinlassen or GehOrenlassen
what marks off man's belonging to the fourfold from the way in
which non-human beings belong?
In the third verse of Wie wenn am Feiertage . Holderlin writes:
. .
And they who smiling worked our fields for us,
Assuming the shape of labourers, now are known,
The all-alive, all-animating powers of the gods.
Heidegger comments that the word 'fields' here is a passing reference
to the first verse and stands for that on and from which man lives -
the uivre de treated so fully by Levinas and sometimes said to be
neglected altogether by Heidegger. It deserves comment too that the
Greek word for field or allotted abode is nomos, and that this is
affiliated to nomos, usage or apportioning law. Man once cultivated
the fields without being insensitive to the omnipresence of the holy.
But he has been in too much haste to subdue nature to his own needs.
The poet is the one who can remind us that man is not the only
participant in the fourfold that has needs. Man himself is needed by
the others, by the immortals, by the sky and by the earth. It is thanks
to this recognition of needs other than human need that we can speak
of human responsibility which is, if not yet ethical responsibility,
already more than response as aesthetic Erlebnis. Earlier in the third
verse Holderlin writes
A fire has been lit in the souls of the poets.
And that which happened before, but hardly was felt,
Only now i
s manifest, . . . .
The feeling here alluded to is on Heidegger's reading stabilized
through being attached to an ecology of reciprocal ontological need.
When Heidegger reflects on the poems of Holderlin after publishing
Being and Time he does not abandon his analytic of Dasein. Although
124 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
he abandons the terminology in which he conducts this analysis, he is
keeping the promise he made in Being and Time to go on and reflect
on being, instead of concentrating his attention on There-being. At
no time does Heidegger turn a deaf ear to the words of Parmenides'
-Fragment 6: chre to legein fe noein t'eon emmenai. Parmenides' chre is
ontological need. It is this that is in Heidegger's thoughts when he
writes in Holder/ins Erde und Himmel, after citing Holderlin's fragments
Die Erde . . . . . . . .
Grossen Gesezen nachgehet, die Wissenschaft
Und Ztirflichkeit . . . . .
'The earth "abides by great laws". The "laws" here named are the
nomoi in the sense of the injunctions of great destiny that direct and
allot each thing to the place required by its essencing (nach seinem
Wesen gebraucht)' (G4 167). Admittedly, it is verging on anachronism
,t.o employ the expression 'ontological need' in connection with
something Heidegger says as late as 1959. By then his thinking is
centred on and decentred by Ereignis and es gibt rather than on the
contrast between 'ontic' and 'ontological'. We employ the word
'ontological' nevertheless because· it is handy to have an adjective
cognate with 'being' and because it keeps in view the question of the
bearing of what Heidegger says about and through the word brauchen
upon Levinas's response to Heidegger which continues to be cast in
terms of the ontological, the ontic and the ethical. More particularly,
the expression 'ontological need' makes it possible to mark the
difference betwi!en Heidegger's brauchen and the vital needs of
whose satisfaction and enjoyment Levinas treats in detail especially
in Totality and Infinity. Levinas and other readers of Heidegger have
commented on his neglect of the topic of life, its enjoyment and, as
we mentioned a moment ago, the idea of what we live on and from.
That this neglect is not an oversight can be seen from his gloss on
Brauch in The Saying of Anaximander' (1946). There we come across
the notion of what it is convenient to call ontological enjoyment
which he explicitly distinguishes from enjoyment of biological.
psychological and any other animal or anthropological kind. Heideg­
ger would say that ontological enjoyment is phenomenologically
more original than these ontic enjoyments. Levinas would say that
more original than both ontic and ontological enjoyment is ethical
responsibility toward the other man. Our question is whether
ontological need and ontological enjoyment as explained by
Ontological Responsibility 125
Heidegger with recourse to Holderlin and the Greeks bring with
them a notion, albeit pre- or proto-ethical. of ontological respons­
ibility. That it does is suggested by the way in which, in conformity
with his belief that if we are to think the eschatology of being we
must think the Greek morning of the history of being through its
hesperian departure (Abschied) and through the impending dawn
which is at issue for Holderlin and for us today, Heidegger interprets
Parmenides' Fragment 6 and the Anaximander fragment lcata to cJrreim;
didonai gar aula diki11 lcai tisin allelois tes adikias. The translation of
these words at which Heidegger eventually arrives is . . . enflang dem
Brauch; geh6ren ntimlich lassen sie Fug somif auch Ruch eines dem anderen
{im Verwinden) des Un-Fugs (H 342), for which David Krell's
translation is ' . . . along the lines of usage; for they let order and
thereby also reek belong to one another (in the surmounting) of
disorder' (EGT 57).
In the course of his discussion of the Anaximander fragment
Heidegger notes that the generally accepted Diels translation of
kata to chreon and the translation that Nietzsche gives in Philosophy in
the Tragic Age of the Greeks is 'according to necessity', nach der
Notwendigkeit. Of this translation Heidegger writes: 'we err if we
adhere to this derived meaning exclusively' (H 337, EGT 51). This
suggests that the derived meaning is part of what the phrase means;
that some notion of Notwendigkeit must be included in our reading of
the Greek. Our suggestion is that the expression 'ontological need' be
adopted to convey this notion. The adjective 'ontological' serves to
warn that Heidegger considers 'it is needed' or 'it is necessary' on its
own inadequate and superficial (WHO 117, WCT 190), requiring
supplementation by some notion of usage or custom. The problem is
to some extent that of keeping the connection between the noun
Brauch, meaning usage, and the verb brauche11, meaning to need, of
reading Anaximander's kafa fo chreon along with Parmenides' chre and
of reading Holderlin and Heidegger along with what is said by these
two Greeks and by Heraclitus.
The usage or custom at issue here is 'older' than the Sitten that are
at issue for HegeL though like them it is geared to what is in some
sense useful, needed, called for or meet. Heidegger goes so far as to
say of brauchet in the lines of Holderlin's Die Titanen
unter dem Maasse
Das Roherz brauchet es auch
Damit das Reine sich kenne
126 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
measure demands that
Crudity, coarseness, exist, so that
What is pure shall know itself
'Perhaps we shall be able to hear Holderlin's language properly only
when we comprehend the "it is meet" that is beginning to sound in
the chre of Pannenides' saying' and 'In this Brauchen is hidden a calling
(Geheiss) and command (Anbefehlen)' (WHO 118-19, WCT 196).
Responding to this call is in die Acht nehmen. Corresponding to
ontological need is ontological heed, taking to heart in care and
esteem, schatzen, allowing a thing the enjoyment of flourishing
according to what is meet: ontological usufruct. The Concise Oxford
Dictionary defines usufruct a s 'Right of enjoying the use and
advantages of another's property short of destruction or waste of
its substance'. This conveys something of what Heidegger wants to
have us understand by Brauchen and to chreon provided that
ontological enjoyment is not confused with the ontic enjoyments of
human consumers. To prevent this confusion he refers us to the
archaic German verb bruchen, to brook and to Augustine's gloss on
frui as praesto habere, where the praesifurn or hypokeirnenon is 'that
which already lies before us in unconcealment, ousia, that which
lingers awhile in presence' (H 338, EGT 53). So brauchen in this
context does not mean only to be in need of, benohgen. Its primary
'high' meaning is to let a thing be what it is and how it is, etwas in
dem belassen, was es isf 1md wie es ist (WHO 168, WCT 191), 'to admit
into its essential nature and to keep safely what has been admitted'. In
two words: Seinlassen and Gehorenlassen.
Ill
In Der lster Holderlin writes:
Es brauchet aber Stiche der Fels
Und die Erd',
Unwirfhbar wiir es, ohne Weile;
It is however meet that the rock be broached
And the earth furrowed,
Without welcome would it be else, unabiding;
Ontological Responsibility 127
'In this passage', Heidegger writes, 'the "meet" designates an essential
belonging together of rock and well-shaft, earth and furrow. This
essential belonging together is in turn determined by the nature of
welcome and abiding'. He adds: The welcome and the abiding are
what mark the dwelling of mortals upon earth. But dwelling, in its
turn, is not grounded in itself' (WHO 169, WCT 192). That is to say,
the welcome, accueil, which according to Levinas is a welcome of the
other person into my home, handshake and giving (see Chapter 9), is
encompassed within a wider hospitality which Heidegger construes
ultimately as the es gibt of Sein articulated by the holy fourfold of
nature with the aid of the German poet of poets and the thinking of
being that is emergent in the Greeks. Abiding (Weilen or Verweilen)
and hospitality (Bewirten), as represented in Holderlin' s poem by
sinking a well for water and ploughing a field to plant corn, are
contrasted in Heidegger's thinking, as accueil often is in the
philosophy of Levinas, with sheer persistence in being, Sucht des
Beharrens (H 331, EGT 46), that is to say with what according to
Levinas is typified by the conatus essendi in the system of Spinoza that
shuts out from his Ethics the least trace of the ethical. Beharren is
inconsiderateness, thoughtlessness, whereas Verweilen is taking time,
the attentive and patient dwelling that is called for by 'the dwelling
(wohnen) of mortals on this earth'. Beings that abide rather than persist
'let order belong, and thereby also reek to one another', didonai . . .
tisin allelois. But the other in Heidegger's thinking of being is not only
the other human being. The other is not only the human neighbour
who is the centre of gravity from whose point of view my striving to
persist is, in Levinas's metaphysic of ethics, accused. The other n i
Heidegger's retrieval of Holderlin and Anaximander includes other
mortals, but it also includes other regions of the fourfold. This
perhaps is one of the reasons why Heidegger 'presumes' to say that
the Anaximander fragment cited, it will be recalled, in Nietzsche's
Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, puts into words an
experience of beings in their being that is neither pessimistic nor
optimistic nor nihilistic but tragic. As Heidegger makes clear in the
'Letter on Humanism' and 'The Saying of Anaximander', which date
from the same year, he is not purporting to advance a metaphysical
or ethical view of the world. His purpose is to interpret the conflidual
belonging together alluded to in Heraclitus's remark that phusis is
polemical.
We catch a glimpse of the non-metaphysical, non-ethicaL non­
psychological and non-aesthetical essence of tragedy when we read
128 Tire Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
Anaximander's didont�i not just as giving away, Weggeben, but as
granting, Zugeben. 'Such giving Jets something belong to another
which properly belongs to him.' What belongs to him belongs to him
not as a consequence of a contract between him and me. To this
extent Heidegger sees my giving to another human being, for
example giving him a drink as Levinas sees my giving to the other
the bread from my mouth: as a giving of what is owed prior to
ethical, juridical and any other social contract. Both authors are
conducting a radical rethinking of the foundations of the traditional
theories of natural justice and natural law. However, where Levinas
argues for a meta-physical grounding or disgrounding, Abgrnnden,
outside the realm of nature, epekeina tes ousias, Heidegger's Abgriinden
is meta-metaphysical in the sense that it breaks with philosophy that
posits an ultimate principle of sufficient reason and yet, paradoxically,
it is also physical in the sense that it thinks phusis and nature as the
being of beings, not, like metaphysics, physics and the other sciences
of nature, as their beingness.
Hence whereas for Levinas, following Plato, primary justice is non­
naturaL for Heidegger, following Holderlin and the pre-Platonic
Greeks, original justice is dike 'thought from being as presencing'
(H 329, ECT 43). Furthermore, according to Heidegger this primary
justice or Fug is demanded of mortal beings toward every other
being, to whatever presences itself, whatever whiles (weilt), whatever
comes to be and passes away in the totality which is the four in one.
When mortals regard other mortals and non-mortal beings as no more
than commodities to which we have recourse for the satisfaction of
human need, greed and will to power, there is primary ontological
injustice, adikia. What in Totality and ln[it1ity Levinas considers to be
secondary justice arises only when the third person is taken into
account. Then I can be confronted with problems of distributive
justice and with moral dilemmas that may have the structure of
irresoluble tragedy. It follows from what Heidegger tells us however
that the tensions between claims and counterclaims that constitute
this structure are there from the beginning. Indeed, they are already
there at the level of primary dual justice for Levinas too if the trace of
the third person is never absent from the second person's eyes. The
other other is always there in Heidegger's view because to be mortal
is to be Be-Dingf, be-thinged (VA2 53, PLT 181), bedingt, conditioned
both by other mortals and by non-human beings that call to be given
their due and to be seen not merely as objects but as things in the
high sense of the word that Holderlin teaches us. The essence of
Ontological Responsibility 129
tragedy according to Holderlin is the simultaneity of the 'monstrous'
(ungeheuer) belonging together and apartness of men and gods, of
mortals and immortals. In the Anmerkungen zum Odipus, reminding us
of the 'monstrous' imbrication of the 'subhuman' and the 'superhuman'
n
i the vocation of man as discussed by Kant in Religion within lire
Bounds of Reason Alone and discussed by us in Chapter 4, he writes:
The representation of the tragic depends above all on comprehend­
ing the monstrosity of the coming together of god and man and of
the infinite union through demonic strife of the power of nature
and what is most profoundly human, as the purification of infinite
union through infinite separation.
This is how Holderlin sees his own Trauerspiel entitled The Death of
Empedocles and the works of Greek tragic art which he translated,
Oedipus Tyrannus and Anligone, the last of these three being the work
containing the chorus which Heidegger discusses in the Introduction fo
Metaphysics and elsewhere in connection with Holderlin and which
treats of the same theme of man's place in nature as is treated in lines
we have reproduced from Wie wenn am Feierfage . . . and Der lster. It
is precisely in the work of art that there takes place this tragic conflict
of which Holderlin and Heidegger speak; in the work of art and in the
poet who is the mediator between the gods and other men. This
tragic separateness in unity holds for the bond between logos and
phusis (EM 103ff.. IM 114ff.). It holds therefore not simply for the
relations between man and man and between man and the gods. It
holds too for the relation between mortals and all the other regions of
the fourfold. We mus� now consider more closely the difficulty that
this consequence presents. In so doing we shall answer the still
unanswered question about Seinlassen and Gehdrenlassen asked in the
second section of this chapter, whether Seinlassen or Gehorenlassen is
what marks off the belonging of human beings to the fourfold from
the belonging of non-human beings there.
IV
The endeavour to elicit from Heidegger, Holderlin and the early
Greeks an ecologically broadened understanding of responsibility
requires that in giving being its due we also do justice to beings.
13 0 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
This attempt would be embarrassed b y the supposition that
Heidegger makes in the Postscript to 'What is Metaphysics?' in
1943 that 'being doubtless prevails without beings, but a being· never
is without being'. Fortunately, in the 1949 version of the Postscript
this sentence is changed to 'being never prevails without beings, a
being never is without being' (G9 306, EB 385). As Heidegger writes
in 'The Saying of Anaximander', 'to be the being of beings is the
matter of being' (H 335, EGT 50). We have seen that 'The Saying of
Anaximander' also says however that the alternatives of persisting
insistently in its own being and taking heed of what is due to other
beings is open to every being, not to human beings alone. Does this
imply anthropomorphism75 That implication would incommode at
least one participant in the 'Conversation on a Country Path', namely
the man of science who, when asked by the man of learning 'What
name should we give to the regioning of that which regions (das
Gegnen der Gegnel) with respect to the thing?' responds 'It can hardly
be regioning with respect to man (die Vergegnis) for that is the relation
of that which regions to Gelassenheif, and Gelassenheit is supposed to
shelter in itself the essence of thinking, whereas things themselves do
not think' (Gel 54, DT 75-6). This means that Gelassenheit, often
translated 'releasement' or 'being released', cannot be the family name
for Sein/assen, Gehdrenlassen and other formations with /assen to which
Heidegger has recourse if the latter can apply to things that do not
think.
One way of escaping the anthropomorphism that appears to be
implied in our reading of Heidegger's reading of Anaximander would
be simply to decide that Heidegger is here putting his finger on an
assumption made by Anaximander which we are free to set aside as
outdated and misleading for our purposes, and that we can take
seriously only the account of Verweilen to be found in those
paragraphs of 'The Thing' in which the Verwei/en of the four regions
is an aspect of their being coincident in a human practice such as
pouring out a drink. We could say for instance that Anaximander is
engaged in speculative natural science that posits an environment in
which organisms and other entities are engaged in a struggle for
existence, hence disposed to appropriate whatever they need for their
survival or to adapt themselves in other ways conducive to the
survival of the species. There is no reason to believe that Heidegger's
interpretation of Anaximander and other early Greek thinkers is
eclectic in this sense and no sign that in his glosses he perceives
them as natural scientists speculating on physical, biological or other
Ontological Responsibility 131
objects and events. That way of perceiving them would be deemed
anachronistic b y Heidegger because it appeals to an idea of
objectivity and event that emerges only in a later epoch of Western
thought. If we reflect on this later conception, as he says we must if
we are to understand what it is for something to be a thing (V A2 58,
PLT 185), we may recognize that perhaps it is because of the
difficulty we have breaking away from this scientifico-methodologi­
cal conception that we find ourselves confronted with the dilemma
from which we are trying to find an exit: the choice between
humanizing the Verweilen of non-human beings and dehumanizing
the Verweilen of human beings in order to cope with the apparent
implication of Heidegger's commentary on Anaximander that beings
of all regions heed one another and let one another belong.
Perhaps this dilemma arises just because we have failed to think of
things in our reading of Heidegger's pages on the fourfold and
because we persist in conceiving them as individual objects in
isolation one from another or interconnected only by some physic­
ally, biologically, psychologically causal or other scientifically
discoverable ontic relation. Whereas, as we have noted, Heidegger's
exposition of the fourfold is a reversion to regional ontology and a
revision of the Husserlian version in the light of the question as to
the meaning of being as such. So the question of what Heidegger
means by a thing can be answered only if we acknowledge its
inseparability from the question of the meaning of being. Now as we
have said, Heidegger never turns his back on the thought he discerns
in Parmenides' Fragment 6. Whatever turn there may be n i his
thinking of Dasein when he departs from his original plan for the
completion of Being and Time, he continues to hold that being is n i
need of thinking and therefore in need of man because only man is
capable of thinking the as such of being as distinct from representing
it. The mirroring that thinking is is no more a portrayal of a likeness
than is the mirroring 'each in its own way' (VA2 52, PLT 179) with
which the non-human regions of the fourfold also respond. We are
representing and therefore misrepresenting the fourfold if we treat it
only as some sort of picture or diagram or landscape for our
contemplation, the Darstellen eines Abbildes (ibid.), just as we fatally
misrepresent the Kantian schema if we reify it; taking as Vorste/lung
what should be taken as Verfahren - or, Heidegger might say, as
Erfahren. True, in conceiving the fourfold as a complex object or a
complex of objects we are not leaving man out of the picture, since
man is one of the four. But his belonging with the regions and their
132 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
belonging with him 'cannot be conceived at all as long as we want to
re-present it to ourselves. that is. forcibly bring before ourselves an
objectively given relation between an obj ect called "man" and an
object called "that which regions" (Gegnet)' (Gel 64, DT 83). If we do
so conceive it we shall imagine that when Heidegger calls the human
members of the fourfold mortals he is simply wanting to remind us
that their lives come to an end. In 'The Thing', that is to say as late as
1950, he writes that mortals are those who are capable of death. That
may sound like another statement of fact. If that is how we hear it
what Heidegger means has not got home. Only when we become
mortals will we begin to understand what is at stake in this
quatemitology. That understanding will be a self-understanding. This
does not mean that it will not be an understanding of others too.
There is no self-understanding that is not at the same time an
understanding of others, of others of all four regions.
But surely mortals are not understood by earth and sky, or by jugs,
bri.dges, rivers and trees? We do not want to be committed to saying
that they are, do we, by the fact that in 'The Saying of Anaximander'
Heidegger appears not to have any difficulty with the thought that
beings of every region linger or abide, (ver)weilen 7 Although David
Krell's translation introduces an 'every' into his version of Heideg­
ger's zum anderen Weiligen, that this conveys the author's sense is
clear from the beginning of the sentence in question: 'Only when we
have already thought ta eon ta as what is present, and this as the
totality of what lingers awhile . . . ' (H 332, EGT 4 7). The relevant
distinction is not that between beings of different kinds, but that
between different ways of being of every being, the way of persisting
and the way of lingering or abiding. This is confirmed by the trouble
Heidegger takes to explain that when he translates Anaximander's
tisis by considerateness or reek. Rucksicht, the word must be under­
stood in a neutral (but presumably not neuter) sense which permits
non-human beings being 'considerate' or 'solicitous'. The inverted
commas here are a guard against anthropomorphism, as too is the
qualification that each region of the fourfold mirrors the others 'in its
own way'. This is the key to the dilemma over anthropomorphism _
and to the question posed in our second section whether Seinlassen or
Gehorenlassen marks off man's belonging to the fourfold from the way
in which non-human beings belong. It would seem that the answer to
this question must be negative, since in the essay on the Anaximander
fragment Heidegger attributes noJ only abiding. but also lettin?
belong to every kind of being. This follows immediately from h1s
Ontological Responsibility 133
statement there that beings which abide let one another belong
(H 331, EGT 46). However. he writes a few paragraphs later that
whatever lingers awhile comes to presence 'in each case in accordance
with its while', ]e und ]e ihrer Wei/e. So the letting belong will be a
letting belong which is peculiar to each different being and kind of
being. If we remember this and differentiate the different ways of
letting be, the answer to our question as to the differentiating powers
of letting be and letting belong will be affirmative, assuming as seems
reasonable that letting belong is a way of letting be.
Gela.ssenheif. we have seen, is not the family name for the various
formations of lassen to which Heidegger resorts. It is the name for the
kind of leHing be and belong that distinguishes beings that think from
those that do not. In our quotation of one exchange in the
'Conversation on a Country Path' we followed the published
translation which has one speaker saying that the name for the
regioning of or in relation to things cannot be Vergegnis, 'regioning
with respect to man', human regioning. Although this phrase is the
translators' interpretation of Vergegnis and not a translation of words
explicit in the text, the text does go on to say that Vergegnis is a
relation of regioning to Gelassenheit and Gelassenheit involves
thinking; therefore neither Gelassenheit nor Vergegnis can be the name
for regioning of or 'with respect to' things that do not think Here
Ding is not being given the Eckhartian scope it is given in The
Thing', where it is used also of beings that think. But the
'Conversation', written five years before 'The Thing', and the address
commemorating the birth of the composer Conradin Kreutzer, written
five years after, supplement the account which is given in The Thing'
of the belonging together of the regions of the fourfold with a name
for what is distinctive of the letting be of mortals.
Gelassenheit i s also the name for what is distinctive of human
responsibility. Just as the genitive of the letti ng be of mortals is
'speculative', ambiguously subjective and objective, so is the genitive
of the responsibility of mortals. It is a responsibility that they
exercise. But it is at the same time a responsibility that exercises
them. This is why it is first and last ontological responsibility.
Heidegger asks at one point in 'The Saying of Anaximander' 'But
to whom does whatever is present let the order of jointure belong?' -
Wem aber lassen die Anwesenden den Fug der Fuge gehoren 7 (H 333, EGT
48) The dative wem is the dative of what is present, beings, but at the
same time the dative of presencing, being. It is to mortals that es gibt
Sein. It is therefore to mortals that is given the responsibility to give
134 The Middle Voice of EcologiCill Conscimce
being to non-mortal beings. If, as Holderlin says, the poet is the
mediator between gods and men, this is only because the poet is a
mortal whose responsibility i t is to mediate being to non-mortal
beings, and because a mortaL like Dostoevsky's monk Markel. can sin
not only against the gods, but against 'birds, trees, meadows, sky'.
'Sin' is a word that Heidegger would be reluctant to use without
quotation marks and other precautions in the context of ontological
thinking. But Levinas would be no less reluctant to use it unreserv­
edly in his philosophy of ethics, notwithstanding his willingness to
equate the ethical with the religious, in the sense in which the
religious is that by which - or by whom - we are obliged. He would
never agree of course that ethics or proto-ethics is contained within
Heideggerian ontology. But what does Heidegger mean by the
ontological when in the 'Conversation' he has the scholar say 'the
relation between that which regions and Gelassmheit, if it can still be
considered a relation, can be thought of neither as ontic nor as
ontological . . .'? Is this not inconsistent with our assertion that
Gelassenheit is what is distinctive of ontological responsibility? It is
not, for at the stage in the conversation at which these words occur
'ontic' is being employed for a relation such as the relation of cause
and effect with which a scientist might be occupied, and 'ontological'
is being employed for the transcendental-horizonal relation that
occupies Husserl in his phenomenology of representation. It is just
from this that Gelassenheit, releasement, is a releasement. It is a
releasement to ontology in the liberated sense it has when, for the
reasons given above, we speak of ontological responsibiHty despite
the qualms Heroegger comes to have over using the word except of a
s�yle of thinking he no longer wishes to pursue. 'Time and Being'
(1962) announces a releasement which in all strictness would be a
releasement from the ontology to which we are released when we are
released from thinking being as beingness to thinking being as being.
It announces a releasement from the ontic-ontological difference. This
is a releasement of Gelassenheit from being Seinlassen only without it
being its releasement from the Seinlassen of being and beings. In
words on which we have already had occasion to comment
Heidegger describes this transition as follows :
To think being without beings means: to think being without
regard to metaphysics. Yet a regard for metaphysics still prevails
even in the intention to overcome metaphysics. Therefore, our task
is to cease all overcoming, and leave metaphysics to itself (Darum
Ontological Responsibility 135
gilt es, vom l.iberwinden abzulassen und die Metaphysik sich selbst zrl
iiberlassen). (ZSD 25, TB 24)
This transition goes a step beyond, back beyond, the step described
in the Postscript twenty years earlier when he had written:
The question 'What is Metaphysics?' asks a question that goes
beyond metaphysics. It arises from a way of thinking which has
already entered into the overcoming of metaphysics. It is of the
essence of such transitions that they are, within certain limits,
compelled to speak the language which they help to overcome. (G9
303, W 99, EB 38G-1)
This different thinking is yet heralded already in the remark made
another five year earlier in the inaugural lecture itself that the thesis
that Nothing is the origin of negation 'breaks the power of reason (die
Machf des Versfandes) in the field of the thinking of being and nothing
and decides the fate of the mastery of "logic" in philosophy' (G9 117,
W 14, EB 372). The thinking of the excluded middle of being and
nothingness here heralded is an 'overcoming' of overcoming whose
abandonment of power and Herrschaff and whose freeing from idols
(Freiwerden von den Gotzen) invite comparison up to a certain point
with the emphasized feminine patience for which Levinas's thinking
seeks to find room. Up to a certain point, because overcoming is itself
a Hmschaff that cannot be entirely abandoned. It prevails (herrscht)
even in 'the thinking that expressly lets itself into the advent of
disclosive appropriation in order to say It out from it and unto It',
dasjenige Denken . . ., das sich eigens in das Ereignis einliisst, urn Es aus
ihm her auf Es zu - zu sagen. This saying is a provocative saying, not
the saying of what the inaugural lecture names the thesis ' Nothing is
the origin of negation'. But since Heidegger thinks that this
prepositional manner of the lecture is a menace continually at work
even in such saying (the word Being and Time supplies for this ever
presently attractive activity of gravity is Verfallen) there will always
be an obstacle to overcome and so there will always be overcoming
to be overcome by leaving metaphysics be, over and over, unabltissig ;
incessament, as Levinas says in the treatment of scepticism which
acknowledges the same threat and shows that he would endorse
Heidegger's statement that "'logic" disintegrates n
i the vortex of a
more original questioning', adding only that the original questioning
136 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
disintegrates in the vortex of a proto-ethical responsibility which is
'older' than origin and than 'the beginning of a responsibility where
the asking arises with renewed originality' and which is the reason
why 'the most genuine questioning is never stilled by the answer
found' (G9 304, W 100, EB 382-3).
No one is more alert than Heidegger himself to the difficulty of his
later style of thinking, in particular the difficulty of thinking es gibt
Sein without slipping back into representing being or Ereignis or Es as
an ontological or proto-ontological principle and ground, a principle
of all principles, as Husserl would say. This is not simply a technical
difficulty to be overcome by taking extra pains. It is an ontological
or proto-ontological error in that being (for example!) itself conceals
itself in revealing itself in being. Men and women will forget, but at
least with the help of the denkende Dichter and the dichtende Denker
they may come to remember that they are ontologically predi­
sposed to become oblivious to their responsibility toward being and
to the responsibility toward beings, human and non-human, that that
entails.
We must be alert to the difficulty that would be presented to a
philosophy of ecological responsibility drawing on Heidegger's early
and later thinking if it turned out that his latest thinking, when
perhaps the name for the task of thinking reads, instead of 'Being and
Time' or Time and Being', clearing and presence, Lichtung und
Anwesenheit (ZSD 80, TB 73), reversed the revision in the fourth
(1943) edition of the Postscript to 'What is Metaphysics?' which
replaced 'being indeed holds sway without beings' by 'being never
holds sway without beings' (G9 306, W 102). When the task of
Denken is the exposure or sacrifice (Preisgabe) of previous thinking to
the voicing (Bestimmung) of the matter (Sache) of thinking (ZSD 80,
TB 73) it does not cease to be aided by the Diclrten whose matter is
the naming of things. Presence remains the presence of what is
present (ZSD 73, TB 66). So when in the passage cited above dating
from 1961 Heidegger says 'to think being without beings means: to
think being without regard to metaphysics' he is not reversing the
revision made in the Postscript to What is Metaphysics?', notwith­
standing that he may appear to be doing this when he writes on the
same page of Time and Being': 'The task of our thinking has been to
trace being to its own from the advent of disclosive appropriation
(Ereignis) - by way of looking through true time without regard to
the relation of being to beings', hence without regard to metaphysics.
To think that to think being without beings is to think that being can
Ontological Responsibility 137
hold sway without beings is to commit a fallacy somewhat similar to
that of confusing what Russell calls knowledge by acquaintance with
what he calls knowledge by description, and to suppose that when
you divert your attention from something it ceases to exist. If, as
Heidegger says, the task of thinking would be the exposure of
previous thinking to the voicing of the matter of thinking, then the
task of thinking would be not to turn its back on previous thinking,
but to turn back to it with regard and respect, Rucksicht. So if we are
to have regard for the previous thinking that goes under the name of
metaphysics, to let metaphysics be, to leave it to itself, we cannot
think beings away. We must rather let beings be. And this means
thinking of things, not thinking of beings only as objects as previous
philosophy and phenomenology have done.
When phenomenology or philosophy in general forgets that there
is more than objects represented, willed or desired by subjects it
represents itself as onto-theology. It forgets responsibility. That it is
irresponsible to construe responsibility onto-theologically is one thing
on which it is certain that Heidegger and Levinas would agree. This is
one reason why they could both be described as humanists, despite
their non-naming naming of, respectively, gods and God. Levinas's
humanism is more thoroughly humanistic than Heidegger's in that it
allows direct proto-ethical responsibility only from and to a human
being whereas, on our reading, Heidegger's humanism leaves room
for direct proto-ethical responsibility to non-human beings as well.
Allows room, we say, because Heidegger insists that the thinking of
being must not be mistaken for ethics. It is because of this insistence
that care must be taken to anticipate a mistaken inference from the
statement that his thinking of being is a humanism. If Heidegger
insists that he is not aiming to develop a theory of ethics, he insists
no less that he is not developing a case for religious agnosticism or
atheism; so in the sense in which humanism is one of these his
thinking is not humanistic. When he writes of the gods as participants
in the fourfold he is writing of a region of thinking shared by
theology and atheology, irrespective "of whether there is a god who
can be present in or absent from his temple, synagogue, mosque or
church. Only if this is kept in mind can his ontology be called a
humanism; only if we take seriously its claim to remain uncommitted
to any specific theory of ethics. That is its power and that is why we
are taking seriously its power to clear space, even if it does not itself
occupy that space, for an ethics of direct responsibility toward non­
human as well as human beings.
138 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
With the support, as he sees it, of Anaximander, Heraclitus and
Holderlin, Heidegger comes to think that Parmenides' Fragment 6
entitles us to say that although things do not appear by human
making they do not appear without human vigilance (VA2 54, PLT
181). That is, if the movement of Heidegger's reflection is 'through
phenomenology to thought', it is 'through' in the sense that
phenomenology is not left behind.6 Thought remains a thought of
appearing - and disappearing. Now the part human beings play in. the
appearing of the fourfold is twofold because it is reflexive in that its
being is an issue for the human being. Its being is ontological because
in being toward death it is being toward there being nothing and no
thing, hence being toward being - and hence Levinas's complaint.
And just as we must take steps to prevent ourselves thinking of being
as a being, so we must take care not to represent the fourfold as an
aggregate of objects. One of the steps Heidegger takes early on to
guard against the first error is to emphasize that Sein is a participle,
not a simple noun. One of the steps he takes later on to minimize the
risk of erring in the second way is to stress that the fourfold is a
fouring, the Geuiert a Vierung and Vieren (VA1 53, PLT 180).
Vierung is the Vorbeigang which the Verwei/ung of the beings that
make up the fourfold makes manifest provided one of those beings,
the human being, is in a mood to let beings be and belong to one
another. This human letting belong means, we have seen, letting each
participant in the fourfold belong in its own way according to its own
way of being, fUgsam seinem Wesen (VA2 55, PLT 182). This means
that the Verweilung of non-human beings is not to be assimilated to
that of human •beings. Gelassenheit prohibits anthropomorphism. It
requires that no peings be treated only as objects requisitioned in
order to calculate and as far as possible totalize the satisfaction of
human need and greed.
A bridge may serve as an example for our reflections . . . . Even
where the bridge covers the stream, it holds its flow up to the sky
by taking it under the vaulted gateway and then setting it free
once more . . . . The bridge lets the stream run its course and at the
same time grants their way to mortals so that they come and go
from shore to shore . . . . The bridge gathers to itself in ifs own way
earth and sky, divinities and mortals. (VA2 26-7, PLT 15 2-3)
There is also a lesson to be learned from the rose of Angelus Silesius,
whose words Heidegger cites in Der Satz vom Grund:
Ontological Responsibility 139
The rose is without why; it blooms because it blooms;
lt is regardless of its self, asks not if it is seen.
It is not true that if a rose is born to bfush unseen it wastes its
sweetness on the desert air.
V
Vierung is coming to be and passing away in good time with respect
to the regioning of four-dimensional space. In the words of another
preacher-poet,
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the
heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck
up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down and a time to
build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to
dance . . . .7
The poet who has been mainly in question in this chapter is the poet
of mourning and morning who writes in the elegy Brod und Wein :
One thing stands firm: whether it be near noon
Or close to midnight, a measure ever endures,
Common to all; yet to each his own is allotted, too,
Each of us goes toward and reaches the place
that he can. (H 251, PLT 95)
The place he reaches, be it noted, is the place he can reach. The poet
does not say that this may not fall short of the measure common to
all and perhaps too of what is allotted to him, just as the preacher­
poet leaves open whether every purpose under the heaven reaches its
time.8
When the thinker who has been mainly in question in this chapter
says that the thinking that must be given to the pas de quatre of
mortals, immortals, earth and sky is responsible remembrance,
Andenken, he is responsibly remembering the title of the hymn by
that poet on which he dwells in one of the essays published in
140 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
Erliiutenmgen zu Holder/ins Dichtung and in the lecture published in the
Gesamtausgabe as Volume 53. A topic of this and other works of
Holderlin is the coming and going of the gods, and the absencing of
past and future inherent in the presencing of things: Abschied and
Adieu or, as Levinas writes, A Dieu. Our discussion has scarcely
touched on this question of historicity and the way it connects with
the special responsibility Holderlin and Heidegger ascribe to the poet
of mediating between the divinities and men, thereby running the risk
of sacrilege, a risk of which, it deserves to be said, Holderlin is no less
afraid than Levinas, if by sacrilege is understood a failure to observe a
proper distance from the holy (G4 62, 104). So afraid of this is
Holderlin that according to Beda Allemann there is only one piece of
textual support in the late works of Holderlin for the idea that the
poet is a demigod acting as mediator like Empedocles or Christ.9 And
is it not important for our interpretation of Holderlin-Heidegger to
play down this widely-held idea, for if the poets are entrusted with
the task of mediating between the divinities and men, does it not
follow that there will be no responsibilities left for ordinary mortals7
This does not follow. First, because there are other responsibilities
than this special one ascribed to the poet, some of them, we have
been arguing, responsibilities to beings of the non-human regions of
the fourfold. Second, because those mortals whose responsibility it is
to name the holy need the response of ordinary mortals, their hearers
and readers, for the preservation of their words; as Heidegger
acknowledges when in 'The Origin of the Work of Art' he writes
'The preservers of a work belong to its createdness with an
essentiality equa1 to that of the creators' (H 58, PLT 71) - at least
equal, we could, say if with Levinas we understood creation as
adspiration by the other, the holding out to us of his hand and our
response; and as Holderlin acknowledges in the final paragraph of the
letter he sent probably in November 1802 where he asks Bohlendorff
to write soon because 'I need your pure accents. Communion with
friends, germination of thought in conversation and letter is necessary
for artists.' As Celan notes, winning Levinas's agreement, a poem can
be a handshake. And there is agreement between Holderlin and
Heidegger and Levinas and Celan that ordinary mortals are extra­
ordinary, even if there is not general agreement among them on the
reasons for saying this. One reason on which at least Heidegger and
Holderlin agree is that the so-called ordinary mortal who hears the
poet's words must himself be a poet in his way. The ordinary mortal
shares with the poet who is 'struck by Apollo' and whose 'eye too
Ontological Responsibility 141
many' is dazzled by the fire of the sky (G4 189-90) the responsibility
of loyally remembering the extraordinariness of ordinary beings,
whether they be human beings or not: 'the jug and the bench, the
footbridge and the plough . . . tree and pond too, brook and hill . . .
heron and roe, deer, horse and bull . . . mirror and clasp, book and
picture, crown and cross' (VA2 55, PLT 182), where the book may be
the Book or may not, its word the word of the prophet or the word
of the poet, where the cross may be the cross of the Word, of the
Trinity, or may not, because the cross of the word � the
Quatemity, and the burden of ontological responsibility it carries
with it, are prior to theistic and atheistic faith as well as to rational
onto-theology and onto-atheology.
VI
If ontological responsibility is also prior to ethics it may seem that
the burden it brings is vanishingly light. It may strike the reader of
the hundreds of pages in which Heidegger meditates on Holderlin and
the early Greeks that there emerges and could be expected to emerge
from them no directive whatsoever as to what their readers should do
other than, so to speak, wait upon grace. When asked by the young
student Buchner with what authority the author of these pages says
what he says in them Heidegger responds with another question:
Where do Plato and Kant get theirs? 'It never occurs to anyone to ask
whence Plato had a directive to think of being as idea, or whence
Kant had the directive to think of being as the transcendental
character of abjectness, as position (being posited)' (VA2 58, PLT
185). Although this response may sound arrogant, it is in fact a sign
of humility. Thinking of the thing is 'a thinking that thinks about the
possible advent of the world, and keeping it thus in mind (andenkend)
perhaps, in the humblest and inconspicuous matters, helps such an
advent to reach the opened-up realm of man's nature as man'.
Humility however is not ordinary passivity, any more than is the
waiting on grace that, in both senses, calls for religious faith,
paradoxically presupposing what it pursues, seeking what it must
already have found. It is not upon the advent of an object that poetic
thinking waits. By now we have heard Heidegger say often enough
that poetic thinking is not (p)re-presentation, Vorstellen. And by now
it should be clear that the waiting for which poetic thinking calls is
rooted in our belonging in that upon which we wait, and it is from
 142 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
this that it receives its movement toward it, its Bewegung (Gel 51-2,
DT 73-4). The 'higher doing' (Gel 35, DT 61) that poetic thinking
calls for is neither activity nor passivity. It is less like the derivation
of conclusions from authorized premisses than criticism if this critical
testing is taken to be not, as in Popperian criticism, the application of
· a method but rather the following of contours in the opening up of a
way, where the opening up of a way is what Heidegger would call
Be-wigen and perhaps even Tao (US 198, OWL 92) ar.d where the
contours are a changeable configuration of the Vieren of the history of
being. 10 To think the thing is to think being, and 'To think "being"
means: to respond to the appeal of its presencing (dem Anspruch seines
Wesens entsprechen). The response stems from the appeal and releases
itself (entliisst sieh) toward the appeal' (VA2 56, PLT 183 }. The
response must be historical in that i t must be tested by listening
with one ear to words that have been spoken, for example by the
early Greeks, and with the other for words that are on the way. The
response will not be an answer, but another question, for 'the essence
of man is never an answer but essentially a question' (EM 107, IM
118). Hence ontological responsibility is an Antwort/ichkeit ohne
Antwort. That is what marks it off from ethical responsibility that
believes it knows the answer, and from calculative thinking that
believes it can prove which answer is right. Because the Prufung des
Gehdrs to which ontological responsibility must be open calls for 'the
complete concentration of care and caution toward being that has
already come to language', already come to language, it calls for the
commemoratively thinking poet and the commemoratively poietic
thinker respectively to name the holy and to say the words for being.
We have been . saying something about one of these words, to
chreon, of which Heidegger writes that it is the oldest name for the
being of beings. Since we began this chapter by describing our
question as a question of doing justice, of doing what is due, to
beings, let us end it by returning to one of the other words in the
fragment from Anaximander.
Dike, the fugsam, as this emerges from Heidegger's intertextual
reading of Holderlin with Anaximander, Heraclitus and Parmenides
(Pythagoras with his qualitative understanding of number may be
about to come on to the scene), must not be identified with the fitting
as this is conceived in theological, rationalist, nationalist or naturalist
theories of ethics. To do that would be to conceive Gesetz as Gestell. It
would be to fail to recognize that ethical, theological and religious
criteria and standards of propriety are appealed to responsibly only
Ontological Responsibility 143
when understood as expressions of the pre-criteriological authenticity
and propriety mentioned in the statement part of which was cited
above: 'lf authentic releasement (Gelassenheit) is to be the proper
(gemasse) relation to that which regions, and if this relation is
determined solely by what it is related to, then authentic_r.eleasement
must be based upon that which regions, and must have received from
it movement toward it'. Gelassenheit is guardianship, Wiichterschaft,
and guardianship is vigilance, Wachsamkeit, motivated by what in
Being and Time is named Gewissenhabenwollen, wanting to have a
conscience, an ontological conscientiousness which is prior to and
unfixated by principles: Ent-schlossenheit, the authentic opening of man
for the open (Gel 61, DT 81).
Hermeneutically intermediate between his earliest unarticulated
thinking of being and his later Holderlinian topography of the
fourfold are Heidegger's explorations of the dyad of earth and
world in 'The Origin of the Work of Art' and his reflections on
early Greek thinking of dike as the order of worldhood as such which
is in tension with and against the propensity for disorder that erupts
in the world when man, who in the words of the chorus of Antigone
'comes toward nothingness' (G53 92), suddenly finds himself struck
by the strange thought that there is a world and there are things.
World and things as such are sung into existence, it might be said, as
Arkady does say in Bruce Chatwin' s The Songlines of the Australian
aboriginal world.
'Some.times', said Arkady, Tll be driving my "old man" through the
desert, and we'll come to a ridge of sandhills, and suddenly they'll
all start singing. "What are you mob singing?" I'll ask, and they'll
say, "Singing up the country, boss. Makes the country come up
1
quicker." ' 1
World comes up quicker when it is sung. The waxing and waning of
the world as a whole is the unsaid. It is also in Wittgenstein's strict
sense unsayable. In Heidegger's strict sense it calls for the aboriginal
Sagen for which the poet has an ear, 'the music of the spirit of
apartness that has been spoken to the poet' (US 70, OWL 188). The
measure of the music, its nomos, is dike, the tempo of the music of
time, the measureless - demesuri, as Levinas would say, of my
responsibility to the other - measure of four-dimensional regioning,
the 'principle' of all principles, the Abgrund below the ground base.
Dike in Heidegger's thinking of the Greeks corresponds in Holderlin's
144 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience Ontological Responsibility 145

thinking of them to what Allemann names the royal principle. This is order to bring to mind the question whether my responsibility toward
the principle of organization and Ortschaft, the principle of return to the next man which Levinas counts to be primary justice and a
hearth and home. Dike is in tension with the violence of techne. Techne condition of ethical justice where three persons are gathered together,
corresponds to what Allemann names the Empedodean principle. This has as its condition in turn justice among the human and non-human
is the aorgic principle, the principle of Wanderschaft, the principle of beings of the quaternity. Although there is no question of deducing
departure and of exile, nomadism or walkabout. Holderlin's departure particular ethical responsibilities from this ontological justice, it makes
and return become on Heidegger's reading of him a journey to the room for the direct responsibilities toward human beings which
unheimisch and a return which together enable him 'to know the place Levinas holds to be the only direct ethical responsibilities we have,
for the first time', to know that the unheimisch is the home, the but for direct responsibilities toward non-human beings as well,
ungewdhnlich the Wohnung, and that being is the hearth, the human toward birds, trees, meadows, sky . . . .
habitation to which the man of science, the man of learning and the
teacher come back at the end of their conversation on a country path
where the teacher says 'perhaps we can express our experience during
this conversation by saying that we are coming near to and so at the
same time remaining distant from that which regions; although such
remaining is, to be sure, a returning' (Gel 67-8, DT 86). What
Holderlin's experience and the ebbing flow of the River Ister teach is
that Ortschaft is Wanderschaft, the royal principle and the Empedo­
clean principle are the same. When at the end of the hymn Andenken
Holderlin writes

But the memory

Is taken and given by the sea,

he 'names the law of being away from home as the law of

homecoming', though this law, Heidegger adds, reaching a point of
almost absolute �roximity to HegeL is but an empty ruJe uruess we
aJso name the essential trait in which the history of a historical people
resides (G53 166, cp 156 and 177).
Heraclitus says in Fragment 80 that we must remember that the
law of being is a law of laws, a Gesetz of the way order, dike, nomos,
belongs to setting apart, polemos, Auseinandersetzung (EM 127, IM
139). This Auseinandersetzung is then a Gegensetzung in which the gegen
is not only an against but also a toward. This law of being or nature,
phusis, is the law of the historical fourfold of mortals. divinities, earth
and sky that is named when the unsettling techne of the poet in man
and the orderliness of dike, both spoken of in the last strophe of the
choric song from Antigone, respond to each other in what Holderlin
calls the harmonious Gegensetzung of what Heidegger calls the
regioning, Vergegnis, of the fourfold. We call this law of being or
nature the law of ontological responsibility or ontological justice in

7 transformed into the invisible, and that to do this is man's, especially
The Responsibility of Saving the
World Through Song
nous voila charges de la transmutation, de la resurrection, de la
transfiguration de toutes chases.
. merely making clear the everyday understanding of what it ·is for
Rainer Maria Rilke, letter to Sophy Gtauque,
26 November 1925
Arkady, who is of Russian origin, probably knows Dostoevsk)r's
Brothers and his Markel. He certainly knows Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus,
at least the most celebrated of these, the third of the first part
containing the sentence 'Song is existence', Gesang isf D_
asein. How
close to what Rilke means by this do Arkady and hts _ mterlocutor
come in the following exchange?
Aboriginals could not believe the counh� existed until they
could see and sing it - just as, in the Dreamhme, the country had
not existed until the Ancestors sang it.
�
'So the land', I said, 'must first exist as a concept in t e mind?
Then it must be sung? Only then can it be said to existr
'True.'
'In other words, "to exist" is "to be perceived"?'
��
' interdependency of the language. of philosophy or, more precisely,
'Sounds suspiciously like Bishop Berkeley's Refutation of Matter.
How like Berkeley's esse est percipi is Rilke's Gesang ist Dasein ? Not
very. It does not say esse est cantari. Berkeley's dictu� has it that the
. .
being of matter is being perceived, for example bemg vtstble. The
words from Rilke's most often quoted poem epitomize what he says
in the most quoted of his letters, that by song the visible is
146
Saving the World Through Song 147
the poet's, task. So, as against what Berkeley and Arkady's aboriginals
maintain, the visible must already in some sense exist before the
singer comes on the scene. Although, because it is visible, its
existence will be more than existence 'as a concept in the mind', its
existence will be deficient as compared with the existence conferred
by song. When Berkeley insists that he is not making things into
ideas but making ideas into things, he is wanting to have his readers
understand that in the dispute about the nature of material substance
he is on the side of people untutored in philosophy, and that he is
doing no more than formulating what they take for granted. He is
something to be a physical thing. This can hardly be what Rilke is
doing in his poems if he is right when he asserts in one of his letters
(17 March 1922) that there is not a single word in his poems that has
the sense it has in ordinary speech. 'Not a single word in the poem
(and here I mean every und or der, die, das) is identical with the same­
sounding word in ordinary usage and conversation'. This, he explains,
is because in the poem and in literary prose there. is a greater purity in
the lawfulness in the way the words relate to one another, a greater
density - a greater Dichl-ung, we might say. This poses a nice
problem. How can what is said in the poem have a. bearing on what is
said in the language of daily life? And how does the language of
philosophy relate to the other two? There is no single answer to these
questions. The answers will depend on the philosophies and the
poems we have in mind. For at least some selections it will be
important not to assume that there is no overlap among the three
kinds of language, if indeed it is correct to talk of three kinds of
language here. Berkeley believes that between his language and
ordinary speech the degree of overlap is extensive. Rilke's view of
the non-identity between the words of his poems and those of
everyday discourse does not exclude a dependency of the one on the
other. And Heidegger's later philosophical idiom is an example of an
essential thinking, Denken, and the language of poetry, that is to say,
in his sense, Dichtung, originary naming. Furthermore, Heidegger does
not hold that poetry, in particular the poetry of Rilke, is isolated from
metaphysical philosophy. One of the reasons for his lukewarmness in
'What are poets for?' over Rilke's right t o be counted along with
Holderlin as a 'poet in the time of need' is that Rilke subscribes to the
metaphysics of Will to Power and Representation. Although Rilke
•
148 Tlte Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
does not participate with Berkeley or any o�her �hilos�pher i� the
metaphysical dispute over the nature of matenal thmgs, hts poetics of
things, a ccor ding to Heidegger, is founded and foundered on
metaphysics. Heidegger's attempt to show this is conducted largely
with reference to Rilke's poems - a procedure that leads one to
wonder whether he can consistently do this and yet deprecate as
abuse the attempt to extract a philosophy from the poems of
Holderlin or Rilke (H 252, PLT 96). He does not inhibit himself
entirely from referring to Rilke's letters and other writings in prose.
Nor shall we.
In 'What are poets for?' (1946), relying chiefly on lines improvised
two years before the poet's death, Heidegger tells us that the
metaphysics of Rilke's poetry is a gentler form ?f Nietzs�heanis n;.
Leaving aside the vexed question of the tenabthty _ of He1degger s
reading of Nietzsche (of which we shall speak briefly in Chapter 9),
his reason for comparing Rilke's metaphysics with Nietzsche's is that
for the thinking of both writers will and representation or idea are
fundamental. And representation is fundamental because wilL specific­
ally the will to will, is fundamental. Both Rilke and Nietzsche inherit a
version of the Leibnizian metaphysics according to which Natura or
being is primitive active force, vis primitiva acfiva, that expresses �tself
as a higher or lower degree of clarity or confusedness of c?nsCJ�us­
ness. Human willing is an expression of this force whtch Rilke
identifies with Life. And for the most part human willing expresses
itself as will to persist in its life, to which end it makes use of the rest
of nature as resource. This use calls for the representation of the rest
of nature as objects over against the subject who employs them and
other human beings in calculating and manufacturing the most
efficient means. From this point of view language too is never
anything more than a utility. Animals and plants, ho:vev er, are n�t
over against a world in this way. Their way of belongmg m _ na�ure ts
one of being in what Rilke calls the Open, a boundless whole, w1th no
awareness of distinction between themselves and their surroundings.
Rilke's Open is not to be confused with the Open in Heidegger's
sense the unconcealedness of beings that lets beings as such be
prese �t. Animals are incapable of conceiving beings as such. This is
why in the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (�29/30) and t e � Hier ist alles Abstand, und dorf wars Atem 'for womb is all!' But the
lectures on Parmenides (G54) Heidegger says that ammals are poor m
•
Saving the World Through Song 149
world, weltarm. In the letter of 25 February 1926, which Heidegger
cites, Rilke writes:
By the 'Open', therefore, I do not mean sky, air and space; they too
are 'object' and thus 'opaque' and dosed t o the man who observes
and judges. The animal, the flower, presumably is all that, without
accounting to itself, and therefore has before itself that indescrib­
ably open freedom which perhaps has its (extremely fleeting)
equivalents among us only in those first moments of love when
one human being sees his own scope (Weite) in another, his
beloved, and in man's elevation toward God.
It is paradoxical that what in the classical great chain of being is
below man's estate should be a pointer towards what in that chain is
above. But the 'equivalents' are in a vital respect utterly different. The
letter that speaks of them is a reply to a request from a Russian
correspondent for elucidation of the eighth Duino elegy. This elegy
says that the free animal and the flower have before them 'pure
space', eternity, God, 'without no'. lmmer ist es Welt. Soon after birth
and shortly after death this is how it can be with human being, if
indeed it is possible to speak of human being when
nearing death, one sees death no more
and stares forth, perhaps with an animal's wide gaze.
Rilke here has no such doubts as those voiced by Levinas over
whether an awareness of death can be discerned in the animal's eyes.
Yet, later in the same elegy, we are told that even in the all­
encompassing look of the animal there is a hint of what is the normal
human condition:
the memory
as if that for which we long
were once nearer . . .
.
Here all is distance,
there it was breath.
-
child has hardly left it when he or she is violently roused from the
residual moments of 'quiet lostness' in unbounded pure space and
 Tire Middle Voice of Ecological Coi'!Science
150
compelled to look at things, no longer beyond them. Henceforth life
is a perpetual taking leave, immer Abschied. Although these 'shades of
the prison house' may be momentarily dispelled when a person falls
in love, the fufilment of the promise of a return to the Open is
frustrated because the loved one is there standing in his or her light!
From this cruel paraphrase we can conclude that in Rilke's
estimation there is a sense in which the life of the animal is more
whole and holy, heilig, than that of the human being, despite the
poet's admission that even the animal is burdened by 'the weight and
care of a great sadness'. Perhaps the plant, Rilke's flower, is holiest of
all. And what would he say of the stone? What should we? And what
about 'man's elevation to God'?
We have seen that Rilke says of the anim al lmmer ist es Welt, it is
ever world. And we have also seen that according to Heidegger the
animal is poor in world. This does not mean that when Heidegger
says this three or four years after the publication of Being and Time he
is advancing a reason for downgrading the status of the animal below
that of man. Without entering here into the question whether
Heidegger consistently stands by his resolve to eschew evaluation,
and what exactly that resolution entails (we say something about this
in the Postface), it can be asserted without doubt that when in The
Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics he says that the animal is
weltarm, whereas man is world-forming or world-constituting or
world-picturing, weltbilderrd, he does not mean that the animal has a
world like man's, only one that is less rich. Tucked away in The
Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics is the statement that the
poorness of th'i:! animal's poorness in world is, roughly speaking,
nevertheless a richness (G29/30 371). It may well be that this
statement is not as roh gesprochen as Heidegger says. It may be that
he is treading delicately in order to allow Reichtum to be understood
(on analogy with Konigtum, kingdom) as realm in this statement and
the statement later in the same paragraph that the realm of life is one
whose being open has a richness such that the human world can
perhaps know nothing of it at all, 'human speculation practically runs
out of alternatives' (VA3 70, EGT 116): Vielmehr ist das Leben ein
Bereich, der einen Reichtum des Offensein hat, wie ihn vielleicht die
menschliche Welt gar nicht kennt. Whether or not it would be too naive
to say that if Heidegger had wanted to exclude the interpretation of
Reichfum as richness he would have done so explicitly, that he does
not want to exclude it is clear from his opposing this word to the
word Armut in one of the two sentences in question and from his
Saving the World Through Song 151
saying in the other that Reichtum is what the Bereich has rather than
' ·
what it is.
So here some concession is made to anyone who, like Rilke, wishes
� o speak up for th� quality of animal life. Rilke also speaks of respects
.
m whtch ammal ltfe Js better than ordinary human existence. It is
better in so far as the animal, according to him, enjoys existence in an
unbounded world, uninhibited in particular by the idea of its being
bound for and by death. Human existence knows only those rare
.
equiValents of this . state which we referred to above. Heidegger, it
hardly needs stressmg, does not say in the sentence we have cited
that the richness of the life of non-humans is of a richness that the
human world cannot know, or even that it is of a richness that the
h�man world cannot know perhaps. He says that it is a richness of the
kmd ?f which perhaps the human world can know nothing. It is not a
quesbon of compar� ng degrees of richness of quality of life. (We say
.
mor� ��out companson m the Postface.) Rather is it a question of the
�osstbthty that we may be unable to have any experience of the
n:hness that may be a quality of animal life. Yet this does not prevent
.
hts makmg a d�tailed analysis of animal life the first part of his
account of the dtfference between human world-constitution and the
.
�
animal's worl -poverty. This analysis goes into detail beyond what
.
w� ft�d m Bemg and Time, but the analysis of Weltbildung associated
.
Wt�h 1t IS put forward as an analysis of man as distinct from the living
bemg, a d the word Weltbildung seems to be used still in the fairly
.�
unspectftc sense conveyed by the expression 'world-constitution' . We
earlter gave 'world-picturing' as an alternative, and we might well
have added 'world-representation'. Heidegger states in The Funda­
�
menta Concepts of Metaphysics that he is there using the word
Weltbddung unspecifically so s to cover the idea of constructing a
. � .
;-rorld (Herstellen), the tdea of glVlng a picture or view of it, portraying
tt (Darstellen) and the tdea of constituting and enclosing it within a
frame (Ausmachen, Einfassen, Umfangen) (G29/30 414). The world as
represent�d or pictured is in The Age of the World Picture', Die Zeif
des Weltbddes (1938), and 'Science and Reflection' (1954) specifically
and explicitly limited to the modern world of post-Cartesian science
The Bild is a model, rule or framework of which an extreme fo�
would be a Geste/1, pro- and pre-posited (vor-gestellfe) by modem man
who l �oks at the world, subjecting it to objecthood, unlike
Parmemdean man who is 'looked upon by that which is' (VA 1 61,
QCT 180; H 83, QCT 13D-1). However, it is not impossible that in
The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics Heidegger is thinking of man
152 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
as a modern invention. Hence his preference for speaking in Being and
Time of Dasein even when he means that being that 'is there'; and
hence his hedging in the 'Letter on Humanism' when pressed to
declare whether h e is arguing for a new humanism. A year before the
lecture Die Ztif des Welfbildes was delivered he was giving a lecture in
which he seeks to explain 'the fact that as a consequence of the will to
dehumanize world interpretation Nietzsche is compelled to will
supreme humanization' in his doctrine of eternal return. The
explanation is that for Nietzsche man itself is one of those
unquestioningly presupposed Vorbilde the formation of which,
according to The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. distinguishes
man from animals. It is unquestioned because the question 'who man
is ... cannot even be posed, much less answered, without the
question of what being as a whole is', and this second question
'embraces a more original question, one which 1uither Niefzsche nor
philosophy prior to him unfolded or was able to unfold (G44, NI
'
364-5, trans. I! 105; Heidegger's italics).
In connection with our earlier comments on the relationships
between the language of philosophy, the language of everyday life
and the language of poetry. to which we should now add the
language of the sciences (see note 1 of our Postface and the sentence
to which it is appended), one cannot but ask whether the analysis of
non-human life presented in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics
could be slotted into the space opened up when i n Being and Time
Heidegger refers in passing to an area of human worldhood for the
understanding of which neither the existentials catalogued in that
book nor the c<1tegories of presence at hand and readiness to hand
suffice. After mentioning animal and other natural products he
observes that aside from this readiness to hand of natural things
and the presence at hand they may have for the botanist or zoologist
who collects and dissects them, things of nature, or, as Heidegger
writes, 'Nature', may be 'the flowers of the hedgerow' (die Blumen am
Rain) or 'the springhead in the dale' (die Quelle im Grund). which is not
the source that interests the geographer. These words in inverted
commas belong to the language of poetry, the language we use of the
Macht der Erde, the Naturrnac/1t, Nature 'which "stirs and strives",
which assails us and enthralls us as landscape', enthralls man who
lives poetically on this earth, who dichterisch, wohnet . .. auf dieser
Erde (BT 70; G39 88). Now, Heidegger asks, is not it only the poet in
us who says that the animal is weltarm understood as suffering from
lack of world? He does not answer his own question immediately.
Saving the World Through Song 153
Instead he notes only provisionally that the biologist has no occasion
to talk in this way and that perhaps on reflection we shall have to
concede that the animal does not suffer a privation of world and that
to say that it does is to talk only illustratively and analogically from
man's point of view. Our understanding of what it is for us to b e in a
world, and for us to be in the world for the most part in a way that is
deprived of the world's worldhood, the way of inauthenticity and
indifference, is taken as a metaphor of how it is all of the time with all
animal life. Perhaps this furnishes us with a kind of truth, but a poetic
truth which, like the truth of myth, is a truth of a special sort. Still,
Heidegger adds, referring to Romans 8: 19, and to the apocryphal
Esra 4: 7 and 12, the fact that not only preachers and prophets but
also poets speak in this way, as when Rilke attributes to the animal a
lingering, so to speak, metaphysical sadness, should not be dismissed
out of hand. Perhaps this fact is evidence that what they say has a
metaphysical truth. The last words of The Fundamental Concepts of
Metaphysics are words quoted from a poem - admittedly a. poem by
Nietzsche. the poet in whose metaphysicsal wake Heidegger locates
Rilke (G54 235).
These cautionary remarks are made at the end of more than a
hundred pages in which he has been investigating the structures of
the openness of animal life. The reader of those pages might well
have come t o think that in them Heidegger's style of philosophizing
is surprisingly different from what we have been led to expect of him
by the existential analytic of being and time.It is as though he were
now engaged in an analytic of animal life from a basis independent of
the life of human beings - indeed when he speaks now of ljfe, it is
almost as though the phrase 'human life' were a contradiction in
terms. There certainly is a difference in style between the two books,
if only because in the later one much of what he says is directed at
specific biological theories, whereas most of the references to biology
in Being and Time are made only where its author wants to issue a
general warning to his reader that its statements are of a category
quite other than those of biology. The difference of style does not
however amount to a basic reversal of approach. I n the Introduction
of Being and Time he writes: 'biology as a "science of life" is founded
upon the ontology of Dasein, even if not entirely. Life, in its own
right, is a kind of Being; but essentially it is accessible only in Dasein.
The ontology of life is accomplished by way of a privative
Interpretation' (BT 49-50). As is beginning to emerge in those
pages of Kant's Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone which
154 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
Heidegger discusses in The Fundamental Problems of Phenomenology,
human being is not rational animality in the sense of an aggregate of
animal life and something else. The idea that it is continues to be a
target in The Basic Concepts of Metaphysics, so there too we find it
emphasized that the essence of life can be approached only from a
deconstrudive point of view, im Sinne einer abbauenden Betrachtung
(G29/30 371), meaning by this subtractive back-translation from our
understanding of our own being in a world.
True, Heidegger says in the words reproduced from the Introduc­
tion of Being and Time that biology as a science of life is not entirely
or exclusively founded on the ontology of Dasein. Why does he say
this? Does he mean that there must also be an appeal to the
empirically present at hand data that distinguish biology from, for
instance, botany or psychology? As we have noted, The Fundamental
Concepts of Metaphysics makes fairly detailed references to these and
to the theories of recent biologists. However, after those hundred
pages in which it seems that this book may not be taking the
ontology of Dasein as its point of departure there comes this
reassertion of the methodological canon of regressive analysis from
being in a human world followed by an unmistakable adherence to it
throughout the rest of the book. This, however, is not the only
apparent reversal. The book (lectures delivered in 1929 and 1930) has
two main connected topics: ontological boredom (tiefe Langeweile),
corresponding to the topic of anxiety in Being and Time, and
worldhood. (Boredom, anxiety and worldhood are all topics of
What is Metaphysics?', a lecture delivered in 1929.) One of the
reasons why the watershed in the discussion of worldhood appears
where it does is that the argument seems compelled to begin again
because it seems to have talked itself into a contradiction. U seems
that in the endeavour to explain what can be meant by saying that
the animal is poor in world we have had to say both that the animal
has a world and that it does not. This would be unacceptable to the
logic of sound common sense, Heidegger says, but not to the logic of
metaphysics. It is not at all clear why he should say this, since he
goes on to say that the apparently contradictory statements do not
speak of access to world in one and the same sense, a circumstance
that would surely remove any objection to their joint assertion that
might be entertained by sound common sense (G29/30, 293, 309,
389-92). When the different senses are spelled out we learn that the
animal's having a world is defined in terms of what is above it in the
classical great chain of being and its not-having a world is defined in
Saving the World Through Song 155
terms of what is below. If we define having a world as having access
to entities, then the animal that negotiates obstacles in its path has a
world. This is not, however, how having a world can be defined if
world is to be understood as the world that human beings constitute.
Having a world is, among other things, having access to entities as
such. The 'as' is all important and several sections towards the end of
The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics expand on what is said about
the hermeneutic 'as' and the apophantic 'as' in Being and Time. It is
only when this and other features of human worldhood are grasped
that a return can be made t o the point at which the provisional
analysis of the animal's Wellarmut was broken off.
The animal is open to that which inhibits or disinhibits its drives.
This being open is a being absorbed, wrapped up and rapt in its
instinctual life, hingenommen and benommen, benumbed or stunned, as
we may say, recalling what Heidegger says in the Grundfragen der
Philosofhie (G45) about the way man is open to be astonished, er­
_ latter uncommon form of human openness to astonish­
stau.nt. Th1s
ment before the common presupposes the capacity to accept or let be,
sich ein/assen auf. . .. The animal does not have this latter capacity.
Heidegger actually says, positively, that it has the capacity to not
accede or not let be. This is a surprising thing for him to say since it
suggests that it at least makes sense to suppose that an animal could
accede to, accept or let something be - and did we not see in our last
chapter that although non-human things of the fourfold are incapable
of Gelassenheit, they are capable of letting things be? Maybe in 1929-
30 Heidegger chooses to attribute positively to the animal the power
of not letting be rather than to deny to it the power of letting be
because he thinks that only the positive attribution presupposes that
the animal enjoys a kind of openness. But, fortunately, this openness
of animal life does not need arguing for in this curious way. It is, on
Heidegger's own account, already implied in the idea of the animal's
absorption in its life and in whatever inhibits its drives. No such
openness or openness of any other kind, he now adds, is possible for
the stone. S o are we to say that the stone has no world? Is that what
is meant by saying that it is welt/os ? And is it we/flos because it has
no having? Fortunately again, Heideg,ser does not need t o argue this.
His aim is to show only that because the stone does not have the
openness either that the animal has or that the human being has it
cannot be poor in world, whereas because the animal does have a
kind of openness there is room for it to be poor or deprived in some
regard, though not deprived of world, that is to say, not lacking in
156 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
what it could be expected to have.Its not having a world is a straight
negation, not a privation, and its having is a having of a non-worldly
openness. With this somewhat laboured dismissal of the apparent
contradiction between the animal's having and not having, the second
and intermediate thesis of the original three - man is welfbildend, the
animal is weltarm, and the stone is welt/os - has been shown to be
justified only by being shown to have only heuristic utility. What his
testing of it enables Heidegger to conclude is that the animal's not
having a world is not a lower degree of world-having than that of
man. Animal life - in Heidegger's argument vegetable life is glossed
over as no( for his purposes as relevant - and human being are, he
concludes, evaluaHvely incommensurable. This conclusion is what we
would be led to expect by his statement quoted earlier that there may
well be a richness in animal life but it is not open to us human beings
to experience it.
II
This conclusion, like this earlier quoted statement, makes a concession
to Rilke in the way that the agnostic makes to the theist a concession
that the atheist does not. Other readers of Heidegger may find him
much harder on Rilke than we have so far found him to be. They
might take Heidegger to be first objecting to Rilke's idea that the life
of the animal is in a certain respect superior to human being and,
second, to be arguing that the opposite is the case. Our reading
agrees on the first point but stops short of agreement on the second.
True, when Heidegger remarks that Rilke seems to be recommending
that humans should become animals, his tone of voice is indistinguish­
able from that of someone who wants to endorse a time-honoured
opinion that animal life is as such poorer than human existence as
such. In the lectures of 1929-30 Heidegger compares animality and
humanity ontologically in order to demonstrate that they cannot be
compared evaluatively. One of the authors he addresses in his
sections on the animal is Jacob Johann von Uexkiil.l While Heidegger
draws on that biologist's books he does s o in order to show how
misguided is the title of one of them, namely Umwe/t und lnnenwelt
der Tiere, as though he were already saying to Rilke that as regards
the animal Nimmer isf es Welt, it is never world, a statement with
which he comes out bold and clear in the Introduction fo Metaphysics
(1935) where we read: 'The animal has no world nor any environ-
Saving the World Through Song 157
ment' (G40 48, EM 34, !M 37). The misleadingness of the earlier
description of the living as poor in world is acknowledged also in the
Beitriige zur Philosophie (1936-8). There Weltarmut is replaced by
Welflosigkeil in describing life. Consequently Weltlosigkeit has to be
withheld from the stone. The stone is now declared to be not even
poor in world. The reason given for this is that the stone is without
the darkening or dimming (not to say dimness) associated with
instinctual life (G65 277).
A dozen years after the 1929-;-30 course one of the authors
preoccupying Heidegger is Nietzsche, on whom he had recently
been lecturing over a period of four years. This fact goes some way
to explain the more than usually shrill edge there is to his voice when
he speaks then of Rilke. It may explain also why his determination to
put Rilke in his place, which is a Nietzschean place according to him
as we have seen, leads him to make two criticisms of the poet that are
not demonstrably consistent with each other. On the one hand Rilke
is suspected of humanizing animals (and plants), and indeed of
equating them with the llber-mensch, on such grounds as the words
of the Eighth Elegy:
What is outside, we know from the animal's face
alone....
On the other hand Rilke is charged with demoting human beings
from their traditional position above animals in the chain of being.
'For Rilke human "consciousness", reason, logos, is precisely man's
limitation, leaving him less capable than the animal. So are we
supposed to become "animals"?'
It can hardly be said that if there is any inconsistency here it is not
that of the critic but of the texts he is describing.One reason for this
is the failure of the words just cited to make a simple distinction that
is made by Rilke and by Heidegger himself elsewhere, the distinction
between logos as calculative ratioCination and logos as poetic Sagen,
which both Rilke and Heidegger also call Gesang. It i s precisely
because human beings but not animals, not even blackbirds, have the
capacity, in Rilke's sense, to sing, that we are needed by them and by
every other thing on earth.
Yes, the Springs had need of you
says the First Elegy. And
158 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
all this here and now, transitory, needs us,
and concerns us strangely. Us the most transitory of all
says �he Nin�h. Rilke's word for need being the same as Heidegger's,
brauchen. The 'us' who are needed is the poetic heart in man, needed
to save what is threatened by the wholly cerebral structures of an
increasingly desacralized world. Rilke's Klagelied on this subject
touches a chord that sounds in Heidegger's remarks on technology,
for example those made in the 1946 essay on Rilke which are a good
deal more sympathetic to the poet than he had been three years
earlier. A fundamental difference remains, the difference between what
each of them means by the word 'Open', despite the possibility that
both of them came across it in Holderlin. The conceptual structure,
the erdachtes Gebild, of the Seventh Elegy is not remote from what in
'The Question Concerning Technology' Heidegger refers to as
enframing or installation. Ge-stell. And when a few lines later we read
Temples he no longer knows
it is impossible not to recall what Holderlin and Heidegger say about
the unmissed missingness of the gods. even if the comparison of the
newly fabricated church to a post office on Sundays is unmistakably
Rilkean. There are lines in his poetry, in his letters and in other
writings in prose in which Rilke speaks fondly of old and familiar
things. things with which people have lived, like the worn doorstep
of a house and the partition walls whose interior surfaces have been
exposed by the ;partial demolition of a block of P� ris apartmen s. �
More than a page of the description of these walls m Malfe Launds
Brigge is reproduced in The Basic Problems of Phenon:enology whe:e
what Rilke calls 'the tenacious life' of former inhab1tants that sbll
clings to the surfaces Heidegger prefers to call being-in-the-world.
Rilke's description of the surviving evidences of this life is an urban
equivalent of the description of van Cogh's painting of the r; asant's
shoes given by Heidegger in 'The Origin of the Work of Art . These
evidences of life, of course, are also evidences of death:
And from those walls once blue, and green, and yellow, framed by
the outlines of the destroyed partitions, the breath of these lives
came forth, the obstinate. sluggish, fusty breath which no wind
had yet dispersed ... the sicknesses and expirations (das Ausgeat­
mete) . . . .
Saving the World Through Song 159
It is because in the midst of life man is toward death that he, the most
transitory, is needed by the transitory things of this world, beings
whose openness has the freedom of being toward life but untoward
death, free of this other toward or regard, this anderen Bezug, as Rilke
says, because their transitoriness (Verganglichkeit) is, as Heidegger
says, perishability (Verendlichkeif), not mortality (Sferblichkeit). The
unprotected need those that are even less protected because of the
dangers they, human beings, incu'r through their being able to speak
and to sing, to sing elegies and hymns of praise, as though through
mourning perishing were avenged by being turned into death. In
human beings non-human beings find their voice. In the human hymn
of praise their transitoriness passes away. There, in the poem, in
sculpture, in the painting, they become 'realized' in the sense in which
Cezanne uses this word, the word that reappears in Heidegger's lines
on Cezanne in Gedachtes.
Cezanne, Rodin and Jens Peter Jacobsen played a significant part in
enabling Rilke to break with his earliest manner of writing where
what is paramount is the expression of his own feelings. These artists,
he says, taught him to attend more closely to the things around him
and to concentrate on eliminating imprecision in depicting them in his
literary works. It could be said that after directing his attention first to
his own feelings and then to the objects around him, he learned to
fuse the subject and the object in the last two decades of his life,
above all in the Sonnets to Orpheus and in the Duino Elegies. When at
the beginning of this chapter we commented upon the reference i.n
Bruce Chatwin' s The Songlines to the third of these sonnets and to
how its Gesang isf Dasein is linked there b y Arkady and his
interlocutor, presumably Chatwin himself, with Berkeley's esse es/
percipi, it may have come as a surprise to anyone who had read
Heidegger's comments on this sonnet that Arkady and Chatwin
should suppose the existence in question in Rilke's words to be the
existence of what is sung rather than the existence of the singer. That
Rilke is thinking of the latter is clear from what he asks in the very
next line: 'But when are wer Wann aber sind wirl where, as Heidegger
points out, the emphasis is not on the 'we', which might have implied
that until then what had been in question was the existence of
something else. However, if the full story is to be told it must be said
that what is in question is the existence of both the singer and the
sung. They each achieve existence together in the space and time of
the song, which is the 'inner space of the world', the Weltinnenraum.
This space is, as Rilke explains to von Hulewicz. not the space of the
160 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
galaxies of the world of physics, the infinite spaces whose -eternal
silence terrified Pascal. lt is, if we are to be thinking of Pascal, more
like his space of the heart. But Rilke's 'heart' is not Rainer Maria
Rilke's heart or any other person's subjective feelings. Michel Haar
indicates reasons for thinking that in this open inner space of the
world which for Rilke is also the space of the heart the private
individual is no longer as such on the scene to append his signature
to the poem.2 It is as though Rilke wants to say, like Mallarme in a
letter to Cazalis, 'I am now impersonal, and no longer the Rainer you
knew.' The Monsieur has been suppressed. Erde .., says the Ninth
. And, among others from the second part, of this line from sonnet 10:
Elegy, Namenlos bin ich zu dir entschlossen. 'Earth . . . I am open
toward you without name'.
It may be more accurate to say, as Haar does, that the heart, which
he identifies with the Invisible into which it is the poet's task to
transform the visible, is a 'mutation' of the Open of the Eighth Elegy.
It looks as though the mutation is a Rilkean analogue of the non­
Hegelian, non-dialectical logic of the relation between the animal and
the human considered in the first part of this chapter.But why does
Haar refuse to go along with Blanchot (and Paul de Man? See below
Chapter 8) in including in the equation the poetic text?3 Why is that
not the Invisible too, or at least what gives it a local habitation and a
name by transforming it into what is heard? Is it exactly because the
poem gives it a name, whereas Rilke's poems frequently invoke what
is beyond the name's reach? Thus, what is nameless according to his
reading of Namenlos bin ich zu dir entsch/ossen is the speaker who is
without a name not only for himself but for aH the things of the earth
- which things, if should not be forgotten, include words, the words
of a poem for example which may, like Slake's evening star, speak
silence. A similar reading is proposed for the following lines of
number 5 of the first part of the Sonnets to Orpheus:
Raise no memorial stone. Only let the rose blossom
every year for his sake.
For this is Orph eus. His metamorphosis
in this one and in that. We should not strive
for other names. Once and for all
it is Orpheus when there is song.
And of these from sonnet 13 of the same first part:
Saving the World Through Song 161
Ripe apple, pear, banana,
Gooseberry ... All this speaks
Death and life in your mouth ... A hint...
Read it on a child's face,
when it tastes them. From far away it comes.
Is your mouth not finding itself slowly without names?
There where once words were ...
Words retreat quietly into the unsayable.
And of these from number 6:
We have heard your sweetest name being called to us
across the centuries by your fragrance:
suddenly it hangs in the air like praise.
Yet we know not how to name it, can do no more than guess .. .
Some of these and other passages may well be saying poetically
something like what Bergson and many other philosophers have said
(tautologically, if by 'to name' is meant to apply a common noun)
about the powerlessness of words to name unconceptualized quality.
Though even Bergson allows they have the power to suggest. The
second of the cited passages may be read however as not about the
shortcomings of words before the experiences of taste, but about the
way the words in the mouth have the taste and texture of the fruits
they name. Later in the poem comes the challenge to
Dare to say what 'apple' names.
It is not impossible that at least one of the conceits here is what
Heidegger expresses in saying that when we go through a wood it is
also the word 'wood' through which we go (H 286. PLT 132).
Or perhaps we could say that the poem names at least the
namelessness of things, somewhat as YHWH is said to name
unpronounceably the namelessness of God. The analogy (to which
we shall return) fits in well with what we have quoted from sonnet 6
of the second part.Where we cannot name we can nonetheless praise.
For at least some of the later poems this is perhaps the most
162 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
appealing solution to what another commentator on Rilke, Hermann
Kunisch, regards as an insoluble paradox: that th� poet's task is to
find names for what is beyond the reach of names. No name can do
what the poet might wish he could do, find the name that completely
describes the thing whose name he seeks. But Rilke sees the poem as
a Leistung, a performance which is not a description. The poet is an
inventor of names by which we may praise the thing. Instead of
setting out to map the thing as it already is he makes another thing, a
Kunsfding, which is less like a map than an icon that helps him and us
to sing its praises. This means that although for Rilke the poem is, as
Haar maintains, a loss of voice, it is the gaining of another. Whether
it be a second or a third or the first we have refound, the singing
voice is another voice, quite different from the voice in which we
ordinarily speak. You can sometimes be struck by this when you look
at someone preparing to sing. It is as though you were looking at the
driver of a vehicle feeling for another gear. That Rilke agrees with
this is confirmed by the end of the third Orpheus sonnet which says
that singing is 'another breath':
In Wahrl1eit singen, ist ein andrer Hauch.
Ein Hauch urn nichts. Ein Wehn im Gott, Ein Wind.
Further confirmation is the statement from the leHer quoted at the
beginning of this chapter where he distinguishes the words of his
poems from those of everyday speech, a statement which, incident­
ally, only seems to be irreconcilable with the philosophy of the
language of poetry set out in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads where
Wordsworth explains why for the poems in that volume he made 'a
selection of language really used by men'. As soon as the most
ordinary words are surrounded by the blank spaces of the verses on
the page their extraordinariness shines out. Sung, they receive the
touch of madness necessary if the visible is to be not merely referred
to and described but transfigured into the language of the invisible,
the language of death which confers on them new life: 'how sustain,
how save the visible, except by making of it the language of absence,
of the invisible? And how speak this language that remains dumb,
unless it be sung to distraction, altogether regardless of whether it
makes itself understood' (letter of 26 November 1925). Holderlin too
says of poetry in a time of need that it is thorig. We might say as
much of a reflective science, besinnende Wissenschaft, in. a time of
paradigm change.
Saving the World Through Song 163
The second voice, the singing voice of poetry, is a middle voice,
and it is a middle voice in two ways. It is middle in the sense of
Greek and Sanskrit grammar, the sense reflected in the Heideggerian
notion of letting being and beings be. If this noHon is indeed
applicable to Rilke we must reject Kunisch' s assertion that Rilke
subjects things to his masterful control, zwingf die Dinge in seine
5
Gewalt. If that assertion were valid, so too would be Heidegger's
judgement that Rilke belongs to what the former thinks of as the
Nietzschean epoch of subjectivity and will to power. Haar and
Kunisch himself demonstrate that the mature poems of Rilke cannot
be called subjectivist if by that it is meant that they are turned inward
to the poet's feelings or other itats d'ame. A careful reading of Rilke's
allusions to the Weltinnenraum and the heart demonstrate that Rilke is
not a subjectivist in that sense. Even so, one suspects that Rilke
remains a subjectivist for Heidegger in the sense that his poetry is not
a questioning of being. To break out from the psychological subject
in order to honour the object is not to escape from what Heidegger
understands by the metaphysics of subjectivity, not even when the
opposition of subject and object is overcome, if this overcoming is
thought in terms of the opposition of conscious subject and the object
of which it is conscious. For the metaphysics of subjectivity to be
overcome there has to be an overcoming of the post-Cartesian
metaphysics of consciousness.
What we have just said begins to explain how attention to what
Rilke says about the inner space of the world also brings out the
second sense in which Rilke's singing voice is a middle voice. It is
middle because the inner space of the world, the 'pure space' which
the poem itself generates, somewhat as the productive imagination in
Kant is the generator of pure time, is a centre, a Mitle, where the
polarization of opposites is non-dialectically overcome. The inner
space of the world is the place where the conceptual construction of
calculative reason wnich the Ninth Elegy describes as 'imageless ad',
Tun ohne Bild, is fended off by the Welfbildung of art. If the analogy
with Kant is to be pressed still, the Bild with which comparison must
ultimately be made is not the mathematical schema of the first
Critique but its correlatives in the second and third, unless, of
course, the Kantian view of the spatia-temporal presuppositons of
mathematics is turned more in the direction of art and, in Mill's
phrase, the art of life.6 Furthermore, if Rilke's presuppositions of art
are not to be embarrassingly restrictive, it must be recognized that,
once more like Holderlin and Heidegger, he does not limit the
164 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
denotation of the word 'poet' to the elite of wordsmiths like
Holderlin and himself. Heidegger stresses that the interpreters of
the poem, whom he calls its preservers, are in their way p�ets . too,
responsible for what comes off the page. To be a human bemg JS to
dwell on this earth dichferisch in the linguistic precinct of being.
Likewise, allowing for what Heidegger would regard as the d�ep
difference to which our previous paragraph referred, when Rilke
addresses the preservers of the things on the hiesige earth, things
which include ordinary words that have through Herzwerk to be won
- words like 'apple', 'house', 'bridge', 'brook', 'gate', 'jug', 'fruit-tree',
perhaps 'column' and 'tower' - he is addressing us human b�ings �ho
are reading him. The fact that there are great poets hke Rtlke,
. invisible, but they are invested in the visible as well. They themselves
Holderlin and Hopkins who are prepared to live dangerously m the
world with words does not mean that lesser mortals do not share the
Auftrag der Erde. The 'we' in the question 'But when are we?' asked in
the third of the Sonnets to Orpl1eu.s may be primarily the poet
understood in a narrow sense, but how Rilke sees the relation of
the poets in this narrow sense to the rest of us is explained in �is
. .
letter to van Hulewicz. There he writes of a respons1b1hty
(Verantwortlmg) that we all have as perhaps the last generations to
know things that enter into and are infused with our daily Lives
before they get swamped by the undifferentiated products of the
assembly line, agri-business and the other spheres of mass techno­
logy. The earth has no other refuge except to become invisible:
in us who wi�h one portion of our nature have a share or at least
share-certificates in the invisible and can augment our holding in
invisibility during our being here (Hiersein) - only in us can this
intimate and lasting transfiguration (Umwandlung) of the visible
into an invisible no longer dependent on visibility and tangibility
be performed, as our own destiny is ever becoming at once more
closely realized (vorhandener) and invisible within us. The
Elegies set up this norm of existence.
That is to say, the saving of the things of the world, preventing them
from becoming mere objects, is a task set for us all. In carrying out
this task we are at the same time saving ourselves. And it is the poets
among us to whom we may look for I_T'odels of that towa�d which
, .
this twofold task is aimed. The poem ts a Noah s ark admtssJon to
which is not restricted to sentient creatures.
SarJing the World Through Song 165
The performance of this task is assisted by what in the mythology
of the Elegies is called the Angel. The Angel of the Elegies
corresponds in some respects to the Orpheus of the Sonnets. The
Angel sets a standard. But this standard is one that not even the poets
can attain because - and this is important - the poets do not cease to
love the visible and what is otherwise sensorily perceived. This is
why Orpheus cannot be identified with the Angel. How could the
musician and the poet ever suppress or sublate that love? When the
women of Thrace tore Orpheus apart and threw his head into the
Hebrus it was still crying out 'Eurydice, Eurydice' as it was carried
down to the Aegean sea. The mortals may be shareholders in the
depend for their salvation on the things of the visible world that at
the same time depend on human beings for theirs. They, we, depend
for example on the example of animals, in the way the Eighth Elegy
explains. The Angel on the other hand does not have this earthly tie.
That is why Rilke says that for us mortals the Angel is 'terrifying':
schrecklich, like the numinous and sublime. Supporting man on the side
opposite that of the animal and the flower, the Angel serves him like
an Idea in the Kantian sense, as if he, she or it were no more than an
'as if'. Rilke explicitly rejects any Christian interpretation of the
Angel, and in the von Hulewicz letter it is to the angel of Islam that
allusion is made. .In the same letter there are references, though in a
different connection, to the Greek Orpheus, to the Roman gods of the
household and to the Egyptian cult of the dead. The scrambling is
deliberate. Rilke wants as oecumenical a mytho-cosmological econ­
omy as is consistent with the confinement of transcendence to the
immanent here and now, with what is, as Wahl says, 'perhaps the
greatest transcendence . . . the transcendence of transcendence, i.e.
falling back into immanence'.7
JJ[
Does Rilke's attempt to transcend transcendence end in a stifling
domesticity? And is the openness at the heart of his Weltinnenraum an
openness only to the past? An affirmative answer to one of these
questions would be a reason for answering the other affirmatively
too.
If the Angel is no more than an 'as if, a regulative principle to
guide the poet in his task of overcoming the opposition of the
166 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience Saving tm World Through Song 167

strikes in our air becomes air that has already been breathed, ausgeatmet. The least
aesthetic and the anaesthetic, then the Schreck the Angel
g in the dark. that can be said of Heidegger's treatment of the animal. vegetable and
hearts becomes something like the opposite of whistlin
in order to scurry mineral is that, like the Douanier Rousseau, he recognizes the
We are like children who invent objects of fear
from which, Unheimlichkeit and Unheimatlichkeit of a frontier when he sees one,
back, screaming, to the lnnenraum of the womb
into an even if he recognizes also that the frontier is not predeterminably
screaming, we came forth. Or like Kant turning the sublime
least lets the fixed. This holds not only for the place where the jungle or the rain­
epiphenomenon of our humanity. Where Heidegger at
around forest begins. It holds for the wilderness at the last frontier too.
wild animals be wild, Rilke, apparently, will have us slip a lead
of the earth into For each single one of us in the world, Heidegger says, the end of
their necks and take them and all the other things
and laraJ worth'. his life is before him. This is what enables Heidegger to give the
the security of the home. to preserve 'their human
unlike analysis he gives in Being and Time of how our being toward death
The Lares, primarily gods of the home, were of human origin,
Romans they were pervades our being tout court. Because of the place or non-place at
the Penates, whose origin was divine. But for the
the skin of a dog and which he draws the line between being-in-the-world and life strictly
represented by monkeylike statues enveloped in
door, sometim es with understood, that is to say, strictly, not understood, there is, as Derrida
set up in a niche near the hearth or the
care. notes, some difficulty for us in understanding what Heidegger can
figurines of barking dogs at their feet to symbolize their vigilant
d to the city, to the mean by our death, since we usually contrast that with our life.8
Gradually the range of this care was extende
It is as though by the Where there is no life there is no death. Is this difficulty dissolved
countryside, to roads and to the sea.
helped to colonize the precisely by the unintelligibility of non-human life and by an intended
domestication of animals the Romans were
ed for them a service like implication that human life as bios is unintelligible too because it is
world. The barking of their dogs perform
of the lyre screened by Da-sein? Is Dasein's finitude not only its Sein zum Tod,
that which Orpheus performed for the Greeks. His playing
so spellbin ding, we are told by but also the Unmimlichkeif of its Sei11 zum Leben, its being toward
inherited from Mercury or Apollo was
not but listen, the rivers ceased what in the Parmenides lectures is referred to as the enigma or riddle,
Lempriere, that the mountains could
forest forgot their wildnes s'. Is Riitse/, and mystery, Geheimnis, of life (G54 239)7 In those lectures, in
to flow, and 'the savage beasts of the
f TCTOtlen by Rilke too? The wildnes s that is remem­ the immediately preceding paragraph, Heidegger writes: 'In fact it
this wildness D
bered by Hopkin � w�n in sight of the mountains at lnversnaid he would require a more original poetic power to foreshadow the
asks and pleads hiddenness of the living, a poetry of which what is demanded is
more, higher, essential because essentially ownmost (Wesenf/iches, weil
What would the world be, once bereft Eigenwesenfliches), in contrast to that which degel}erates (verfiillt) into
Of wet and wilderness? Let them be left, humanizing plants and animals'. Here Rilke is pronounced to be a
0 let them be left, wildness and wet; poet in need rather than a poet needed in the time of need. The
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. phrase 'it would require', es bedurffe, does not in itself imply that the
more original poet has been or could be found, whether this would be
It sometimes sounds as though Rilke would be in sympathy with Holderlin, for example, or Trakl or another. But what Heidegger says
the author of a recent article in The Scotsman pleading for more and here about original Dichten, when taken in conjunction with 'The
more of the Cairngorm mountains to be transformed for what he calls Origin of the Work of Art' and the sections on life, nature and the
(six times in not so many paragraphs) human 'use', meaning that earth in the Beilriige zur Philosophie, reminds us that animals, plants
permission should be given for as yet inaccessible glens to be opened and stones are encompassed by what Heidegger calls Erde. Although
up by his weltbildend buddies in the construction business so that the in the section of the Beitriige entitled 'Das Leben (in quotation marks,
'

full potential of the range could be developed for the benefit of skiing following a section entitled Leben, without quotation marks) the word
mankind. Not content, like Vuillard, with depicting domestic interiors Erde is put in quotation marks, these are absent when the word is used
as interiors, Rilke, like Bonnard, appears to want exteriors brought in the next section which is entitled Die Nafur und die Erde. This is a
indoors where foliage takes on the appearance of wall paper and fresh transition from employment of the word in the context of references
168 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
to the science of biology to its employment in Heidegger's thinking
in conjunction with Welt. This transition is Heidegger's way of
marking the dependency of the meaning the word has i� th� conte� t
of science and biologistic metaphysics upon the meanmg 1t has m
The Origin of the Work of Art' where earth is distinguished from
world and in later essays where earth is distinguished from and
belongs with sky, mortals and immortals. In the 1930s earth st�nds
_
for the darkness whose indispersability the work of art bnngs to light,
the self-concealment to which Heraditus says phusis inclines.
Whether or not Heidegger is beset by this problem of finding a
place for death where there appears to be no place for life, it i: not
one that arises for Rilke. This is why he is able to say that the mner
space of the world is a totality in which, along with many other
oppositions, the opposition of life and death is overcome. In a letter
written at Muzot in 1924, two years before his death, in paragraphs
in which he makes observations akin to those made in the pages of
Matter and Memory where Bergson employs for consciousness the
metaphor of a cone, he compares the geometry of this space to that
of a pyramid. Since his early youth he has suspected that a cross­
section near the base of this pyramid of consciousness would reveal
being in its instantaneous simplicity, he writes in a sentence that
Heidegger could have written: das einfache Sein konnte zum Ereignis
werden. We have already seen that in his letter of the following year
to von Hulewicz he refers to the Egyptian cult of the dead. But he
also says there that the responsibility exercised by what we might
describe as his own poetic cult of the threatened things of the world
is not only that of remembrance, Andenken. It is also that of
preserving their human significance, ihren humanen und larischen
Wert. He goes on to explain that that means a care for our
inheritance, and that this is not possible without giving thought to
death. But whose death, or the death of what? In a notebook entry of
1913 which to some degree foreshadows his later remark about what
he has thought since his early youth, we read:
He had, really, been free long since, and if anything prevented his
dying, it was perhaps simply the fact that he had already
overlooked it at some time somewhere, so that, unlike the rest,
he did not need to go forward to it, but only to go back.9
This sentence puts a different face on things, a different face on things,
especially if it is set alongside those sentences written to his Polish
Saving the World Througlt Song 169
translator which say that the care we must take of our inheritance
should be vorsichtig, literally forward-looking, and how fitting it is (es
gilf : he puts it no more strongly than that) for us mortal human
beings to recognize that there are other no less fragile non-human
beings with whom we share this earth and that they are therefore not
only not to be hurt or demeaned, but call for their praises to be sung.
What singing!', quel chant!, Rilke exclaims with reference to certain
paintings by Sophy Giauque in the letter written to her on 26
November 1925 which likens the artist and his or her work to petits
cimetieres . . . contenant tant de corps difunts qui nous dema11dent de
timoigner de leurs ames. With his own death behind him, as the death
of the animals of which the Eighth Elegy treats is said there to be
behind them (and perhaps this is another way in which they are
exemplary), Rilke is free to think more about the mortality and
transience of other beings instead of being preoccupied with his own.
(The animal is preoccupied with neither. In this the animal is not
exemplary, and depends on the human being.) This opens room for
more stress to be put on responsibility toward other beings of
manifold kinds than is put even in Heidegger's economy of the
fourfold with the stress it puts on letting beings be. This difference is
firstly a difference of degree of stress, for Rilke's oecumenical
economy is still an economy of mutual need. Admittedly, in the
letter to von Hulewicz he says of other things that they are in our
Besitz, that is to say possession or, at least, in line with Genesis, in our
stewardship or care. The Biblical and Heideggerian metaphor of the
shepherd is to be found as well in Rilke. Also to be found there, in the
same sentence with Besitz, is the word Freundschaft, used to describe
our relationship with all other beings of the great chain and
reminding us of Rilke's early admiration for Saint Francis, even if
what first attracted Rilke to him was his vow of poverty and his work
with the widow, the orphan and the poor rather than his practice of
addressing himself to the animal, the plant, the stone and death as his
beloved brothers and sisters. The word leads us to think too of what
Levinas has to say about fraterniti. And so does the way Rilke diverts
his gaze from his own death in order to meet without mediation the
gaze of mortality that looks out from the face of the others.
Not that the ontology of even the early works of Heidegger is
incompatible with ethical altruism. And as ontology, that is to say as
prior to a theory of ethics, provision is made for my being concerned
that others should be toward their death no less authentically than I
am toward mine. But the ambience of this allegedly pre-ethical
170 The Middle Voice of Eco logical Conscience
concern or solicitude is, for each one of us, our own ordering of a
world, what The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics calls Weltbildung.
Whereas in Being and Time as much emphasis is placed on my
thrownness (Geworferrheit) as on my projecting of myself ahead
(Entwurf), which are equiprimordial with each other and with falling
(Verfallen), nevertheless we are told there that 'The primary pheno­
menon of primordial and authentic temporality is the future' (BT 329),
so it is not surprising that in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics
it is to projection that special attention is given. Worldhood is
constituted by projection. And this has three moments, we are told:
the disclosure of the being of beings; totalization, though the word
that Heidegger uses, Ergiinzung, also means supplementation; and
being held confronted by what we shall dare to call obligation, das
Sich entgegenhalfen von Verbindlichkeif. This is a threefold structure, and
- und ohne Reiz), it 'rests in the sobering quality of what it says'. This
its moments are as interdependent as in the first edition of Kant's first
Critique are the moments of the threefold synthesis of apprehension in
intuition, reproduction in the imagination and recognition in a
concept. But this Kantian synthesis, which is a theory of the
prepositional copula, presupposes, Heidegger maintains, the three­
fold synthesis which constitutes a world as described by him, a world
which is neither a totality of things nor a totality of facts. This is the
ultimate condition of the possibility of what Kant calls objects and
subjects and of 'things' in Rilke's Dichten and in Heidegger's own
fourfold dichtendes Denken of the great chain of being. This ultimate
condition is a truth which is prior to the truth of theoretical assertion,
and an obligation which is prior to that laid down in the judgements
of what we usuaUy mean by ethics. The totalizing which these two
conditions entail is effected, Heidegger holds, by our being toward
our own death. Hence this fundamental obligation originates in me,
however much at the level of ethics or the law - or religion - it is to
the other that I am bound. In the final section of The Fu11damental
Concepts of Metaphysics he writes: 'Hence projection is in itself the
coming to pass (Geschehen) that lets obligation (Verbindlichkeit) as such
arise (enfspri11gen liissf), in so far as this always presupposes an
enabling-allowing (Ermoglichung)' (G29/30 528). But, he adds, rethink­
ing now in terms of 'free binding' the thoughts of the second Critique
and of the third chapter of The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of
Morals, 'The possible comes into its own (west) in its possibility only
if we bind ourselves to it in its enabling-allowing'. These words
supplement Kant's words 'ought presupposes can', du kannst, denn du
sollst, with the words 'can presupposes ought'. They do not of course
Saving the World Th rough Song 171
imply that you ought to do whatever you can do. In possibility thus
understood, in antic practical possibility, possibility as Heidegger
intends it to be understood in these words has not come into its own
as ontological possibility. They are an evocation of what we have
called ontological responsibility and, although they give weight to
the 'we' who bind ourselves in being bound for our own death, there
is an adjustment of weighting toward the balance spoken in the
middle voice when more than three decades later Heidegger refers to
the thinking which is 'more sober', niichterner (degrise1), than
calculation because i t is thinking that 'gives voice to a bond that
binds all thinking, providing that thinking submits to the call of what
must be thought' (ZSD 79,25, TB 72, 24; compare VA3 25, EGT 78:
'The word of thinking is poor in pictures and without charm' (bildarm
call (Geheiss) of the thinker's responsibility or task, of what it behoves
him to do (Es gilt), is the echo of the command (anbefehlen) which in
Chapter 6 we learned is hidden in the chre of Parmenides (WHO 118,
WCT 196). This re ligio beyond religion and ethics is indeed the
obligation 'to trace being to its own from E reignis - by way of
looking through true Hme without regard to the relation of being to
beings' (ZSD 25, TB 24), but as we argued in that same chapter, this
brings with it an obligation to let things be things in the manner
Holderlin enables Heidegger to see. And as Rilke enables us to see,
this obligation brings with it an obligation to respond to the
vulnerability of beings other than ourselves, both non-human as
well as human, and to respond to them as individuals.
In the discussion that followed the reading of the paper by David
Krell referred to in note 2 at the 'Reading Heidegger' conference at
the Unjversity of Essex in 1986 the author of the paper said:
'Heidegger reduplicates, without any critical distance, Hegel's eleva­
tion of die Ga tfung or species as the universal. He simply reduplicates
and says: This is the death of the individual. Thus Heidegger
reiterates the most striking move that Hegel makes in the advance
from philosophy of nature to philosophy of spirit . . . the move of
metaphysics'. Thus one comes away from these texts of 1929/30,
with 'ultimate disappointment'. While sharing that ultimate disap­
pointment, the author of this chapter has concentrated on what in
these and other texts may be read as signs of an antepenultimate
hope. There is a sign of hope even in the phrase Vorrang der 'Gattung'
which occurs in Heidegger's discussion of instinct and life in the
Beifrage zur Philosophie (G65 277). Over what, we may ask. does genus
172 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience Saving the World Through Song 173

or species have pre-eminence? Over individuality or 'individuality': that those on the other side of the ha-ha have Weifof!ensein and
'Gattung', der kein 'Einzelnes' als selbstisches kennt. This seems to say Umweltoffensein the way is open for acknowledgement that if they are
that the animal has individuality, but an individuality without in our environment we are in theirs. But what is called for most of all
selfhood. In his commentary on Schelling - hence in a text which - and on this I believe Krell and I agree - is a little less self-certainty
may not without caution be taken as directly representative of the as to where lines are to be drawn, a little more circumspective care
commentator's thinking - Heidegger writes: The animal is an and generosity regarding genus, gender, generation and genre - in a
individual this (ein einzelnes Dieses). It could not be this if the craving word, Geschlecht - than Heidegger is sometimes prepared to show,
for individuation were not in it. But the animal never comes to itself, despite his being the thinker who would prepare the way for
in spite of this craving. It rather merely serves, again, the species in Gelassenheit and letting beings be.
spite of this craving. And it could not perform this service if a
universal will did not strive within it with the particular will at the
same time' (G42 242, S 168; 140}. It may be that through a craving
for domestication which would make them gods, but household gods
(familiars, friends, Romans), Rilke, the penultimate hope, fails unaided
to point a way by which not only the lizard but also the lichen, and
the rock beneath them may come to their selves. Our ultimate hope is
that Levinas, aided by the Gesang of Rilke's elegies, by the Dichten of :
Holderlin's hymns and by Heidegger's Denken of Gelassenheit, may
enable us to judge how distance, Abstand, and proximity belong
together in the neighbourhood of a metaphysics of singular
responsibility that outmoves the move of the metaphysics of
ultimate universality of spirit.
In his inspired and inspiring discussion of Derrida's De /'esprit
Oavid Krell refers to the Hegelian, Heideggerian, indeed German
10
'domesticity of spirit' (p. 225). In this chapter we have been
referring to the threat of what might be described as Rilke's
domesticity of ;animal spirit. Krell also writes: 'If Weltoffenheit
characterizes humanity, Weltoffensein characterizes animality. Yet
how does -sein differ from -heit, indeed in such a way that Heidegger
can be assured that an abyss separates human beings from animals, as
though the world were constructed like one of those modern,
cageless, animal-friendly zoos?' (p. 215). Among the interpretative
hypotheses tried out in this chapter is that if Heidegger's weltbildend
human beings do dig a ditch between themselves and those that are
characterized by Welfoffensein but not by Welfo!fenheit (those that lack
not world but worldhood?), at least the Open in which they live is
not humanized, colonized, Romanized, conqut;red ('Everest Con­
quered' the headlines proclaimed. Will Machapuchre, the abode of
the gods of the wilderness, be next?). At least by digging a ditch
Heidegger allows them to be themselves. If it were a laughing matter,
the laugh would be on us. If Heidegger is prepared after all to allow

8 This preoccupation with proper death as the condition of the
The Absolute Master
its whole being has been seized with dread; for it has experienced
the fear of death, the absolute master.
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Death is not this master. Always future and unknown it gives rise
to fear and flight from responsibilities . . . . Death, source of all
myths, is presenf only in the Other, and only in him �es it
.
� chamberlain had carried within him and had himself nourished during
summon me urgently to my final essence, to my responstbtltty.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity
�
Saul Kripke. in Naming and Necessi y expli�tes1 ide� tity in t�rms of
•.
�
originarity, a being's being from ongm or btrth. He• eg�er, m Berng
.
and Time, explicates the identity of each hum� bemg m te�s of
. .
terminality, its being towards its death. Termina!tty ts the prmctple of
jemeinig individuality, what separates me from the impersonal
undifferentiated one (das Man). It separates me in my autobiographi­
cal existence, it js tempting to say, not from the viewpoint of an
observer recording events in the story of my life, the viewpoint from
which Kripke's criterion is applied. It separates m� out in my li':'ed
existence, it might be said, were it not for the anhpathy to speakmg
.
of human as distinguished from animal life which we have dtscerned
already in Heidegger's references to biology in Being and Tirne, in Th�
.
Fundamental Concepfs of Metaphysics, in his treatment of Rilke, and
elsewhere. Being toward my death is being on the way toward
�
myself, hence, via the manifold meanings of eigen, o� t e way to he �
possibility of authentic being. Although Heidegger mststs . that bemg
in the world is being with others and that it is not only w1th _tts own
mortality that each Dasein is concerned, my concern fo� the mortality
of others is, according to the account given in Be tng and T1rne,
inscribed within the circle of the project whose origin is the each-for­
himself jerneinig I, the projectile, if not subjectile, je.
174
The AbsolHJe Master 175
propriety of the I pervades Rilke's earlier work. In The Book of Hours
he writes, recalling the lines of Ecclesiastes which we reproduced in
Chapter 6:
0 Lord, give each one his proper death,
the dying that issues from that life
in which he knew love, meaning and need.
With the generosity of this eigene Tod he contrasts the kleine Tod, the
little death which is death not looked in the face, death treated as no
more than an event that befalls one, a limit at the end of a life instead
of a 'princely death' like that of Christoph Detlev Brigge 'which the
his whole life'. So, at the time of Ma/fe and earlier, Rilke's idea of
inauthentic death resembles Heidegger's in some respects. Appalled at
the way in which, like so much else in the industrialized world, even
death becomes an impersonal, dehumanized, 'American', happening,
Rilke, as Blanchot says, becomes obsessed by the thought
of a self that wants to die a self, the residue of a need for
immortality, concentrated in the very fad of dying, in such a way
that my death is the moment of my greatest authenticity, towards
which 'I' project myself as though towards the possibility that is
absolutely mine, that belongs only to me and holds me in the hard
2
solitude of this pure self.
My death, not my bringing it about, achieves a first person
singularity. What, speaking of Rilke, Heidegger refers to as man's
'going with the venture', mit dern Wagnis mifgehen (H 257, PLT 103),
may or may not be an expression of the will to power and the will to
will. Rilke quite explicitly decries suicide because it would do violence
to death. In the language of Heidegger - though the word
Gelassenheit is used by Rilke too - we must let death be,
acknowledge its absolute alterity. So there is a tension between this
recognition of death's noli me tangere and the wish to die a death that
carries my fingerprints. It is the second of these incompatibles that
has given way by the time the last Elegy has been composed. Now
the dehumanized impersonality from which the earlier Rilke hoped to
rescue death by giving it his name makes way for a humanized
impersonality.
176 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
Is this a subjection of the subject by death, the absolute master
who back-handedly saves the singular by losing it in the spirituality
of the Singular Subject? Is the move Rilke makes from his earlier to
his later. conception of death a move back from a Heideggerian to a
Hegelian one? Not quite. Thanks to the song. We saw in Chapter 7
that the song is nameless both because the personality of the singer
does not obtrude and because he does not sing about things, but
simply sings things. Any naming of a thing in the song is not
referring to it by its name but giving it a name as though for the very
first time, as in the Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger says
Sophocles does for the sea in the opening strophe of the chorus
from Antigone.
To transfigure visible things into invisibility as Rilke's New Poems
do is on Paul de Man's reading of them to transfigure them into
figures of speech.3 The Weltinnenraum of the poem is a space of
lingual sound between the subjectivity of the poet and the objectivity
of the visible world. The poem, the song, is a new thing, a Kunst­
Ding, in the way that a plaything (such as the ball of which Rilke
writes) inhabits a space of its own with its own separate centre of
gravity (of which Rilke also writes). But is that not to turn one's back
on things, to fiddle while Rome bums? Is it not the extreme of
irresponsibility toward visible things to deny that the centre of
gravity is in them? And what of those poems that treat not of things
with which we readily play, but of serious matters of life and death?
We saw that Rilke does once say that he has put at least his own
death behind hi!ll. Is it the poet's task to do the same with the death
of others and V.:ith the fleetingness of things? Is not to make music of
them to make mock of their call and to betray them in their need?
When Rilke says that it is as though his own death is behind him
this does not mean that it is forgotten. On the contrary. To take
anything into the inner space of the poem's world is to make sure
that it is erinnert. True, Rilke says that the poem is more than a
memoriaL but it is that at least. And when you put something into
words, you neither shut it off from itself nor encapsulate it within a
hermetically sealed inside. Whatever is erinnert in words is at one and
the same time entiiussert, publicly expressed. But is this not because
words are already outside themselves in foro externa, because, as has
been earlier suggested, when you walk through a wood you walk
through the word 'wood', because words have reference? If this is so,
however, what can Paul de Man mean when he says that in the inner
space of the poem Rilke's rhetoric of figuration implies 'loss of
The Absolute Master 177
referentiality'? What he means is that the word functions only in its
aspect of phonic signifier. Citing Barthes, he says on the next page:
'this "liberating theory of the Signifier" also implies a complete
·
drying up of thematic possibilities'. But he immediately raises the
question whether this drying up can be as complete as Rilke imagines
it might be when he entertains, indeed 'programmatically thematizes'
this possibility in his poem 'Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes'. 'Could any
poetry, including Rilke's,' he asks, 'lay claim to the purity of such a
semantic askesis?' Paul de Man's own considered view is indicated
when he says that Rilke's figurative rhetoric implies 'the absence of a
reliable referent'. What he first calls 'loss of referentiality' is to be
understood as loss of a reliable referent. 'The notion of a language
entirely freed of referential constraints is properly inconceivable. Any
utterance can always be read as semantically motivated, and from the
moment understanding is involved the positing of a subject or an
object is unavoidable'. To put this in a Derridean way, the putatively
purely phonic poem is written, even when it is literally sung. That is
to say, the so-called signifier cannot be securely anchored to a
signified whether the latter be understood as a concept or as an object
falling under it. The signified is never confined in a living presence
with the signifier, but from this it does not follow that on 'the
liberating theory of the Signifier' the signifier is set at liberty to
freewheel. To speak of it as a signifier is already to commit it to some
signified or other. But there is an unavoidable and absolute alterity of
signification, an absolute absence of mastery which is the being
toward death of the sign's alleged living present.
If no safe and sure meaning can be sealed within the sign, the same
must be said of the song. It. like the sign, will inevitably fail to live up
to its promise of a living present to come. Rilke's programme at the
; time of the New Poems was for a poetry in which the meanings which
words have in everyday speech - even der, die and das - are
chiasmically reversed on to self-contained patterns of the poet's
own invention: fictions, fables. The successful carrying out of this
programme would have confirmed Levinas's judgement that the poem
is, like the dream, an interlude from living, an aesthesiological
suspension of the ethical. But since his songs are not songs without
words they cannot be self-contained. However eperdument their words
may be sung, the possibility of meaning something or other is never
entirely lost. However careless the singer may be about whether or
not they are understood, the words uttered in this second voice are
apt to find unpredicted meanings accruing to them, and these may
178 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
include the pre-dicted meaning of the words as spoken in the first
voice of everyday sane and sober. digrisi speech, for example the
allfaglich 'Bonjour'. The chiasmic reversal is liable - Heidegger would
say bound and obliged. verbunden - to be reversed.
Therefore, although the great themes of life and death may be held
at arm's length when the author of the New Poems gives priority to
lexis over logos, and creates phonic figures of little, gering things as a
child might make for himself 'an entire poetic universe' out of
brightly-coloured stones or hold conversation with a between-worlds
being, a doll, there is no way by which these themes can be kept
definitively under lock and key. And this is because no theme is a
pure signified. To every signified there corresponds a signifier and
every signifier is exposed to the chance and necessity of migration
from one context to another, a migration which is at one and the
same time an alteration of the signified. As de Man and Derrida put
it, work procedes simultaneously on both sides of the mirror. Hence
the chiasmic structure is not only to be found in the primarily
figurative New Poems. These are chiasmically related to the 'messianic'
Sonnets and Elegies which themselves retain a chiasmic figuration
notwithstanding that this is likely to be and has been overlooked
because of their clamantly exhortatory and apocalyptic tone, just as it
is easy to overlook the messianism of the more formally figurative
poems because they purport to dispense with signification and the
never-to-be-fulfilled promise of presence that that brings.
The messianic reading of Rilke is an integral part of a work that
could not ex�st without it. The full complexity of this poetry can
only appear in the juxtaposition of two readings in which the first
forgets and the second acknowledges the linguistic structure that
makes it come into being (p. 51).
It is the messianic reading of Rilke that has absorbed the attention of
most commentaries, including most of our own. This is because it is
that reading which has received most commentary from Rilke in
letters and elsewhere, so that by attending less to the formal and
figurative reading than to what he writes explicitly concerning the
salvation of the world we stand more chance of getting guidance on
this latter topic, sa/us mundi, which is also our concern. However, as
Paul de Man enables us to see, the two readings are chiasmically
interdependent, the one enabling the other, and at the same time
disabling it. For in so far as the saving of visible things by
The Absolute Master 179
transfigurin� them into the invisible means transfiguring them into
.
purely aud1ble eqwvalents, pure song, the messianic-cum-figurative
programme breaks down. Or does Rilke persuade himself that the
�
�rogram?'�'s b�eak own is at least a second-best success? Perhaps this
ts what IS tmplted m the Orpheus sonnet which condudes
Star patterns may deceive
but it pleases us, for a while,
to believe in the figure. That is enough.
Is a deception enough? It is enough for Rilke perhaps only for a while.
�o does Rilke agree after all with the Levinas who says that the poem
rs no more than an interlude, a fleeting shadow of the world? But
what if the world itself is fleeting? Would this not make it possible for
Rr.lke to agree also with the other Levinas, the Levinas who agrees
.
WJth Celan that a poem may shake its reader by the hand? It is to
P?ems b� Paul Celan that Paul de Man compares some of the poems
Rrlke wntes from New Poems onward, pieces no longer than the haiku,
the poetic form that Rilke so much admired.
One might well . consider them to be Rilke's most advanced poetic
achrevement. It rs through them that he is related to poets such as
Trakl or Celan. The figure stripped of any seduction besides that of
its rheto�ical elas�icity can form, together with other figures,
constellahons of frgures that are inaccessible to meaning and to
the senses, located far beyond any concern for life or for death in
the hollow space of an unreal sky (p. 49).
How could a poem be said to be a handshake if it is far beyond any
. and death? U this can be said of any of Rilke's poems
concern for life
one would have thought they would be found among the messianic
. .
Eleg�es wh1ch occupy themselves explicitly with the great themes of
deshny and death. How can there be anything like a fraternal
(so:ori �l, paternal, �aternal) welcome or farewell about a poem
�
wh1c IS so purely ftgurative that it is 'inaccessible to meaning', a
contnved constellation like The Horseman in the sky of Rilke's poem
of that name which is unreal because the stars that make it up only
appear to be all m . the same plane? This begins to look possible as
soon as it is remembered that the strength of the fraternal bond which
the more self-consciously philosophical poems of rescue tie between
the poet. the reader and the recognizable visible things of the world
 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
180
of which the poem is to preserve die noch erkannfe Gestalt is the
fleetingness and fragility they share. Now that impermanence is
reflected and performed in the trompe l'oeil of the illusory constella­
tion in the sky and in the trompe l'oreille of the most purely figurative
and interlusory figment of poetic art. The purer the signifier and the
greater the space between it and the signified of which it dreams the •
_ _
more closely it mimes alterity and the more it meets the respons1b1hty
.
to be faithful to death, looking it in the face by prefiguring it.
II
But as well as the alterity of the signifier which is written, spoken or
sung, the alterity that marks the incompletion of the sign, there is the
alterity of the Other, Aufrui, the Signifier who sings and signs 'Thou
shalt not kill'. It is the distance and proximity of these alterities that is
the topos of the meeting between Derrida and Levinas. The alterity of
a what and the alterity of a who. The mortality that marks the word
and the mortality of him that speaks it. To move from the former to
the latter, one might think, is to move from a purely metaphorical
mortality to the real and literal thing, from death as a figure of
engraved speech to the silence of the grave. However, the m�ve is
one that marks time. The mortality of the said and the mortahty of
the sayer were never far apart. For it was always the assistance of the
speaker at his word that was supposed to enable the speaker to keep
his word, and to keep the word alive. That is for Husserl the
condition of rest>onsible speech. And it is what Levinas means by
being sincere: being there to answer for one's word. Husserl's
dilemma arises because while endorsing this condition of the
possibility of responsibility he recognizes that the possibility of
rigorous science posits writing as its condition. The transmission of
a scientific truth from one generation to another and the idea of a
i order that
scientific community call for results to be written down n
they may be used as points of reference for practitioners who, if
science is to make any advance, must take at least some parts of the
tradition for granted and not insist on doing the original demonstra­
tions and experiments for themselves all over again. Put this way,
Husserl's dilemma sounds like one that is based on a contingent desire
to make the best use of one's time. It could be said that with
sufficiently dose teamwork the problem could be overcome, rather as
an oral tradition can be kept alive if parents make sure their offspring
The Absolute Master 181
are initiated. What Derrida shows in his Introduction to Husserl's The
Origin of Geometry and in Speech and Phenomena is that Husserl's
dilemma is based not on an in-principle avoidable contingency but on
�he unavoidable prn i ciple of contingency itself, a principle that affects
not only writing in the ordinary sense of the word, but orality and
oreilliti themselves. The principle that there is no principle. No
principle of principles. Only a supplement of origin: the Urschrift
that is responsible for the Ur-teil of the judgement that speaks death.
Of necessity the communication is a communication, is itself, only if it
is not an itself, only if it has already severed the umbilical chord that
is alleged to tie it to its author, and only if it anticipates the
contingency of its author's being dead. A sign communicates with its
signatory and the reader who signals 'Roger', meaning 'I have
understood', only by way of discommunication through the no
longer being there, the never having been fully present there of the
Signifier who sends and of him or her who responds.
So at the very moment when the seignorial Signifier says 'thou
shalt not kill' his commandment is condemned to death. His
imperative is already a sign of his mortality. If, however, he is
finite, there is no confusing the Signifier with God, whether the God
of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob or the Deity of Descartes. Yet it is the
Infinity of Descartes's third and fifth Meditations that Levinas invokes
to introduce us to Autrui. Is this signifying Other both finite and
infinite then at one and the very same time? How can this be7 How
can it be possible? Because the question is not simply a question of
being or possibility. And because it obliges us to let the question be
interrupted by the command, the command 'thou shalt not kill'. As far
as ontology goes, the other man is very finite. That is why he calls to
us in his need. But the call he makes is infinitive. As the infinitude of
Descartes's God precedes and exceeds any idea of it that I can form,
so does the command to respect the life of my neighbour slip through
the fingers of my conceptual grasp. The difficulty of understanding
�ow my neighbour can be at once finite and infinite is not a problem
like that of comprehending how my mind and my body can be both
substantially different and yet connected. That problem is a problem
in ontology. Nor is the difficulty a problem concerning the
connection of ontology and theology, though there are points of
formal resemblance between it and the problems or mysteries
associated with the via mtalogiae and the via negativa. The difficulty
is not a problem if a problem is a question. It is more like a mystery
as described by Gabriel Marcel, 'a problem which encroaches upon its
182 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
own data and invades them, and so is transcended qua problem'.4 The
problem is transcended because it is dissolved by the withdrawal from
a demand for a prepositional answer to an acknowledgement of what
is this side of constatable prepositional knowledge, somewhat as the
source of ontological wonder is so close, so geheim, according to
Heidegger, that it gets overlooked and mistaken for an object of antic
interrogation. According to Levinas, this side of ontological wonder is
the wonder of my neighbour's ethical command 'thou shalt not kill',
astonishment before the Other.
Hence the difficulty with which Levinas faces his. reader, the
difficulty of the postulate that the Other is both finite and infinite.
How can this be possible? It is not a matter of possibility, whether
logical or phenomenological, any more than it is a matter of
ontology, whether metaphysical or phenomenological. lt is not a
matter of saving the appearances, for more than appearance and
reality is involved in this mystery. And what is at stake in this
mystery is not just possibility, not even the ultimate possibility of my
being towards my death, the possibility of the impossibility of being
there. For me to be met by the mortality in my neighbour's eyes is to
be encountered by the impossibility of possibility. The intentionality
of my cognitive and conative persistence in being collides with the
reverse intentionality of the look which says the ethical impossibility
of murder inscribed in the very possibility of carrying out any
intention to murder the other in whose eyes I read j'accuse, as
though I were already respo�sible for the other's death without
having committed an identifiable dateable crime (TI 209; 232-3). For
to be totally contemed with my own to-be-or-not-to-be is to stand in
my neighbour's light. It is to take the bread from his mouth in�tead of
giving him the portion I am about to put in mine. The porbon, n�t
my portion. For where two are gathered together I am always m
second place. Only the other can be an apology for my existence. My
existence starts not from the autonomy of an T but from the
heteronomy of a 'me' declined in the accusative case by the
Other's accusing regard. He and I are both economic beings with
biological needs and cultural interests but with finite resources and
finite time to achieve their satisfaction. But my freedom to pursue the
interests of my domestic economy is ethically justified only in so far
as it is put in the Other's service in response to his silent call. The
Other's vulnerable finitude together with my finite ability to assist
him imply the arithmetically impossible infinity of his ethical claim
and the infinite time of the infinitesimal 'last n i terval which my
The Absolute Master 183
consciousness cannot traverse, and where a leap will somehow be
produced from death to me' (TI 211; 235). The will . . . on the way
to death but a death ever future, exposed to death but not
immediately, has time to be for the Other, and thus to recover
meaning despite death.' The 'absolute master' is mastered by the
passivity of undergoing which is 'mastery itself' (Tl 216; 238). Once
again 'I can' implies 1 ought'. However, whereas in the version of this
implication hinted at in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics the 'I
ought' has its origin in the 'I can' of my own projected possibility and
states that the bedrock of all obligation is an obligation of pre-ethical
loyalty to myself, here the obligation comes toward me from the 'I
cannot' of the impossibility to be read in the Other's eyes, the
impossibility of possibility, your being bound to die.5
A question that will be raised is whether the 'thou shalt not kill'
comes toward me from God, as it came to Moses on Mount Sinai. An
affirmative answer to this question would place Infinity over against
the finite human being and separated from him by a great divide, or
else close that gap by construing Infinity as the Aufhebung of Holy
Spirit mediated to the human being by the God-man. The former
alternative would, like Heidegger's, leave man with finitude alone.
The second alternative would be tantamount to the Hegelian doctrine
that man can leave his finitude behind. Levinas fears that if man can
be finished with either finitude or ethical infinity there is in the former
case no exit for him from the 'there is' or from the langweilig neutral
bad infinity of the pursuit of one egological, though not necessarily
egoistic, project after another which led to the crisis of accidie suffered
by the young John Stuart Mill; in the second case there is no exit
from the loss of individuality and difference in the totality of a
Parmenidean or Hegelian One. An exit is effected in both cases not
by an authentic being toward my death, albeit with others who are
authentically toward theirs, but only by the Other who breaks into
the otherwise windowless monad from outside (HQO 262-4).
III
The thinking of Heidegger is not atheistic if atheism is understood as
the denial of the existence of god. Nor is it the opposite of atheistic,
any more than are the writings of Holderlin, Rilke, Derrida or L�vinas
on which we are drawing in this book. Perhaps this is a book for
readers who are willing to suspend the question whether the great
184 Tlte Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
chain of being is suspended from the surpassingly existent being
called God or for whom that question is, if not dead, only middlingly
and muddledly alive, as it is for Philip Lar�in's churchgoer who says
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
and answers, referring to the church, the synagogue, the mosque . . .
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air aU our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.
The writers on whose philosophical or poetic work this book
chiefly draws share one of this book's preoccupations. In their very
different ways they show that there is an application for a notion of
the holy that does not wait upon an answer to a question of onto­
theology. This is shown in The Holy and other publications by Rudolf
Otto in his particular way, a way which Husserl characterizes as
phenomenological. That way remains too neo-Kantian for Husserl, as
it does for Heide'gger, who became a colleague of Otto's at Marburg
when neo-Kantianism was still very active there. The holy cannot
remain an a priori category of knowledge without its being
domesticated by man as Kant and Schiller domesticate the sublime.
Nor can the holy remain an a priori category of knowledge if it is to
remain at the prior level of the thinking of being. Nor can the
thinking of being remain a thinking of the beingness of beings, albeit
the highest of these. Hence the asseverations throughout Heidegger's
works that the thinking of being is neither theist nor atheist.6 Hence,
in response to all three of these impossibilities, the recurrence
throughout the present work to the thinking of the prophetic and
poetic medial voice that mediates a bid which is never a takeover bid.
As the guardian of the holy the poet is he from whom the holy
receives the names which may anticipate the advent of another ethos
and another epoch of the history of being. The poet is therefore the
Tlte Absolute Master 185
ancilla of the thinking of being as such, ancilla philosophiae.
Furthermore, only through the thinking of being as such is it
possible to think the essence of the holy.
Only from the truth of Being can the essence of the holy be
thought. Only from the essence of the holy is the essence of
divinity to be thought. Only in the light of the essence of divinity
can it be thought or said what the word 'God' is to signify. ( G9
351, W 1� 1-2, BW 230)
Thinking or saying what the word 'God' is to signify is not to be
confused with religious revelation or faith. It would be more difficult
to deny that such thinking or saying is at least a part of what goes
under the name of theology and hence that the thinking of being is
ancilla theologiae. But Heidegger does deny this. Marking a departure
from the scholastic doctrines studied as part of his Catholic training,
at least as early as the 1920s Heidegger endorses Luther's assertion
that, as Heidegger puts it in 1954, Theologians should stay in the
exclusivity of revelation' (HQD 335). Questioning is the piety of
thinking, but, as Luther's Commentary on Paul's Epistle to the
Romans holds, revelation i s not question, but demand or claim,
Ansprnch, and this must not be confused with the Zuspruch which,
as Heidegger writes in The Nature of Language' (1957-8), is the
addressing itself to us of the language itself and so is presupposed by
the revealed demand and by the true or false affirmation which he had
called Zusprechen in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics nearly
thirty years earlier. However, he explains, in the passage of the 'Letter
on Humanism' which speaks of the meaning of the word 'God', what
is in question is the god of the poets and the daimon of Heraclitus's
saying ethos anthropoi daemon, The (familiar, geheure) abode is for man
the open region for the presencing of God (of the unfamiliar one, des
Un-geheuren)' (G9 356, W 187, BW 234). Whereas for Luther the
Epistle to the Romans is direct revelation, being face to face with
God,
When the thinker listens to a poet like Holderlin, something totally
different is at stake, a listening in a domain of 'manifestation' at the
basis of which the poet participates in an essential way, unlike the
revelation of the word of God which is always already decided.
The thinker speaks of the manifestation of being; but the word
being is a non-theological word.
186 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
Levinas insists that the face to face with the Other is non­
theological, but it is also beyond being. The inviolable transcendence
of. the Other, his holiness, has nothing of the numinous which Otto
associates with holiness (Tl 169; 195). 'It is only man who could be
absolutely foreign to me - refractory to every typology, to every
genus, to every characterology, to every classification' (Tl 46; 73).
Does this mean that God could not be absolutely foreign to me? Not
if 'It is our relations with men . . . that give to theological concepts
the sole signification of which they admit' (TI 51; 79), from which it
follows that when in expounding his philosophical metaphysics of
ethics Levinas refers to the Bible and to the metaphysical theology of
Descartes's Meditafions these references are only illustrative. They
take their orientation from the human face to face, so that it was with
the other man that Moses was face to face on Sinai, it would seem!
When Levinas says that discourse is discourse with God and not with
equals (Tl 273; 297), the word 'God' is best understood as a
translation of Plato's Good beyond being:
this notion of the being above being does not come from theology
but from Plato. If it has played no role in the Western philosophy
issued from Aristotle, the Platonic idea of the Good ensures it the
dignity of a philosophical thought - and it therefore should not be
traced back to any oriental wisdom. (Tl 194; 218)
Of course, it is Judaeo-Christian theology of which Levinas is
speaking, not the Aristotelian science of the divine. Had he wished,
he might have npted that in Aristotelian nous which 'comes in from
outside' there is a principle analogous to Plato's epekeina tes ousias. He
does not wish b because this principle is not in his sense
metaphysical or ethical. As for Aristotelian ethics, that is eudaemonis­
tic and teleologically totalitarian, in his view, whereas Platonic ethics,
despite the politically totalitarian development it suffers in the
Republic, contains a seed that could develop quite otherwise.
So much, all too cursorily, for the atheology of the two philosophers
and, still more cursorily, for the atheology of one of the poets to
whom one of them appeals. Holderlin's atheology is that of a
historical interregnum. We shall see that asking where Rilke stands
in regard to theological and religious belief opens up a question more
The Absolute Master 187
directly related to the comparison of religions than to the history of
religion or to the history of being. But we see first that asking this
question of him is a particularly effective way of making clear why
we are asking it of the philosophers and poets whose writings we
have been discussing.
We are seeking a notion of ecological responsibilHy oecumenical
enough to allow direct responsibility not only toward other human
beings but to non-human beings as well. If we were to maintain that
human beings are directly responsible toward a Creator God, we
could be expected to maintain that all other responsibilities are
indirect ones to His creatures. Levinas avoids this corollary by
maintaining that what significance there is to the word 'God' is
given by the ethical proximity of the human Other. It might seem
that a corollary of this would be that there are only indirect
responsibilities toward God. Levinas can avoid this in either of two
ways, both of which, I believe, he follows. He can say that ethical
responsibility toward God is ethical responsibility toward the human
Other. Or he can say that the embarrassing corollary arises only
because we are thinking ontologically, thinking of the human Other
and God only as beings, and to do that is to commit blasphemy and
to deface the ethical encounter, to de-visage the Other through
mistaking the face for a phenomenal countenance at which we
stare. This still leaves us, so far, with only indirect responsibilities
toward the non-human and non-divine. With the help of Heidegger,
Holderlin and Rilke - so far we have only stumbled upon hints that
ultimately Levinas himself might be prepared to come to our aid - we
have tried to show that there is no reason why there should not be
room at least for proto-ethical responsibilities toward what Heidegger
provisionally describes as the weltarm and welflos, that is to say
animals, plants and even the inorganic things of the world, whether in
their natural state or shaped by the work of man.
The reason why we could afford to be cursory in our treatment of
Holderlin's gods was that we accepted Heidegger's comment that
they are the gods of poetry, rather than the gods of revelation and
faith.When we turn to Rilke we discover that this distinction is one
over which we have to be more circumspect.This is partly because,
although in our comments on Holderlin it is not only his poems that
we have cited;-" ip our comments on Rilke we have drawn heavily on
the letters, like those commentators who at the same time warn
against the dangers of doing this, for instance Heidegger and Paul de
Man. We noted that in the most frequently cited of these letters Rilke
188 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
denies that the Angels referred to in the Elegies are meant to be th_e
angels of Christianity. The gods to whom he mostly refers there, in
the Sonnets and elsewhere are the gods of pagan mythology, the
gods of poetry, in Heidegger's phrase. In Levinas's phrase, �hese are
the faceless gods. They are the gods of the elements, of 'wind, earth,
sea, sky, air'. The element is that in which we bathe. Our enjoyment
of it - and the enjoyment of life, Levinas observes, gets short shrift in
Being and Time - is not the enjoyment of the smooth functioning of
an object of use or the self-contained enjoyment of an objet d'art,
since, whatever the element may become for science, it does not yet
fall within the category of an object or substance with an identity. It
is resistant to every category other than that of quality. 'Quality',
Levinas explains, probably thinking of Bergson, 'does not resist
identification because it would represent a flux and a duration; rather
its elemental character, its coming forth from nothing, constitutes its
fragility, the disintegration of becoming, that time prior to repre­
sentation - which is menace and destruction' (TI 115; 141).7
Representation is the first response to this menace, either as a
named natural thing, or as something worked upon, a piece of
equipment or a work of art, this last being Rilke's response to the
fragility and transitoriness that still menaces visible and handlable
things. Sheer quality, Levinas says, is the apeiron prior to the
distinction between the finite and the infinite. Only through the
ethical infinite, of which the mathematical and scientific infinite is for
Levinas as derivative as for Descartes the finite is derivative from
God, is there a prospect of escape from the whispering menace of the
il y a which persists even when we are outside the insecure enjoyment
of the elements i n the enjoyment and employment of substantial finite
things. This spoonful of honey, as Descartes reminds us, remains
vulnerable to becoming a remainder, to dissolution into elements
whose qualities are conveyed by ideas that are either confused and
obscure or by the idea of an exterior space of the world - a
We llaussenraum - the infinite variability of whose contour and
extension is a reliable object of knowledge according to him only
by the grace of the infinite goodness of God. That is to s�y. there is,
es gibt, a stable world according to Levinas only when we recognize
that the substantiality of finite things consists in their being not
things we can possess - property and estate, ousia or Anwesen - but
things we can give to the Other in response to the infinite exteriority
of the face to face. This recognition is achieved by a passage from the
theism of the faceless pagan gods of the elements, through atheism in
The Absolute Master 189
regard to them, to metaphysico-ethical monotheism before the regard
of the Other. The separated being must run the risk of the paganism
which evinces its separation and in which this separation is
accomplished, until the moment that the death of these gods will
lead it back to atheism and to the true transcendence' (TI 115-16;
142). The monotheism of this true transcendence is an ethical and
humanistic 'religion', Levinas's answer to the religion of humanity
preached by Comte in the Course on Positive Philosophy, and endorsed
by Mill in Utilitarianism and the Essays on Religion but with an
infusion of liberal individualism in the - Levinas would say vain -
hope of preventing it sliding into totalitarian holism. H is a non­
humanistic monotheism that is endorsed by Rilke in a letter of 1904
addressed to Lou Andreas-Salome in which he writes: That was my
Easter, and I think it is sufficient for a whole life; with strange largesse
the message was given to me in that Moscow night, given me in my
blood and in my heart. I know it now: Chrisfos voskres!' However,
does he still know this on 22 February 19237 On that day he writes a
letter in which he repeats what he had said thirteen years earlier
about how Russia taught him to be 'a little more human' (letter of 30
August 1910) but records a change in the way he sees how human
and other beings in the great chain are interlinked with God:
I began with things, which were the real confidants of my lonely
childhood, and it was quite an accomplishment for me to be able to
get as far as animals with no outside help . . ,. . But then Russia
came into my ken and presented me with brotherliness and the
darkness of God, in whom only is there community. So I then
named him too, the God who had broken in on me (den r:iber mich
hereingebrochenen Gott), and lived a long while in the narthex of his
name, on my knees . . . . Nowadays you would scarcely ever hear
me name him. There is between us an indescribable discretion, and
where there was once proximity and penetration (Durchdringung)
new distances stretch, like in the atom that modem science also
conceives of as a world in miniature. What one takes hold of slips
through one's fingers, is transfigured; instead of possession one
learns regard (den Bezug}, and there arises a namelessness that, to be
complete and unevasive, must begin again with God.
What in heaven's name or on earth does Rilke mean by this
beginning again bei Gott? Judging by what he goes on to say in
this letter it looks as though he means that we must go back from the
190 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
New Testament to the Old, an interpretation that receives some
support from his statement a year earlier that if we are not to be on
our guard against a certain debasement to which Christianity is
exposed we would do better to stick to the Old Testament and the
Koran (letter of 1 1 and 15 February 1922).
The experience of Christ becomes more and more peripheral; it is
infinitely outweighed by the most ancient God. The idea that
sinfulness and need of redemption are the way to God is
increasingly objectionable to a heart that has been seized by the
earth.
The uralle Goft and his angels hover between the ancient of days and
the pagan gods of the elemental heaven and earth. Why invoke a
supernatural heaven beyond this natural earth, a new life for the
attainment of which a mediator has to be invoked to raise us from
this earthly abyss? For this Abgrun.d is itself full of the darkness of
God.
Only to him for whom also this abyss was a dwelling do the
postponed heavens return, and all that is profoundly and intimately
here, which the church has conjured away to a beyond, comes back;
all the angels, singing its praises, open their wings toward the
earth.
The complaint is not about Christ but about a church which makes of
the Cross an l�ol instead of a pointer. A pointer to what? To the
Creator or to his creation? Or to both at once? To the one as the
other and the other as the one? A year earlier he had written: 'When I
say: God, that is a great conviction in me, not something learnt. It
seems to me, the whole creation speaks this word . . .'. If this is some
kind of pantheism or panentheism it is also some kind of Arianism or
semi-Arianism, for it wants to hang on to the radical alterity of the
First Person of the Trinity from the Second, and to the Second
Person's secondarily. It also wants to hang on to the radical alterity
of God vis-a-vis us. What else can Rilke mean by the abyss that is full
of the darkness of God? Both of these radical alterities come together
in Rilke's statement:
To take a good hold of this life, with warm affection and wonder
. this it was which Saint Francis of Assisi thought to write down
. .
The Absolute Master 191
in his song to the Sun, which was more glorious to him as he lay
dying than was the cross, which only stood there to point into the
sun.
In this statement there come together also the light and the darkness
which, as Plato teaches, overcomes the eyes that would look into the
light's source. Emmanuel Levinas hands on that lesson when he
reminds us that the sun is Plato's figure for the Good, and that the
face of the Other is the trace that remains unseen, like the face of God
according to Exodus 33: 23.
Rilke has the cross pointing away to God. This makes it easier for
him to say that if Christ has helped us say the name of God, well and
good, 'but now at last leave him out of the question. Do not always
force us back into the labour and sorrow that it cost him to "redeem"
us, as you put it. Let us, at last, enter into this state of redemption'.
Thi s is what one might consider to be a healthy, Nietzschean sense of
being emancipated from the incubus of the idea of sin. And it is
noticeable that even in the Book of Hours there is little sign that the
author ever has any sense of ever having sinned, even although that
book is the book of a monk, like the monk Markel whom Rilke could
have met in Russia, who believed he had sinned against birds, trees,
meadows, sky. Which, given what we have just heard Rilke say about
God, is surprising i£, as Nietzsche says in The Will to Power (160), sin
is a Judaic or pagan idea. Perhaps Rilke would have allowed that
Judaeo-Christianity could not 'leave him out of the question' had he
seen Christ not only as a sign pointing to the sun or God, but as also
a mediator through whom God points to man, to Rainer Maria Rilke,
as, in the word of Emmanuel Levinas, the Other, like Lord Kitchener
in the recruitment poster, points a finger at me.8 Nietzsche's
genealogy of sin notwithstanding, sin is not a word one is
continually coming upon in the philosophical writings of Levinas.
Let us not insist on a sense of sin. A sense of responsibility will do.
But it will not do for this sense of responsibility to be limited to
direct responsibility to God or to man. Why should it be7 That this
need not be is what the poets and philosophers we have been
considering help to show in different ways, the poet Rainer Maria
Rilke, for example, and ultimately the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.
What Levinas contributes to the philosophical theory of proto­
ethical responsibility is a theory of the limits of theory which shows
how political justice can be saved from doing violence to the
individual person by refusing to let go of provocativity or address,
192 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
by insisting that the said can always be unsaid, the dit reanimated,
respired, by face to face Zusage or dire, a possibility or rather
necessity and obligation that may explain why scepticism, though
it continually defeats itself in the modality and Hme of the
proposition of ideas and the constatation of form, continually raises
its head again in the modality and time of exposition, provocation
and performance that de-fo rms. This is the response Levinas makes to
Hegel and in general to philosophies of system, however individualis­
tic they may be. The individualism for which we have taken Mill as a
model, like any other theory conceived sub specie aeternitafis, is in
principle mechanistic, treating individuals on analogy with centres of
force of which the resultant of interactions among them is a matter
for calculation by an unprejudiced observer mindful of an 'original
position' before the lots are drawn, a blindfold weighing upon scales.
In this it is no less a philosophy of totality than a theory which
argues explicitly that the individual is an epiphenomenon of the
whole, be it the Platonic Republic, the Kantian intelligible kingdom or
the Hegelian and neo-Hegelian Absolutes. Such primarily political
morality is immoral and unjust, Levinas maintains, unless there is
prejudice at its anarchic beginning, not a prejudice in favour of the
totality, as with Hegel, a prejudice in favour of the mortal 'we' such
as Levinas sees in the personalisms of Buber, Scheler and Marcel, or a
prejudice in favour of the mortal T, as with Heidegger, but a
prejudice in favour o f the mortal Other, of the infinitive 'to say' of
the face to face beyond the said and beyond the 'to be' which
transcends the beingness of beings.
If this is the only way that space can be left for what Kant and the
Stoics call dignity, for what Heidegger and the existentialists call
authenticity, and for what Levinas calls the holy, it would appear to
be a waste of time considering the alternative answer to Hegel that
might be thought to be offered by Duns Scotus's doctrine of
haecceitas. On the most widely-agreed reading of this doctrine there
is a unique thisness that attaches to the forms, the matters and their
combination in each thing below the level of universality. Because
this individuality is below the level of universality, below the
Aristotelian lowest species, it is below the dignity of science because
below the level of what can be propositionally said. lt does not
follow that it is below the dignity of poetic invocation and praise, as
Gerard Manley Hopkins demonstrates as well as anyone, though
inevitably with him the glory goes to God, not directly to the
dappled things.9 But suppose the quasi-phenomenal haecceitas, which
The Absolute Master 193
always foils our attempts to appropriate it by making it the content of
what is properly propositionally said, is construed not through the
Scotist categories of matter and form but through the instance of the
non-categorial, non-quasi-categorial, reversed existential, reversed ek­
static, in-static, i/leiU of the Other who addresses himself to me face
to face and to whom I can respond hineni, 'I am here'. Admittedly, this
would appear to forfeit the scope of the Scotist doctrine which is not
limited to beings that can speak. But we have already found reason to
allow that we have direct responsibilities to beings that are
traditionally thought to be unable to speak, namely animals, what
Heidegger at least provisionally names the we/farm, Rilke's panther,
Levinas's Bobby. The reason we found was that whether or not the
animal is poor in world, he or she is no less capable of pleasure and
pain than what Aristotle calls the rational animal and what Heidegger
calls the weltbildend. As Mill and Bentham maintain, if our ethics is
utilitarian it must include all sentient beings. Whether from a non­
utilitarian point of view we consider that we have direct responsibi­
lities to animals is likely to be dependent on how we see the linkage
between humans and animals in the great chain of being. We have
noted how differently Rilke and Heidegger see this. But the problem
was already posed in our discussion of Heidegger's reflections on
Kant. Posed there already too, especially by Religion within the Bounds
of Reason Alone, was the problem of the nature of human respons­
ibility toward whatever being there may be above human beings in
the classical hierarchy. We have seen that this problem, transmitted
through the writings of Philo, Plotinus, Rabbi Ha'im of Volozhin and
their epigones is very much alive in the writings of Levinas. Whether
the problem be that of the linkage downward or that of the linkage
upward, the view taken of the directness, indirectness or non­
obtaining of responsibilities usually turns on the degree of kinship,
never the difference, that is judged to hold either in the dimension of
animality or in the dimension of rationality. This leaves the plant, not
to mention the stone and the artefact, distinctly out in the cold. It is
left to the poet, the thinking poet and the poet-thinker to bring them
in, for example the poet Rilke, the denkende Dichter Holderlin and the
dichtende Denker Heidegger. Levinas would say that Rilke's
Weltinnenraum and the four-dimensional space of the Geviert of
which Holderlin and Heidegger set out the geometry are either a
space whose coordinates have no origin or one in which the origin is
the first person singular whose primary care is the egological, if not
egoistic, satisfaction of its needs and the drive to sustain its own
194 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience The Absolute Master 195

being towards its own death: the transcende�tal unity of �pper�eftion

stretched. Compare the questions posed in §282 of the same book: 'Is
and the transcendental unity of digestion. Pnor _ to th1s ongm of
it false or nonsensical to say that a pot talks? Have we a clear picture
geometry, prior to this theoretical 1 think', and prio; to this practical
of the circumstances in which we should say of a pot that it talked?
'I can', cutting across t�e disHndion between ac hon �nd pass1. on,
(Even a nonsense-poem is not nonsense in the same way as the
Levinas maintains, is the proto-ethical passivity of my bemg a subJect_
babbling of a child.)' If we do not have a clear picture of the
only because subjected to and called to responsibility b� the regar of � circumstances in which we should say that a rose or a pot talked, and
each and every mortal Other (HAH 91), the cynosure m a pre-eth1cal
if we require that a thing must be able to talk if it is to be capable of
_ :
�
space whose dimension of depth we might _ no ' c l der andere Be�ug.
being that toward which there can be responsibility, it follows that
Prior to the for-oneself, the pour soi, the fur s1ch, IS the proto-eth1cal
we shall be unclear whether it is false or nonsensical or true to say
for-the-other. that such things as roses and pots are things toward which we can
But can the Other who calls me to responsibility, whether direct or
have responsibilities. But why do we lay down this requirement?
indirect, be a being that cannot speak? The response to this q�estion
Apparently because we require that for every responsibility it must be
must be the further question, Why not? As Bentham and M1ll and
possible to make a correlative claim. Even if this were a valid
Saint Francis would hope to have persuaded us, the capacity to speak
requirement, it does not follow that the claim has to be one that
is not a necessary condition for being the prime mover of
can be articulated by the being to whom the responsibility is directed.
responsibility, and they would hope to have persuaded those of us
Those who make this requirement allow that it is sufficient if the
who needed this persuasion quite independently of whether we hold
claim can be articulated or the right expressed by an agent or trustee
that certain animals can speak. Nor, though history shows that th1s _
of the being in whom it is invested. True, they are likely to restrict
has sometimes been denied, is the capacity to speak our language
agency and trusteeship to circumstances in which the being on behalf
such a necessary condition, where 'our' is variously defined. It is ofte�
of whom the agency or trusteeship is held is one who could
argued that, although neither of these conditions is necessary, _1t IS
conceivably speak for him- or herself. This is because the context
necessary that any being to whom responsibilit� is �wed s o�ld b� � of these claims and rights is one of legal or ethico-legal contract. Yet
capable of acquiring language or of having acqUired 1t .m pnnc1ple 1f
even within this context of systematic reciprocity it is conceivable
_
not in practice. This brings the human embryo, f�etus, mfants and
and does not demand much, if any, stretching of the imagination to
mentally-deficient human beings of whatever age m from the cold.
recognize that a person may have responsibility as agent or trustee
Whether it brings in what, Heidegger notwithstanding, I shall go on
toward a rose, a pot, a rainforest, a river, a mountain, meadows, birds,
referring to as : other animals would then depend again on :'hat trees, sky, fish, whales, the sea. Perhaps indirect responsibilities
species of animals we have in mind and on what we count as havmg a
toward such things will be readily conceived and imagined at the
language. But why do we have to make the answer to the question of
level of systematic, contractual or custom law. But direct responsibi­
responsibility depend on the answers to this question about language?
lities toward such things are conceivable there too, and it must be
Whether or not this or that animal has language, we know that they
direct responsibility that is being conceived at the pre-contractual and
have needs, and needs we can recognize without the animal that h�s
pre-customary level of the proto-ethical face to face; for in so far as
them having to put them into words. Perhaps his need of words IS
this is the proximity of a dyadic neighbourhood and because the first
one of the animal's most crucial needs. For if he or she had words,
responsibility is to the Other, not to myself, there is no room for
�
they would certainly include 'Help!', 'Spare me' or at least · et me be'.
indirection. My responsibility stares me in the face as the Other's
_
And that is what we could expect to hear if non-senhent bemgs �oul � poverty, hunger, nakedness - need. This need stares me in the face. So
�
speak. Granted, the possibility of entertaining such an expec ahon IS
we are this side of symmetry and calculative, totalizing system. There
restricted by the difficulty of imagining what . would sahs the� is no reason why this dissymmetry should be lost when we adapt it
hypothesis. To adapt a question put by W1tt enstetn _ m the
� to the fourfold economy of Heidegger and Holderlin or to Rilke's
Philosophical Investigations, 'Where should a �ose �
tongue have
inner space of the world in which the needs of non-human beings are
been7'.10 If the question is to be answered the 1magmahon must be
acknowledged alongside those of Levinas's Aufrui. And this adapta-
196 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience

tion does not imply that we must believe or make believe that these
other beings can feel and/or talk if they are to be provocative of an
ethical or proto-ethical response. lt suffices that we recognize the
ecological interdependence of things, in other words the mutuality of
need, whether that need be experienced, unexperienced or unexper­
iencable, articulated, unarticulated or unarticulable. The acknowledge­
ment of this need does not presuppose sympathy, for the need may
be a need of a thing that does not feel. The mutuality is not or not
only the mutuality of sympathy or intimate love, and it is a mutuality
which does not fall into the violence of purely political universality as
long as there is someone who recognizes that before the mutual
responsibility and justice of the human community, the condition of
its possibility as justice and of its impossibility as principle, is the
anarchic, dissymmetrical responsibility toward human and non-human
beings of which he or she says 'This responsibility falls on me.'
9
The Feeling Intellect
Comment formuler, voire formaliser ces operations de bascule qui
renversent un terme dans son contraire tout en les maintenanf a
d'aut-res points de vue a distance?
Jean-Pierre Vernant, 'Raisons du mythe'
par confiance envers cette idee que l'idenfite du moi est Dire de
subversion, Dire d'in-quielude pour /'Autre, il faut en terminer avec
fouf Dit, fut-il mifaphorique, qui donne a penser cette inquietude se/on
deux regimes, l'un masculin, /'autre [eminin.
Catherine Chalier, Figures du fiminin

Proto-ethical responsibility is a responsiveness which is a respons­

ibility because it is a response to another's need, whether or not that
other be a human being. lt is proto-ethical, not ethical in the usual
sense, because the responsibility is inevitably mine. These are the two
main theses of our book. They describe more than one chiasmic
encounter. The most improbable of these must be that of Martin
Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas. The chiasmus remains improbable.
It is bound so to remain. This is what one discovers in reading
Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. A chiasmus is neither an eclectic, a
collocation of externally related parallel lines. Nor is it a dialectic, a
synthesis by which two apparently contradictory opposites are both
internalised in a neutral stabilising third. If it is not a dialectical
contradiction, however, neither is it a contradiction of classical logic.
In some sense the parties to a chiasmus belong to each other,
complement and supplement each other. It will have long since
become clear that no amount of ingenuity will make everything that
Levinas has written sit comfortably with everything that has been
written by Heidegger. Such an outcome, even if it were desirable, is
not one we should expect, given the fact that not everything that
either author has said in one place agrees with what he has said

197
198 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
elsewhere. But bland agreement between them is not desirable. We,
their readers, would be the losers. We should lose the obligation to
think again that is imposed by a chiasmus, when two lines of thought
come closest then proceed to move apart, each a supplementary step
ahead of the other, as indicated by the dissymmetry of the Greek
letter chi, X· We should therefore lose a chance of a new way of
seeing that such a chiasmus gives. It is perhaps not without symbolic
significance that vision depends on a chiasmus of the optic nerves
between the retina and the brain. Is it a duck or is it a rabbit? Maybe
it is some third thing for which we do not have ,a name, something
we will therefore be prone to think of as an unthinkable unthing, a
monstrous I do not know what.
Our attempt to reach some third thing via the crossing of
Heidegger and Levinas, something to which neither on his own is
obviously on the way, has more than once been impeded by the
difficulty that where we should like to be reaching literal sense we
seem to reach only anthropomorphic figures of speech. How can what
has no mouth or eyes be said, literally, to make a claim? What can it
mean to say that one may murder an animal, a plant or a stone?
Confronted by this difficulty, is there nothing more to be done than
assert that whether it can be overcome is in the lap of history, in the
lap of the gods, as Heidegger would say? Is it true that 'Only a god
can save us', and what does this statement mean71 History and the
gods have come and gone, and hindsight appears to show that such
difficulties have been overcome. But they have been overcome not
only by waiting, though there will have to be a good deal more of
that. When it is: complained that the only message Heidegger has is
expressed in the .single word 'Wait', this is both unfair and false.
It is unfair because it supposes that a fundamental change in
historical outlook is in principle no different from a changing of one's
shirt, whereas it is much more like the changing of one's skin. To
suppose this is, in Collingwood's terms, to mistake an absolute
presupposition for a relative one, a conceptual frame for a true or
false belief.2 There is a difference in principle because there is a
difference between a principle and a proposition. However, this is still
a too purely intellectualist way of characterizing what Heidegger
means by an epochal revolution in the history of being. We begin to
understand this when we begin to understand, for example, why
Wittgenstein says 'My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a
soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.'3 The Einstellung,
though this is perhaps not a word that Heidegger would here use, is
The Feeling Intellect 199
how I comport myself vis-a-vis fellow human beings, how I naturally
respond, and this response is as much one of feeling as of cognition, a
response in which the other is disclosed through, as Heidegger puts it
in Being and Time, a joint operation in which understanding (Verstehen)
and mood (Stimmung) are jointly adverbs of each other. Hence when
the way the world discloses itself undergoes a fundamantal change
the change is one of Grundstimmung no less than of fundamental
principle or absolute presuppositon. Now the world is not my world.
It is ours. So it is as unfair to complain if a philosopher says only
'Wait' as it would be to complain that Humpty Dumpty cannot decide
by fiat what a given word is to mean.
It is however not true that Heidegger says that all the dichfende
Denker or the denkende Dichter can do is wait. They can prepare the
way. They can do this, without any privileged insight into the future,
by recognizing that one of the needs of the time of need is for
thinking that thinks otherwise, for what Heidegger calls das andere
Denken, a thinking which is a doing that is a response to the
command of what Levinas calls the autremenf dire.
At the crossing of the paths of these two thinkers, our particular
difficulty is that the thinking otherwise which we hope for is a
thinking commanded by an autrement dire which, like a ventriloquist's
doll, must borrow its voice. Where one of the needs of the Other
from which the command comes is the need of a voice of its own we
must, as Rilke does, speak on its behalf, borrowing words from
thinker-poets like him or Holderlin or Hopkins or Jeffers and from
poet-thinkers like Heidegger to help us meet this need. This need
may be the need of a mouth to have words put into it to say that it
also needs food. When, as with a tree or a stone there is neither
mouth to speak or eat nor eyes in which mortality can be read, it is
not easy to suppose a face. But it may not remain impossible. As is
perhaps shown by Levinas himself when, since writing his fine essay
about Bobby, he comes, as we saw in Chapter 3, to experience less
difficulty with the notion that an animal at least may in his sense have
a face. But do we have to stop there? If the dissymmetry of me vis-a­
vis Autrui can be retained, it can save the ecosystematicity of the
fourfold from total violence and injustice just as well as it saves
systematic ethics and politics from these. The responsibility to make
the notion of the Other wider and more welcoming in this way still
has the same foundation, namely need, the need of whatever is
necessary to enable it to persist in its being. Although an unviolent
ecological ethics cannot have my persistence in being as its
200 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
foundation, there is every reason why it should be called for by yours
and your needs or those of the other Other, the animal. the tree or
the flower and the stone, the artefact constructed by weltbildend
human beings or indeed by the non-human weltarm or weltlos.
II
Levinas's account of my responsibility to those who (in both senses of
this expression) come after me beyond the Other who faces me here
and now is connected, as he expounds it in Totality and Infinity, with
his account of erotic love and fecundity. Many of his readers have
found it difficult to accept .what they regard as the sexual bias of his
treatment of these topics. Of Levinas's use of the concepts of
paternity, the feminine and filiality we shall say only at this point
that they are no more intended to be understood in a purely
biological sense than are Freud's conceptions of sexuality and the
family scene or Hegel's recourse to the concepts of the human and
holy families on which Totality and Infinity is as much, if less
explicitly, a critical commentary as it is of Being and Time and that
book's setting aside of questions regarding the enjoyment and pains
of alimentary, productive and reproductive life - which, be it noted in
passing, are set at the centre of some sentimentalist and utilitarian
philosophies of man.4 The effectiveness of Levinas's applications of
the familial terms would not be lost if they were employed under
erasure or regarded as fictional or metaphorical, though he would not
welcome any L�canian implications this way of regarding them might
suggest. One of the striking features of Levinas's thought, most
noticeable in Othe�ise than Being or Beyond Essence, is that he has the
audacity to locate the opening on to the ethical in the most
elementary experiences of what would in the traditional Aristotelian
terminology be called the animality of the rational animal, though
Levinas would be no happier with this terminology than is
Heidegger. Even what some would call the divinity of man, the
respect in which he is said to be made in the image of God, is
incipient in the so-called beast in man. We mentioned earlier Levinas's
appeal to Descartes's Third Meditation to enable him to explain what
he means by the Other that overflows any idea of him that we can
have. Now if the question at issue were one of onto-theology we
might be at a loss to understand why in an early essay Levinas
indicates a preference for Malebranche over Descartes. It is usually to
The Feeling Intellect 201
Malebranche that we att�ibute the doctrine that our ideas are in the
mind of God. This doctrine would lend itself to the teaching that my
centre of gravity is outside my conative or desiring self. It would help
to explain why behind my minuscule desire is a Desire with a
majuscule D for Dieu. Levinas has qualms over Descartes because 'In
Descartes there remains a certain ambiguity . . ., the cogito depending
on God while grounding the existence of God: the priority of the
Infinite subordinates itself to the free adherence of the initially
autonomous will' ('La philosophie et !'idee de l'Infini', 1957, DEHH
174). Yet it is Descartes, not Malebranche, that the later writings of
Levinas regularly invoke. This may be in part because of the
importance Heidegger gives to Descarles as the philosopher who
typifies above all the modem thinking of the subject and the world it
represents, so that it would be an especially. telling tour de force with
special impact upon the ontological programme of Being and Time if in
the writings of Descartes of all philosophers could be read the
message that prima philosophia is not ontology but metaphysics
understood as proto-ethics. In any case, does not ·the ambiguity to
which Levinas refers disappear as soon as we distinguish, as Descartes
does, the order of being from the order of coming to know?
Levinas is arguing for an ethical or proto-ethical reading of
Descartes's Meditations concerning first Philosophy which is in some
regards akin to Kant's reinterpretation of the idea of God as an Idea
of which the application is primarily practical. Levinas is arguing that
prior to order as conjunction is order as injunction, prior both to the
order of being and to the order of theoretical knowing is the order, or
disorder, of proto-ethical or primary justice. Furthermore, he is
making the seemingly insane claim that this justice is not only
outside contract in the usual sense, but is insinuated already even
in 'the erotic caress the intentionality of which is outside contact,
toward ever renewed search. In one of the essays included in En
decouvrant /'existence avec Husserl et Heidegger he writes:
Only the idea of infinity, where being overflows the idea, where
the Other overflows the Same, breaks with the interior play of the
soul and deserves the name of experience, of relation with the
outside. Hence it is more cognitive than knowledge itself and every
objectivity must participate in it. (DEHH 174)
The voluptuosity of erotic love which the Old Testament names
knowledge is an intimation of this anarchic quasi-transcendental
 202 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
condition that transcends all transcendental categories and is the
passing, la passe, and the immemorial past that is passed over, Levinas
contends, by Heidegger's table of existentials. The voluptuosity of
nakedness is a prefiguring of the nakedness of the face, where the
face, Levinas tells us, may be the nape of the neck, the hand, the
entire vulnerable body: 'it is the incarnation of human subjectivity
that guarantees its spirituality' (El 104; 97). The discovery of the
body in voluptuosity is ambiguously a deux. The nakedness of the
face to face into which erotic love is a non-initiative initiation - for
'there is no initiative at the birth of erotic love, which arises in the
passivity of its pangs' (TI 248, cp 254; 270, cp 277) - is ethically
speaking unambiguously a Dieu. The frank presence of the contact
between eyes in the face to face is a tact outside contact that inherits
from the caress an absence which, in the form of Abstand, the distance
· kept by ethical care or respect, is a form of the absence of form, of
eidos, of image and of representation for which Levinas introduces the
word 'trace'. It is because this trace is anticipated in erotic love that
Levinas says that erotic love is an exit froi:n 'tragic egoity' (TI 251;
27 3). It is an exit not only because 'the pathos of voluptuosity is
made of duality' (TI 254; 276), but because this a deux is at the same
time an a trois. Levinas's view of erotic love as described by Freud
seems to be that it is a un or a une, like solitaire or the 'as thyself' of
Rousseau's self-affective dangerous supplement.
One gives onself pleasure ready made; one reasons on the basis of
it. What remains unrecognized is that the erotic, analysed as
fecundity, breaks up reality into relations irreducible to the
relations of .genus and species, part and whole, action and
passion, truth and error; that in sexuality the subject enters into
relation with what is absolutely other, with an alterity unforesee­
able in formal logic, with what remains other in the relation and is
never converted into 'mine', and that nonetheless this relation has
nothing ecstatic about it, for the pathos of voluptuosity is made of
duality.
The duality consists in the masculine being in relation with the
feminine Other, where the feminine is what Levinas has earlier
described as the welcome in the dwelling, whether or not in the
dwelling there is anyone of the female sex (TI 131; 158); in
voluptuosity the feminine Other withdraws into mystery and
equivocation on the hither side of linguistic expression (TI 241,
The Feeling Intellect 203
254; 264, 276). But withdrawal into mystery and equivocation is a
withdrawal from the frankness of the face and of linguistic expression,
a retreat from the uprightness of a you facing me to the intimacy of
the I with the thou. Neither the desire for knowledge of an object or
for power, erotic love is not a desire for possession or being
possessed. The romantic idea of the mysteriousness and modesty of
woman is a mark of the alterity and duality that prevents erotic love
fusing into fusion, and a mark of the fact that the fission-it retains is
not one of a conflict of free wills, in the manner described for example
by Sartre. The other is refractory to our power not because his or her
power is greater, but because the power of alterity is its being outside
power (TA 80, TO 87). Voluptuosity is neither mastery nor bondage,
but the femination and being moved 'which the heroic and virile I will
remember as one of those things that stand apart from "serious
maHers"' (TI 248; 270) where, since they are . philosophical, not
biological, concepts, the virility can be that of a woman.
Voluptuosity hence aims not at the Other but at his [ her!
voluptuosity; it is voluptuosity of voluptuosity, love of the love
of the other. Love accordingly does not represent a particular case
of friendship . . . : friendship goes toward the other; love seeks
what does not have the structure of an existent, the indefinitely
future, what is to be engendered. (TI 244; 266)
Although Levinas's insistence that the familial relationships of which
he is treating are to be understood philosophically rather than
biologically may, far from placating some of his readers, distress
them all the more, it would be a pity if the shock of discovering that
he calls engendering paternity, adding only as though it were an
afterthought that The notion of maternity must be introduced here
. . .' (TI 255; 278), blinded us to the subtlety of his description of
filiation. Since filiation is being explained philosophically, the fact that
it is described as a relation of father and son does not mean that the
relation cannot hold between a mother and daughter. After all, it can
hold between a teacher and pupil - and not only when the teacher is
literally in loco parentis, like James Mill. So when Levinas refers to
paternal love philosophically understood, he is referring to a relation
that a biological mother or father may have for her or his biological
daughter or son, and to a relation that may hold between persons
who have no blood relationship at all. 'The love of the father for the
204 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
son accomplishes the sole relation possible with the very unicity of
another; and in this sense every love must approach paternal love' (Tl
256; 279). But how are we to undertand th is 'approach' (s'approcher
deJ? Dialectically? This word is often employed in Totality and Infinity
to describe the movement of its thought, despite the fact that it is to
the danger of what he considers to be the totalizing movement of
Hegel's thought that Levinas would have us acknowlege infinity as
the check. Now emphase is another word that Levinas often employs
to describe the movement of his thought. His philosophical descrip­
tions proceed by the hyperbolization or superlation of the very
notions whose claim to hegemony he challenges. And he goes on
using the same words, as we have seen him do with the word
'knowledge', saying that infinity is more cognitive than cognition.
This is what he is doing also with the word 'dialectical'. And this
makes space for us to say that although in a sense every love
approaches the paternal. it does not leave entirely outside maternal or
at any rate feminine aftendrissement, meaning by this being 'touched'
by the other, a hetero-affedion that gets under the skin of self­
affective egoity. True, if, following HegeL we say that the paternal
love which erotic love approaches retains the latter in some way, we
shall have to say presumably that self-love is retained too. This still
leaves us wanting to know, if Levinas is following Hegel up to a
certain point, where the point is reached beyond which he refuses to
go. We want to know, for instance, how infinity as more cognitive
than cognition differs from absolute cognition, bearing in mind that
the latter is a Resr1ltat which, unlike the result of an operation of
arithmetical addition, may be a Satz vorn Grund, a sa/to rnortale, a leap
into the light. There should be a good chance of understand n i g ni
some way the discontinuity in the movement from Hegel to Levinas
if we apply to it what the latt er says about filiation, granted his own
assertion that one example of a filiative relation is that between pupil
and teacher and assuming that an example of this latter relation is that
of Levinas to Hegel. If this assumption needs any support it receives
it when, having asserted that filiative connections obtain in nations,
he adds: 'The originality of this resumption (renouement), distinct from
continuity, is attested in the revolt or the permanent revolution that
constitutes ipseity'. Levinas's 'permanent revolution' against Hegel is
a resumption of the conversation with him, a retying of its threads.
The knot between father and son which resumes the threads of
history is - trinitologists will be interested to read5 - a node through
which I am substantially in my son without him and me being
The Feeling lntellecf 205
identical, yet without our non-identity being attributable to some
discernible qualitative mark.
The son is not only my work, like a poem or an object, nor is he
my property. Neither the categories of power nor those of
knowledge describe my relation with the child. The fecundity of
the I is neither a cause nor a determination. I do not have my child;
I am my child. Paternity is a relation with a stranger who while
being Other . . . is me, a relation of the self with a self which yet is
not me. In this 'I am' being is no longer Eleatic unity. (Tl 254; 277)
Nor is it, we may add, Hegelian or 1-Ieideggerian being. One may
well wonder whether the difficulty of this thought is made greater by
the expository rhetoric of Totality and lnfinify which continually refers
to itself as a kind of ontology - for instance, 'Fecundity is to be set
up as an ontological category' - and maintains that Being, admittedly
'emphasized' out of itself, is Exteriority, or on the other hand by the
rhetoric of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence which attempts to
elide the verb 'to be'. But the aim i s quite clear. It is to show that
unicity or uniqueness i s not absorbed by the Eleatic One. And
Levinas's attempt to achieve that aim passes via his analysi s of the
son. The son is unique because he is unique for his father.
And because the son owes his unicity to the paternal election he
can be brought up, be commanded, and can obey, and the strange
.
conjuncture of the family is possible. Creation contradicts the
freedom of the creature only when creation i s confused with
causality. Whereas creation as a relation of transcendence, of
union and fecundity, conditions the positing of a unique being,
and his ipseity qua elected.
The uniqueness here referred to is neither a qualitative nor a
numerical uniqueness, but a uniqueness through election. When one is
chosen one is singled out. Levinas asks 'where can I be chosen, if not
from among other chosen ones, among equals7' It is not obvious why
the one chosen should not be chosen from among unequals. However,
since qualitative differences and comparisons are not relevant here, it
is reasonable to infer that the one chosen will be chosen from among
equals. For what am I elected? To say that I am elected is to say that I
am not merely among equals but to face my brothers and serve them.
My being elected i s my being put on the spot, released by the other
206 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
from the self-position of my identity persevering in and preserving its
being, called to a responsibility from which no one c�n release n:e. I
am both unique and non-unique in the sense that a ph1losophe� might
find himself wanting to say not just that everyone IS . responsible for
�
everyone, but that each I is an I among many each of w om is more
responsible than any other. However, would not sa� mg that be
�
saying something logically and in Levinas's sense ethtcal y absurd:
logically absurd because ethically absurd in Levinas's meamng of the
ethical? It will be recalled that the answer we gave when we discussed
this predicament of predication in the second section of Chapter 2, �s
that it is indeed ethically impossible for me to say that another ts
more responsible than I. For the ethical is my openness to you who
are a second person grammatically but the first person ethically - or,
more precisely, proto-ethically, if we limit the ethical to the usual
sense in which it involves the plurality of third persons, whether they
be my contemporaries or the posterity of the innumerable future as
which, Levinas says, paternity is produced.
Having said something about paternity and the masculine, it is
about maternity and the feminine that we must now speak.
III
We have mentioned more than once a broadening out in Levinas's
thinking beyond his earlier determination to keep ethics at �ms
length from art to a readiness to agree with Celan that to wn�e a
poem can be to shake its reader by the hand. We have also underltned
the kinship acknowledged by Kant between the poietic imaginatio� in
the first Critique, respect in the second and the dodnne . of the subhme
in the third. Whether or not with Heidegger's support we pursue the
idea that these are three stems that go back to a single common root,
there remains at least a kinship in structure. Allowing the word
'feeling' to include sensibility, the aesthetic feelings and the feeling of
moral respect, allowing the word 'intellect' to include what in the
narrower sense Kant calls reason, and bearing in mind the above­
mentioned doctrine of Being and Time that Verstehen ist immer
gestimmtes, this common structure could be desig�ated the feeling
intellect. After referring to Wordsworth' s use of thts phrase _m 'The
Prelude', Robert Nye writes:
The Feeling Intellect 207
The feeling intellect is that grace which dwells between one
possibility and another, perceiving and revealing a pattern beneath
the surface of experience without wishing· to impose a style upon
it. It is as much a talent for saying nothing, for submitting to the
supposed meaning or meaninglessness of life, as for deliberate
speaking out. It is a profounder concept than Keats's 'negative
capability' because it recognises and celebrates the will as just
possibly in some circumstances a 'humbler tenderness'. Rilke of all
twentieth-century poets had this power6
The description 'feeling intellect' suggests that this power of
poetry might be a power of wilL as Nye here says it is, if it has to
be classified according to the traditional division of the faculties of
the mind into cognition, conation and emotion. So, although a
capability, like that to which Keats refers, of 'being in uncertainties,
Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason',
it will be a transfiguration of reason, and rather than being a
·
preference such as Keats expressed in his 'Adam's Dream' letter for
'Sensations rather than Thoughts', this power will be an overcoming
of this opposition. If it is a power of will, it is a peaceful power, a
celebration of the will which is an expression of respect: a 'humbler
tenderness' or a 'humble patience' of 'the thinking heart', die einfache
Langmut of the denkende Herz which is 'the in-sistence in releasement
( Gelassenheit) to that which regions' and which is 'the real nature of
the spontaneity of thinking' (Gel 62, DT 82), a more subtle
spontaneity than that of Kantian pure reason.
This poetic andere Denken is Andenken, commemoration, because it
is a remembrance of what is of high birth. It gives thanks for what the
thinker is given by the grace (Nye's word again) of being, the es gibt
of Sein. The problems or mysteries that surround the manifold
theological conceptions of grace have their counterpart in Heideg­
ger's reflections on the thinking of being. Indeed, as his remarks about
theology mentioned in the previous chapter would lead us to expect,
he maintains that the latter is an investigation of that to which the
former must come back. In a paragraph of Being and Time which is
also directly relevant to our earlier references to sin and the holy and
to our preoccupation with the relationship between my and your
salvation and the salvation of the world, he explains that
our existential-ontological Interpretation makes no ontical asser­
tion about the 'corruption of human Nature', not because the
208 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
necessary evidence is lacking, but because the problematic of this
Interpretation is prior to any assertion about corruption or
incorruption . . . . Ontically, we have not decided whether man
is 'drunk with sin' and in the status corrupfionis, whether he walks in
the status integrifalis, or whether he finds himself in the intermediate
stage, the status graliae. But in so far as any faith or 'world view',
makes any such assertions, and if it asserts anything about Dasein
as Being-in-the-world, it must come back to the existential
structures which we have set forth, provided that its assertions
are to make a claim to conceptual understanding. (BT 180)
The problems or mysteries that surround the theological doctrines
of grace are anticipated ni the double genitivity of the preposition in
the phrase 'the thinking of being'. They are linked up with
Malebranche's doctrine that our ideas are ideas in the mind of God
and, as we shall in a moment discover, they are not unrelated to his
occasionalism. Further, just as in the history of theology the
differences among the conceptions of grace have been differences
over the notion of will, Heidegger's thinking of the history of being
as Andenken calling for Gelassenheit has been a conversation with
Nietzsche on the part played in this thinking by will. Hence, we could
ask why, if Andenken is remembrance of what is of high birth, namely
being, there is so much hesitancy over saying that the Gelassenheif it
calls for is the highest willing. Is it because Heidegger wants to show
Gelassenheif witp regard to the will, to be humbly patient and tender
toward it - and toward Nietzsche and his will to power? Why is not
the poetic power pf the will itself will to power?
In the 'Conversation on a Country Path', dating from 1944-5, the
middle of a period of years during which Heidegger was writing
prolifically about Nietzsche, one of the participants, the research
scientist, says 'The composed patience in which the nature of
releasement rests, might be what could correspond to the highest
willing, and yet this would not be possible'. Das verhaltene Ausdauern,
wodurch die Gelassenheit in ihrem Wesen ruht, wiire das, was dem
hachsten Wollen entsprechen konnte und es doch nich t durfte. This
hovering in what is not quite a contradiction is what we have been
prepared for by an exchange earlier in the conversation where it is
granted that Gelassenheit contains a higher doing (ein hoheres Tun) but
denied that it is an activity (Aktiuitiit), on the grounds that
Gelassenheit lies outside the opposition between activity and passiv-
The Feeli ng lntellecf 209
ity because it lies outside the sphere of the will. More precisely, it is
the end-state of a will not to will, wollen wir das Nicht-Wol/en (Gel 57,
DT 79).
The composed patience of the Gelassenheit of commemorative
thinking as will not to will has an 'unsung precursor', David Krell
observes, in Nietzsche's description of learnjng to see: 'habituating
the eye to repose, to patience, to letting things come to it . . . what is
called in unphilosophkal language "strong will-power": the essence of
it is precisely not to 'will', the capacily to defer decision'. The capacity,
kiinnen, here referred to is a mastery, but a mastery over oneself, as is
confirmed when Nietzsche goes on to compare learrung to think with
acquiring the Meislerschafl or technique of dancing.7 So is what
Heidegger calls Gelassenheif also a technique, though a technique
turned toward the subject rather than the object? If so, there would
seem to be some basis for extending to Heidegger's later thinking
Levinas's description of Bei ng and Time as a philosophy of 'I can'.
Even the thinking of Gelassenheif would then be a philosophy of the
exercise of egological power, a philosophy of the subjectivity's ltisus
and conatus essendi, a philosophy indistinguishable in principle from
the Leibnizian and Nietzschean philosophies of will to power as
Heidegger describes these in order to show that they fall short of 'the
other thinking' of being (The Word of Nietzsche "God is Dead'", H
21 Iff., QCT 72ff.). Heidegger writes that the ancient metaphysical
thinking of the beingness (ousia) of the hypokeimenon or subiectum
changes into 'the subjedness of assertive self-consciousness, which
now manifests its essence as the will to will' (H 218, QCT 79-80). Is
his thinking itself a thinking of that subjectness after all? Can it be
defended against the unlikely claim that it is without exposing it to
the more familiar claim that it is a thinking of quietism and inaction?
We have already begun to see that there is room for a middle way, a
way to wruch we have pointed when from time to time we have
coopted from Greek grammar the admittedly still insufficiently
clarified but nevertheless heuristically provocative notion of middle
voice. The utility of this notion for our purposes was first suggested
to us by Derrida, but no more than he do we wish to exaggerate the
relevance of the original grammatical ideas covered by trus phrase.
Without the flesh we have been putting on it thanks, for example, to
the sentences reproduced above from Robert Nye, the chances of its
advancing the question concerning the difference between Heidegger
and Nietzsche on the subject of the will may seem slim, given that
Charles ScoH sees the middle voice as the key to an interpretation not
210 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience The Fee ling Intellect 211

ne on eternal The published English translation gives 'occasion' for Anlass. The
only of Heidegger but also of Nietzsche's doctri
recurrence and will to power .8 It is significant that. on Scott's French translation published in Questions 1l1 gives incifafion. 10 What
will to power and eternal recurrence are the word is designed to exclude is effecting or causing, as is made
interpretation of Nietzsche,
way Heide gger describes when he clear by the statement that the relinquishing no longer stems from
two sides of the same coin in the
writes: (kommf aus) a willing and by what the scholar goes on to say. This is
an exclusion both of mechanistic causation and of a ground or motive
Inasmuch as the will wills the overpowering of itself, it is not which would be cited as why or how the relinquishing takes place.
satisfied with any abundance of life. It asserts power in over­ The logic is similar to that of Kant's account of the manner in which
reaching - i.e. in the overreaching of its own will. In this way it the feeling of respect plays its indispensable but not central role in an
continually comes as the selfsame back upon itself as the same. action determined by the moral law. But how can the trace of willing
(H 219, QCT 81) be dispensed with once it has played its indispensable role in the
achievement of Gelassenheit, in the consequent state of willed
as 'strong self-will' relinquishment of will? For if Gelassenheit is, as we are told, a
Not only does power overpower itself, somewhat
' thinking of the verhaltenes Ausdauern, a composed steadfastness or patience which,
masters the self's wilL but, if Nietzsche's 1ight-footed
idea of will to
will to power is to be successful. it must fail: 'the as the noun says, endures, then it would not be unreasonable to infer
nt that Nietzsche's that the will cannot be only prevenient but must be sustained as long
power is itself transvalued into something differe
true to itself, imagine'. Into the discourse of as the endurance is maintained if only to resist forces that might
discourse could not,
otherwise lead it to lapse. However, this inference is not compelling.
Heidegger or Levinas or Derrida7 . . .
tc reading of Remembering that not all deists or theists required a God to sustain
The invocation of a middle voice is apt for a chtasm
Heidegger with Levinas because it marks the ver .
�
: spot at w ich their the universe in existence after its creation, it is arguable that although
_
Ity, rarely mdtcated the will would be necessary to reach a state of Gelassenheif, once
paths cross, the place between activity and passiV
fad that the na�e reached the state could remain steady in the way that having a
on maps of so-called Western thought, despite the
e - and desptt e disposition or habit is being in a condition in which the behaviour
we are giving to that place comes to us from Greec
Plato's cross- bred expressive and definitive of it could be said to be precisely that
the fact that that place or non-place is prepared in
us. 9 Both Levinas and Heidegger aim to condition in which willing is now otiose. So among other disanalogies
thinking of chora in the Timae
e the categories of between the place occupied in Heidegger's thinking by Gelassenheit
make their readers sensitive to a dimension outsid
ergon and energeia, a
active and pas��\le potentiality, beyond dunamis , and the place which Kant ascribes to the holy will is this absence of
.
case, but also m will from the former, an absence that is guaranteed if the trace of the
dimension of non-allergic height in Levinas's
caus�, and b�yond 'trace of willing' admitted by Heidegger is not like a trace of oil in
Heidegger's case a dimension beyond effect and
man theones �f water, which is of the same stuff as that of which it is a trace, but like
the quasi-dynamic conflict of wills typical of Newto
the word An/ass IS the dried trace which high water leaves on the sand - or the trace of
human relations. In that case it is not obvious how
a Country Path' the the face in Levinas's sense which is unlike the countenance in that it
to be understood when in the 'Conversation on
scientist says: has no phenomenality at all. If Heidegger· does mean that the
admitted trace of the will is not in pare materia with the will, that
Releasement is indeed the release of oneself from transcendental re­ it retains not even a soupr;on of its power, then, albeit at the cost of
presentation and so a relinquishing of the willing of a horizon. Such presenting us with the problem of understanding how the trace can
relinquishing no longer stems from a willing, except that the Anlass then be the or part of the Anlass, he presents us with a way of
for releasing oneself to belonging to that-which-regions requires a avoiding a certain problem that threatens Levinas. Perhaps a symptom
trace of willing (einer Spur des Wollens). This trace, ow�ver, � of this latter problem, which we might call the problem of the activity
vanishes while releasing oneself and is completely extmgutshed of receptivity, is the doubling of welcome, accueil, as Levinas proceeds
in releasement. (Gel 57," OT 79-80} from Totality and Infinity, where welcome is associated, as the Timaeus
212 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
associates chora, with femininity and maternity and is beyond willing,
to Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence where welcome is active,
virile. assuming, accepting or taking into one's possession, even when
it is suffering that is accepted, as it is in Sartre's analysis of passion
where there is always a trace of action in passion and where the trace
is in pare materia with that of which it is the trace. The passivity of an
object on this Sartrian account is its being used as a means by a
conscious agent. The passivity of the subject is also in this way
subordinate to the free act of choosing to suffer or not to suffer the
suffering. ln both cases the activity and the passivity are simultan­
eous. It is the shortcoming of the Sartrian analysis of the latter
simultaneity that is being singled out for criticism when Levinas says,
The term welcome of the Other expresses a simultaneity of activity
and passivity which places the relation vvith the other outside of the
dichotomies valid for things: the a priori and the a posteriori, activity
and passivity' (Tl 62; 89). Sartre's analysis does not penetrate to a
passivity whose simultaneity with activity is at the same time a
diachrony, a double time, arhythmia. In this simultaneity it is not
activity which dominates passivity, as in the account given by Sartre,
but passivity which rises above · domination by being a patience more
passive than the passivity of allergic interaction, by being ethical, by
being metaphysical, by being beyond being: beyond the being of the
object, the being in-itself whose being beyond the opposition of
activity and passivity it is Sartre's aim to demonstrate in his
discussion of this dichotomy in the sixth section of the Introduction
to Being and Nof�ingness ; and beyond the being of the for-itself which
Levinas maintains is under the ordinance of diacony for the other. So
the problem is to understand how this for-the-other can be welcome
without its being an acceptance or assumption tainted by at least a
trace of willing as the purity of water may be tainted by oil.
The problem is to understand this welcome otherwise than it is
understood in those places of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence
where to welcome is to will. In this book Levinas says that before the
choice between good and evil, jenseits van Gut und Base, so before
even the prereflective choice of a project in whose referential totality
would arise the distinction between the good or the instrumental and
the evil or the detrimental, I am chosen by the Good. It assigns me
before I designate it. The fact that in its goodness the Good declines
the desire it arouses while inclining it toward responsibility for the
neighbour, preserves difference in the non-indifference of the Good,
which chooses me before I welcome it' (AEAE 158, OBBE 123). The
The Feeling Intellect 213
first part of this sentence signals that the desire here referred to is the
non-erotic Desire we earlier spoke of in connection with the essay
'God and Philosophy' originally published in 1975. Erotic desire,
although concupiscent, is not virile assertion of power. As explained
in detail in Totality and Infinity, it is effemination and hospitality, my
being host or hostess which is the vestibule or narthex of my being
hostage to the other in responsibility, which in that book is described
as welcome, but not welcome as described in the second part of this
sentence from Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence This latter
.
welcome is an act, hence incompatible with absolute passivity and
thought to be compatible only because absolute passivity is confused
with the a priori receptivity of the data of cognition which is younger
than it. 'Receptivity with regard to the given, a modality of cognition,
is not adequate for it, for precisely the a priori that cannot be
excluded from it lets all the weight of the given be welcomed. This
would still be an act" (AEAE 109, OBBE 192). Soon after this dismissal
of welcome from absolute passivity Levinas writes, The passivity of
affection is more passive than the radical receptivity Heidegger
speaks of in qmnection with Kant, where the transcendental
imagination offers the subject a "pigeon-hole of nothingness" so as
to precede the given and assume if. The immemorial past of ethical
passivity precedes the a priori we come to know with the help of
anamnetic midwifery. Its prior apriority is at the same time an
aposteriority. That is why in Totality and Infinity Levinas speaks of
it as welcome, to underline that the Other is adventitious or, as
Derrida says, an in-vention, meaning not just my invention but the
other's invenience, the invention de l'autre . 11 The sentence we have
just cited demonstrates just how wrong we could be in simply
assimilating Levinas's treatment of the absolute passivity of proto­
ethical responsibility to an analysis of Gelassenheit read out of or into
the doctrine of schematism as developed by Kant and further
developed by Heidegger. This is why we must try to make do with
the much more complex relation which we are calling chiasmus. And
this is why we should now return to a conside�ation of Gelassenheit -
but not before making two further remarks about Levinas's various
statements concerning welcome.
First, in saying what we have just said about the two conceptions
of welcome which we discern in different places in Levinas's
publications we are not saying that he is inconsistent. There is no
reason why he cannot work consistently with two notions denoted
by the same word. Our reason for embarking on this analysis of the
214 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
difference was to underline the degree of difficulty that besets the
astonishing claim Levinas makes regarding responsibility toward the
other, a difficulty of which no one is more keenly aware than he is
himself.
Second, not the least astonishing part of Levinas's claim is the part
which says that to welcome as woman is to give. He says, giving us
another reason to take great care when we turn again to Heidegger
and approach Gelassenheit &om another side:
Things are not, as in Heidegger, the foundation of the site, the
quintessence of all the relations that constitute our presence on the
earth (and 'under the heavens, in company with men, and in
waiting for the gods'). The relationship between the same and the
other, my welcoming of the other, is the ultimate fact, and in it the
things figure not as what one builds but as what o,ne gives. (TI 49;
77)
Data are first donanda, things to be given. And welcome, the
superlation of passivity, is the superlation of generosity, my already
having responded to the Other by giving my word, giving the bread
I am about to eat, giving myself and giving thanks for being able to
give thanks. But, the lmmanuel Kant in us will ask, as well as the John
Stuart Mill, how can all this giving be goodness if it is not a giving
with good free will7 Perhaps the answer to this question is the
Kantian one contained in the first part of the sentence which we
quoted three paragraphs ago: since we are here concerned not with
concupiscent erotic desire but with Desire of the non-desirable, the
hospitable giving in which my welcome of the Other consists is not
something that I want; or, put more carefully, it may or may not be
something I want in the sense of lower-case desire, but as the object
of an upper-case ethical Desire it falls outside the field of want. This
would not mean that it falls outside the fieid of pure rational will as
understood by Kant. The difficulty of deciding whether the answer
we have just proposed is correct is aggravated by the fact that the
single French word vouloir covers or papers over the distinctions
between (1) a Kantian idea of will which he calls pure practical reason
and to which ethelo would be the nearest Greek antecedent, (2) the
idea of desiring want or inclination, boulomai, and (3) conation defined
as 'the exertion of willing that desire or aversion shall issue in action'
(Cancise Oxford Dictionary). Straddling the first and second of these
but falling short of the third is the idea of willingness or 'being ready
The Feeling Intellecf 215
of itself for . . . ' which Heidegger proposes as a translation of ethelo
instead of the wollen of the Diels-Kranz rendering of Heraclitus's
Fragment B 32: 'The One, which alone is wise, does not want and yet
does want to be called by the name Zeus', En fo Sophon mounon
legesthai ouk ethelei kai ethelei Zenos onoma. Heidegger comments:
'ethelo does not mean merely to demand something, but rather to
allow (zulassen) something a reference back to itself.' The mediality of
this phrase, which echoes that of the phraseology of the last part of
Gonda's characterization of the middle voice reproduced in our
Preface, is confirmed by Heidegger's following remark that the
phrase should be interpreted in the light of the middle-voiced verb
legesthai which appears earlier in this Fragment. The middle voice
occupies the 'middle region' excluded by the either-or of (I) and (2),
where (I) corresponds to the overwhelming power spoken of in the
first part of Gonda's account and (2) corresponds to the interest of the
subject. Heidegger asks:
Does mortal legein remain only an image corresponding to the
Logos, which is itself the Fate in which presencing as such and for
all present beings rests?
Or does such questioning, which attaches itself to the guidelines
of an Either-Or, not at all apply, because its approach is from the
start inadequate to the inquiry here undertaken? If this is so, then
neither can Logos be the overcoming of mortal legein, nor can legein
be simply a copying of the archetypal (massgebend) Logos. Then
whatever essentially occurs in the legein of homologein and in the
legein of the Logos has a more primordial origin - and this in the
simple middle region between both. Is there a path for mortal
thinking in this place? (VA3 21, EGT 74-5)
These questions anticipate those raised in our discussion in
Chapter 4 of Kant's Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone.
Related problems are raised by Aristotle's description of prohaeresis
as 'either desireful reason or reasonable desire', desire and reason not
being added externally to each other, but each being the necessary
supplement of the other (Nichomachean Ethics I139b4). This delibera­
tive choice, in which W. D. Ross sees the beginning of a notion of
will, is not mere wish, since one can wish for what one believes is not
within one's power to obtain. Aristotelian prohaeresis is not only for
what one believes is in one's power. It is also an exercise of power or,
as we say, free will. This cannot be said of Levinasian Desire, it would
216 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
seem, unless in saying it we mean that it is an expression of the
hyperbolization of freedom and will where the power of free will is
taken to the utmost extreme of passivity. So the susceptibility of
Goodness would be the exteriority that completes the free good will
of power by exposing its essential incompleteness and impower.
Perhaps it can be said therefore that welcome as feminine giving
can be welcome as wilL and that it is only self-will that Levinas rules
out, vouloir, will, understood as pouvoir, power, and as will to power
even if this is manifested no more spectacularly than it is by the pilot
in command of himself and in command of his boat. In saying that
this is how the soul is not in my body Descartes is opening the way
for Levinas to say - combining what Aristotle says in De Anima
about the soul as 'the essential whatness' of a thing (11, I, 412b 13)
with what Aristotle says in the passage of De Generatione Animalium
which we have already had occasion to cite (Il, 3, 736b 28) and not
without relevance to our remarks on Duns Scotus and Gerard Manley
Hopkins - that the soul to which is due my singularity is the soul that
comes in from outside. Levinas does tell us that welcome is a reversal
of the hypostatization of self. This answer is inadequate however if to
will is to ad, for Levinas denies that the giving of welcome is an act.
It is a giving, as we have seen, prior to my freedom. We must infer
that it is therefore a giving prior to acting and to will. This inference
is supported by his treatment of the will in Totality and Infinity where,
he explains, at the same time explaining the ambiguity of vouloir to
which we have just referred, will is either self-will or Self-will, the
identity of each depending on which way the will faces in the
traditional trichotomy of faculties into feeing,
l conation and cogni­
tion. The identity of self-will derives from the will's association with
each particular person's desire for happiness, its complicity with desire
and the sensuous side of human nature uppermost in such euc.iaemo­
nistic teleologisms as that of Mill. The identity of Self-will derives
from the loss of particular identity through the identification of will
with reason as in the theory of pure practical reason in the
deontologism of Kant and 'which is the ultimate intention of
idealism, . . . opposed by the entire pathetic experience of human­
ity, which the Hegelian or Spinozist idealism relegates to the
subjective or the imaginary' (TI 193; 217). This ultimate intention
of idealism is the concept of the will to which Nietzsche's so-called
'emotional' concept of the will is popularly opposed, Heidegger
observes in one of his discussions of Nietzsche's doctrine of will to
power (N I 65-6, trans. l 53). In his comments on De Anima 433a 15f.
The Feelitrg Intellect 217
Heidegger describes orexis dianoetike and the Scholastic appetitus
intellectualis as both rational desire (Begehren) and voluntas or will
(Wi/le). And he places Nietzsche in the same tradition of thought.
What makes it look as though Nietzsche belongs to a counter­
rationalist tradition is his practice of describing will as affect, passion
and feeling. He writes, for example, that 'To will is lo command: but
commanding is a particular affect (this affect is a sudden explosion of
energy) - intent, clear, having one thing exclusively in view,
innermost conviction of its superiority, certainty that it will be
obeyed- '. Now what is having one thing dearly, intently and
exclusively in view, Heidegger asks, but the faculty of representation
which Kant and the German Idealist tradition call intellect? Here then
is further support for the critical ambiguity of will or conation n i the
traditional trichotomy of faculties. Undoubtedly further distinctions
need to be made in all three compartments, and Heidegger makes
some of these. For example, he distinguishes affects, like the anger
and joy with which I can be overcome, from passions (Leidenschajfen)
like love and hate. Anger is blind. Love is not; it is perspicuous.
To passion belongs a reaching out and opening up of oneself. Such
reaching out occurs even in hate, since the hated one is pursued
everywhere relentlessly. But such reaching out in passion does not
simply lift us up and away beyond ourselves. It gathers our
essential being to its proper ground, it exposes our ground for
the first time in gathering, so that the passion is that through
which and in which we take hold of ourselves and achieve lucid
mastery over the beings around us and within us. (N1 59, trans. I
48)
This lucid mastery of passion - or great passion, as we should more
carefully say - 'possesses . . . necessity to submit'. Passion thus
understood is a due to what Nietzsche means by will to power. Will
to power is the 'root' of passion, affect, feeling and intellect. It
subverts the traditional terminology but must employ it in order to
do so, as Nietzsche does again when he says that will (here Wollen) is
feeling, the feeling of pleasure supervening on the increase in power,
state of attunement, Zusfand als Gestimmfheit, being in good voice, as
we could perhaps say: didonai diken.
Anyone who writes about the will nowadays cannot do so without
having the ghost of Gilbert Ryle breathing down his neck. But
although when writing of this topic Nietzsche indulges in the
218 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
vocabulary of pushes and pulls, for example when he says that . Wille
can be comprehended as an 'impelling feeling' - which, Heidegger
explains, is not only a feeling of being impelled but itself an impelling,
other statements Nietzsche makes about the will, for example his
reference to it as 'this so complex thing for which people have only
one word' (Beyotrd Good and Evil 19) and his statement that 'There is
no will - there are treaty drafts of will . . .' (The Will to Power 715)
show how jejune it would be to dismiss his account of it as one more
misguided endorsement of the paramechanical hypothesis deemed to
be a myth in The Concept of Mind. Nor are we committed to this
hypothesis in distinguishing two senses of vouloir and wollen. The
distinction between wanting and willing can be made without having
recourse to this alleged myth. When Kant enjoins us to act only
according to maxims that we could will to become laws he invites us
to put ourselves in the position of a legislator who lays down wha�
the law is to be. This laying down is a legislative or executive
stipulation, a non-constative performance, here the casting of a vote
or, as both Kant and Nietzsche would say, the pronouncement of a
commandment or command. It may be that one cannot in this sense
will what one does not in some respect want, but that does not mean
that there is no distinction to be made. Nietzsche, certainly on
Heidegger's reading, and Heidegger on ours, share the concern of
Ryle's ghost to exorcize the ghost in the machine.
What Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche once more reveals, in the
wake of his reading of Kant, is the shortcomings of a traditional
opposition of action or activity or active voice and passion or
passivity or passive voice. It reveals that it may be worthwhile to
experiment with what for want of a handier phrase we are gesturing
toward with the help of something like the traditional Greek and
Sanskrit syntax of middle voice. Perhaps this may enable us to get a
clearer if not simpler understanding of why it is that when we talk
about the sel f or the Self we continually come up with the dilemma
that what is of the innermost essence of the self is either that which is
above it in the great chain of being, angelic reason, coming in to it
from outside, or what is below it in that chain, the animal, the inmost
instincts which yet drive it like demons . from outside. Levinas's
response to this dilemma is one that breaks away from the tradition
which bases an analysis of selfhood on desire. In this his analysis
agrees with that offered by Nietzsche for whom desire is, as
Heidegger puts it, die Ermatfung des Willens, the wilting of the will.
But, whether because he fails to see or because he succeeds in seeing
The Feeling Intellect 219
Nietzsche's analysis of will as a precursor of Heidegger's analysis of
resolved openness, Ent-schlossenheit, Levinas's analysis is one which,
although it must include an analysis of will and power, cannot have
these as its arche or anarchic base. Let us return to the idea that on his
analysis of will will is welcome and giving.
N
How is this g1vmg to be conceived positively? As impositive
impouvoir. As non-virile conception or maternity. We have noted
that in Totality and Infinity maternity is explicitly mentioned far less
often than paternity. Paternity is treated in the fourth section of that
book under the heading 'Beyond the Face'. Paternity is my relations
to my posterity, sons who are not my possessions but, in defiance of
the Parmenidean logic of being and identity, both are me subsistently
and are not. We noted too Levinas' s remark, made in the course of his
discussion of paternity and filiation in that section of the book as
though it were an afterthought, that 'the notion of maternity must be
introduced here'. But the idea of maternity, if not the word, was
already in the foreground in the second section of Totality and Infinity
entitled 'lnteriority and Economy' which treats of vulnerability and
welcome into the oikos and precedes the section entitled 'Exteriority
and the Face'. Further, thi s third section precedes itself in so far as
trauma is the exteriority of the welcomed Other coming in from
outside into the hypodermic inside. Accueil, the a priori-a posteriori
which is prior to any anarnnetic recueil, gets articulated much more
explicitly as maternity in Otherwise titan Being or Beyond Essence as
though to compensate for the virilization the concept of welcome
acquires in that book and as though to answer or anticipate the
objection that the use made in the earlier book of the concepts of
gender is indefensibly one-sided, however non-biological and non­
sexual that use is claimed to be. In From the Sacred to the Holy,
commenting on a text of the Guemara, Levinas notes that the word
Rakhamirn, which is cognate with Rakhmana, the Merciful One,
derives from the Aramaic Rekhem, meaning uterus or womb (SS
158). The paternity of God impli es maternity, his virility the
weakness without cowardice of the so-called weaker sex, the
patiently waiting tenderness which goes by the name of
aftendrissement in Totality and Infinity. This helps to explain why n i
220 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
Efhics and Infinity Levinas can say that the fear of God is not the fear
of a jealous God, since this fear is not a fear for myself but is, along
with Angst according to Being and Time, an exception to the rule that
verbs of emotion are reflexive in French and German (El 128-9; 119).
God's strength is God's sensibility, as the responsibility commanded
by the so-called other man is incipient in the response of the most
sensitive zones of the skin. However phallogocentrically masterful the
concept and its Begreifen appear to be, it is (to date) the woman . after
all who conceives. Neither simply active nor simply passive, if the
middle voice of responsibility has a gender it is that of the middle
sex. The middle sex is not neuter. It is chiasmically bisexual. But what
we are talking about here is humanity prior to the sexual difference.
We are talking about the feeling intellect prior to the distinction into
feeling or sensibility and intellect or Begriff. As Levinas observes,
implying that when the rib is taken from Adam it is taken from
humanity, not from man, the derivation of Ischa from Isch is not a
mark of the second class status of the feminine, as though woman and
maternity were an afterthought. It is a mark of the dichotomy of
humanity into the masculine and feminine (SS 132). Some interpreters
hold that what is called the rib is in fact the face, and Genesis 5: 2,
says that God created male and female at the same time. What a
marvellous idea, Levinas speculates, noting its resemblance to one
advanced in the Symposium, if the cote, the rib, were the cote, the other
side of man (SS 140-1; DL 56). As Derrida observes, Isch and Ich are
the inverse of qui and chi, and the pronouns for God and the Other
which he runs ,through in 'En ce moment meme . . .' range from Il
through El for Elohim and E. L. to Elle. 12 This is another way of
saying with Levioas that human relations take priority over sexual
relations, notwithstanding the historical priority of the male human
being's graduation to the status of civil universality (SS 148). This
perhaps 'provisional' priority of the masculine in the history of
humankind is balanced at the level of individual biography by the
priority of the feminine -as the vestibule to the law. Prior to this
priority would be androgyny and a bicameral chiasmus of the two
hemispheres of the brain, a tough tenderness and tender toughness of
mind and heart, EastxWest, JewxGreek. In Levinas's interpretation of
Sophocles Antigone's relationship with Haemon would be the
beginning of a passage to public law which for her is suspended
halfway through her obsession by the law of the oikos. But in
Levinas's interpretation of public law universality, pure reason, must
remain bound by an umbilical cord to the relation of one individual to
The Feeling Intellect 221
another. In Four Talmudic Lectures he cites from the Guemara the text:
1f a man commits a wrong against another man and appeases him,
God will forgive; but if the wrong is against God, who can intercede
for him? Only repentance and good deeds.' Then, referring to Rabbi
Yosef bar Habo's thesis that the universal law is supreme and that
there is no Idea capable of reconciling someone who is in conflict
with reason itself, he comments:
It is against this virile, too virile, thesis in which certain echoes of
Hegel can be anachronistically perceived, it is against this thesis
putting the universal order above the inter-individual order that the
Guemara text raises its voice. (QLT 44)
This voice is the voice of femininity calling respect for pure reason
back to its root in the rationality beyond reason of respect for the
individual where respect recalls that it has one of its two sources in
passion and where responsibility toward the Other could indeed be
called amour sans eros so long as the sans is seen as a sign that the
erotic, which in Levinas's meaning is not a desire to possess, is· this
love's sine qua 110n, namely the enclosure of the Rekhem, the receptacle
or chora out of which it is delivered, a sign of the merciful charis of a
God who is perhaps none other than, as Levinas says, a permanent
refusal to abandon our private griefs to the indifference of universal
history.
The objection that Totality and Infinity is paternalistic was already
anticipated in that book by the importance given there to the fact
that vulnerability is interpreted as a corollary of incarnation, where
this in turn implies the idea of matter not only as apeiron and its
menacing if y a, but as the mater-iality and matriciality that promises
an escape from that unventilated claustrophobic condition where
there is no vent de crise (ADV 9, El 12 7; 118) to fill the sail of the boat
to which Mill likens himself in his spiritual crisis, and no star by
13
which to steer, as Blanchot writes in describing la pensee du des-astre.
An escape from vulnerability by vulnerability, this is the inescapable
ambiguity of incarnation which exposes us on the one hand to animal
contentment with enjoyment of the goods that subserve our
persistence in being - like a dog, not Bobby but 'a dog that
recognizes as its own Ulysses coming to take possession of his
goods' (AEAE 100, OBBE 79-80). It exposes us on the other hand to
the burden of a responsible signifying and saying that 'escapes the
animal flair'. Maternity is 'a body suffering for another, the body as
222 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
passivity and renouncement, a pure undergoing', non-act, pur subir.
My being subject is my being subjected to the Other in the ethical
face to face such that this acme of my humanity, personality or
spirituality, my being for the other, corresponding to Infinity in the
Meditations of Descartes, is inextricable from my sensibility, corre­
sponding to Descartes's obscure and confused passions and ideas.
This sensibility, sensitivity or pain is not the pain caused by .an
obstacle that frustrates my will. It is prior to the Cartesian and
Kantian conative free will left behind by Heideggerian Gelassenheit
and which according to Descartes is the one respect in which human
being is an image of the infinity of the being of God. And it owes its
sense not simply to the contribution it makes to the achievement of
clear and distinct ideas, for instance as ideas of secondary or tertiary
qualities serving as occasions for ideas of primary ones. Sensibility
achieves sense only when the complacent enjoyment of my self­
centred ego is disturbed by my exposure to wounding by the other.
My sensibility is obsession by the other, suffering the other's
suffering, including the other's suffering on my behalf.
If it is suffered unassumingly, is not this adverb incompatible with
this suffering's being medially-voiced? Is what it calls for not rather a
superlatively passive-voiced verb, a verb that deprives the voice of its
breath and its very verbality? Mediality is called for notwithstanding
because the very senselessness of pain, its being 'for nothing' is what
enables it to regain sense by being for the other. The middle voice
here straddles and mediates non-dialectically the sensuous and ethical
poles of the ambiguous word 'sensibility', translating the response of
psychological 'sHinulus and response' into ethical responsibility. The
middle voice expr.esses my expression, expresses my saying to the
other 'Here I am' in my obedience to his call. It, rather than the
passive voice, expresses that my passivity is not 'limited to the sphere
of the subject' (Gonda). Yet my passivity exceeds the passive voice
not on account of an infinitely free will 'that causes me to know that
in some manner I bear the image and similitude of God' (Descartes),
but on account of the "'anarchic" trace of God' in that passivity
(AEAE 150, OBBE 196).
V Levinas's analysis of responsibility as maternal sensibility is in the
Maternity, being host or hostess, is offering hospitality 'in which
matter shows itself for the first time in its materiality', Levinas says.
The Feeling Intellect 223
His phrase echoes words that Heidegger uses in 'The Origin of the
Work of Art' to make his claim that it is in the work of art that the
materiality of matter comes into its own, thereby marking a
divergence that would be turned into a convergence between himself
and Heidegger if the work of art turned out to be gift, the offering of
a hand. So the maternity which is the mother of materiality because it
is the mother of the in-vention of the other is a 'pre-naissance of pre­
nature' (AEAE 95, OBBE 75); maternity is 'the very gestation of the
other in the same', la gestation mime de /'autre dans le mime. 14
Incidentally, what a marvellous idea, we might speculate, that
because, as we noted in Chapter 5, adam, meaning man, is cognate
with adamah, meaning earth, mother earth should also be paternal, a
crossing which, by the way, is effected by Heidegger when in The
Origin of the Work of Art' he says both that earth is recessive self­
concealment, hence feminine according to a certain stereotypical
figuration, and that earth juts and towers through the world,
5
durchragt (H 37, PLT 49).1
From what Levinas says about the matrix it follows that if the
powers or faculties of the mind as distinguished for example by Kant
can be traced to a common root which may be the root of the three
Critiques conceived as the root of Being and Time, this root is not of
one simple substance with itself, it is not planted in a proper natural
place, and it knows no common time. The receptacle in which the
teaching of Levinas's De Anirna embeds the receptivity of the Kantian
theoretical imagination is diachronically out of phase with itself
because it must accommodate animation both as masterful conative
control and animation as maternal exposure. One of the questions we
have been asking throughout this book is how much, if any, of this
uncomfortable doctrine Heidegger accommodates in a reading of Kant
which sees the theoretical imagination of the first Critique in its
intrication with the theory of practical will and respect of the second
and with what is said in the third about the aesthetic imagination and,
above all, the sublime. Does not the sublime in nature and works of
art wound my complacency? Does it not put my auto-telic vitality in
its proper improper place? And do not the needs of natural or other
things appeal to my maternal sensibility, calling for my respect or for
me to Jet them be?
neighbourhood of responsibility as Gelassenheit and letting be. And
this confirms that the Sagen of Gelassenheit and the Dire of
asymmetrical signifying are both middle-voiced. If there is a concord
224 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience

here however it may, like that of Heidegger's poet and thinker, be 10

one that is at the same time also a discord.Or, less than a harmonische
Entgegensetz.ung, less than a concord of faculties which is also a conflict
of faculties, the Auseinandersetzung between Levinas and Heidegger Something Like the Middle
may have turned out to be one in which something on each side must
give and each must give something to the other, with the Voice
responsibility of maternal sensibility. Such is the tender violence
called for by a chiasmic exchange.

approche d'autrui
Emmanuel Levinas, Ethique et lnfini

How much more attuned the ear may become to the middle voice of
Gelassenheit if it is orientated toward Biblical doctrines of grace
depends on whether these doctrines require faith from the person
in the state of grace, as does the doctrine of the Jewgreek who wrote
Ephesians 2: 8-9, on whether faith requires will and on whether will is
my initiative. lt is not at all easy to see how anything, including faith,
can be my initiative on a reading of that account which exclusively
opposes faith or trust to my works and deeds. The King James
version has 'For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of
yourselves: it is the gift of God; not of works, lest any man should
boast.' If my faith were my doing, an act of faith willed by me, or the
outcome of my initiative, it would be something of which I might
boast, something for which I might take credit. The New English
Bible translates dia pisteos (per fidem) as 'through trusting him', namely
Christ. That this is a deed for which I am responsible is underlined by
Galatians 2: 15-16, for which the NEB has 'We ourselves are Jews by
birth, not Gentiles and sinners. But we know that no man is ever
justified by doing what the law demands, but only through faith in
Jesus Christ; so we too have put our faith in Jesus Christ, in order that
we might be justified through faith, and not through deeds dictated
by law; for by such deeds, Scripture says, no mortal man shall be
justified.' Although 'we have put our faith in' says more than the King
James version's 'we have believed in' and more than is demanded by
episteusamen, the purposiveness of the 'in order to' construction
mirrors the force of hina in the Greek, which in the Vulgate becomes

225
 Something Like the Middle Voice 227
226 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
r�sponsibility is anallergi�, outside the scope of symmetrical coopera­
an ut of which the final rather than consequential nature is confirmed _ ,
hon. But Levmas s doctnne does not exclude prevenience. What he
when the next verse speaks of seeking to be justified.
calls recurrence is prevenience and may well contribute to an
But how relevant to an understanding of what Heidegger means by
�dersta�ding of the Christian doctrine of grace, always remember­
Gelassenheif are these excursions into the Biblical doctrines of faith
mg that tf and when those doctrines speak of God as a transcendent
works and grace? In particular, how can they shed light on th�
obje:t ?f belief (and they do not always do that) Levinas speaks of
relation of Gelassenheit to will? For is it not plain from the cited
the tlleJty of the other human being. This must be remembered even
Galatians passage that Paul at least is concerned not with the relation
. �hen Levinas himself uses 'the extraordinary word' God, as he does
of grace to the will but with the relation of grace to the law? It is not
m the following remarks on recurrence whose relevance to those
plain. The beginning of this passage corresponds to the end of
doctrines of prevenience and grace cannot fail to strike us when we
Romans 3 which picks up the question of what we are in danger of
al so remember that charis can mean both the gift received and the
boasting about treated in the passage cited from Ephesians. It says _
giVIng of thanks, saying grace: mercy and merci.
that what excludes human pride is faith rather than keeping the law.
To bear witness to God is precisely not to state this exhaordinary
For our argument is that a man is justified by faith quite apart from
word, as though glory would be lodged in a theme and be posited
success in keeping the law. Do you suppose God is the God of the . .
as a thesis, or become bemg's essence. As a sign given to the other
Jews alone? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Certainly, of
of this very signification, the 'here I am' signifies me in the name of
Gentiles also, if it be true that God is one. And he will therefore
God, at the ser�ice of men that look at me, without having
justify both the circumcised in virtue of their faith, and the . .
�nythmg to Identify myself with but the sound of my voice or the
uncircumcised through their faith. Does this mean that we are
ftgure of my gesture - the saying itself. This recurrence is quite the
using faith to undermine law? By no means: we are placing law .
opp�s1te of return upon oneself. self-consciousness. It is sincerity,
itself on a firmer footing. (Romans 3: 28-3 1)
eff�swn ?f one�:lf, 'extraditing' of the self to the neighbour.
Wttness IS hw m!tty and admission; it is made before all theo­
Conceit is kept at bay when law is transvalued by faith. However,
logy; � t is kerygma and prayer, glorification and recognition. But
where faith is required how can there be no requirement also for an
what JS proper to all the relations that are thus unfolded - and
act of will, a demand for an 'effort of decision or strenuosity'?1 And if
what a disappointment for the friends of truth that thematizes
that further requirement is made, how can one avoid a return of the
Being, and of the subject that effaces itself before it! - is the fact
risk of conceit, boastfulness or pride? The answer given by Augustine
that the re�urn is sketched out in the going, the appeal is
and others is the doctrine of prevenient grace according to which the
��ersto�d m the response, the 'provocation' coming from God
act of will is possible only thanks to God. And from this doctrine it is
IS m my mvocation, gratitude is already gratitude for this state of
a short step to a doctrine of predestination, if not to a doctrine of
gratitude, which is at the same time or in turn a gift and gratitude.
predetermination. Our faith, at least if we are among the elect,
(AEAE 190, OBBE 149)
becomes indistinguishable from the faith of the one through whom
we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand (Romans 5:
What may strike us too is the relevance of these remarks to our
2), the one in whom we have our being (Acts 17: 28), so that
inventions on the 'middle voice', our variations on a theme that seems
although Paul can say that he worked harder than any of the apostles,
destined t? re�urn itself continually to the melting pot, to remain
he immediately adds 'though it was not I, but the grace of God which
anathemabc: etther as the middle voice of Dichten, hymn, anthem,
is with me' (I Corinthians 15: 10).
eul?gy, elegy, sonnet and song (the rereading of the third Critique)
When we refer these teachings to the teaching of Levinas we learn
which may at the same time and in different times be, as we have
that I am one of the elect. According to him I am the one uniquely
come to see, the middle voice of antiphonal phrophecy, responding
chosen to bear the greatest responsibility. I have to work harder than
for another human or non-human being whose accusation alone
any of the others. And I have to work without synergy, since my
228 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
makes me stand out alone and thereby makes me me, so that what is
voiced is altered from the sacred to the holy, du sacre au saiY!f ; or, as
we have given reason for preferring to say, so that what appears to
be irresponsibly numinous, pagan, and aesthetic shows itself to be
inspired by responsibility for the human and non-human other (the
rereading of the second Critique) ; or as the middle-voiced 'methinks'
or be-thinking of Denken and Danken (the rereading of the first
Critique), which may be, as we have come to see, at the same time
dichtendes Denken or denkendes Dichten in which the thinker and the
poet are not effaced before being if the genitive and the generative
belonging together in need of the thinking of being preserves alterity
in sameness through speaking itself in the listening middle voice, the
voice in which speaking and listening are one and what the speaker
regards in speaking is the other's regard (DL 21). The middle voice
lets the otherness of all beings be, hence not only the othemess of the
being of the being that is be-thinged but the otherness also of the
being of the being who be-thinks.
When with Heidegger the Andenken of being is distinguished from
Andachf, prayer to a being like the prayer from the Cross 'let this cup
pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt', and when
the one in whom we have our being is the same, das Selbe, being as
such, religious faith and grace do not come into play. This does not
mean however that Andenken does not open the Spielraum for
Andacht, faith, grace or gift. Nor does it mean that questions are
begged if we find ourselves describing the topography of that·
Spielraum through the religious concepts, any more than questions
are necessarily begged when we take the concepts of ethics, law, the
sciences or faculty psychology as leading threads. To make .the point
in the terminology which is superseded in Heidegger's later works,
and with the help of a Kantian figure of speech, the ontic must not be
confused with the ontological and the former is blind without the
latter; but the latter is empty without the former. Hence the Judaic,
Christian or Greek ideas of predestination and fate, if handled with
discretion, can be of heuristic assistance in indicating the way towards
the beginning of an understanding of · the historical meaning or
destining of being, provided this theological Sendung is not confused
with the ontological or proto-ontological Geschick des Seins. And
provided the understanding of the latter is referred back ultimately to
the things themselves. Without this latter provision there can be no
non-arbitrary way of selecting among the mutually incompatible clues
that are offered by different religious or ethical doctrines. Inevitably,
Something Like the Middle Voice 229
the topology of the Spielraum of recollective gelassene thinking is
going to be very schematic if it is going to be oecumenical, rather as
Locke's abstract general idea and Kant's schema of a triangle must be
unspecific if, as the former author says, it is not to include mutually
contradictory features such as those which distinguish an equilateral
from a scalene triangle. Not that the topology of the fourfold is an
abstraction or subtraction from religious, ethical or poetic concep­
tions. These provide hints without being bases from which inductive
inferences are made. And there is no reason why Heidegger should
not find one conception, be it Paul's, Augustine's, Eckhart's, Luther's
or Holderlin's, pedagogically more helpful than others. This does not
exclude the possibility that some of his readers will be helped more
by yet other conceptions, for example, those of Taoism, in· particular
its conception of non-virile conception.
lJ
Virile Baconian, Cartesian and Kantian conception. is grasping and
taking. It is no less an exercise of free will than is judgement on the
Cartesian and Kantian account, for Cartesian and Kantian conception
is not reception. At the very least i t is trying . to understand. What
Taoism calls wu-wei is not trying, and therefore not even trying not
to try. In the words of the Tao Te Ching, 'It loves and nourishes all
things, but does not lord it over them.' In contrast to the
purposiveness of Paul's putting faith in Christ in order to be justified
by faith, and in contrast to the idea of a synergy of human faith and
divine grace, wu-wei is non-teleological and non-active. Its 'power', te,
is a kind of stupidity, the stupidity of wonder for which in the
Fundamental Questions of Philosophy Heidegger reserves the word Er­
staunen, which is the primary thaumazein in which philosophy, philo­
sophy, begins rather than the secondary inquisitiveness that demands
an answer to a problem or solution of a puzzle.2 It is, like the ethical
face to face which for Levinas .is the wonder of all wonders, outside
all synergy because outside all energeia, non-allergic: parergonal. Its
aimlessness is that of an obedience, that is to say a hearing, which,
like the rose of Angelus Silesius, is without care for itself and does
not ask why. And it is interesting that Heidegger, if not Levinas,
should be attracted by Silesius's invocation of a plant to illustrate the
sublime stupidity of human being to which he gives the name
Gelassenheit, and that he should consider that the overcoming of
230 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
purely calculative thinking by recollective thi�g in Gelassenheit
might enable us to attain a new understandmg of Johann �eter
_ .
Hebel's words: We are plants which - whether we hke to adm1t It to
ourselves or not - must with our roots rise out of the earth if we are
to be able to bloom in the ether and bear fruit' (Gel 28, DT 57). Not
that these citations go far to fill the silence which The Fundamental
Concepts of Metaphysics maintains on the t?pic of the vegeta le � matter and motion and action and passion. When temporality and in
_ _
members of the region of the weltarm, assummg 1t IS to that reg•on
and not to the region of the welt/os that plants belong; and the� ca n
_
hardly be seen as a revocation of his insistence in that book and m h 1s
comments elsewhere on Rilke that since the welt/os and the weltarm
can be understood, in so far as they can be understood, only by
deconstrudion (Abbau) of the weltbildend, this last cannot be under­
stood by construction from or addition to either of the f�rn:er, as the
classical account supposes when it maintains that human1ty IS rational
animality. . .
.
This remark is a reminder that if to be human is to be weltbtldend 1t
is also to be weltabbildend, weltabbauend. The power to construct and
construe, for example to construct and construe propositions, is a
power to deconstruct and reconstrue, an op:ni�g . for ?las�ost and
perestroika, as the power of productive, pmehc 1magm�t10� was
always at one and the same time a faculty for the application of
_
rules and a faculty for deregulation, a critical faculty for the conA1ct
no less than the concord of faculties. (The Chinese character for 'crisis'
is made up of two components, one which si?� ifies danger, and one
which signifies opportunity.) This power of dereglement de taus les s�s
is a power for. the deregulation of every sense in e:�ry sense, th�t •s
_
to say, a power ,for the deregulation of both s�ns1blhty and me�nm�,
a faculty of rules for the indirection of the mmd where the m1nd � s
understood as the complex of faculties or powers whose umty _ IS
owed to what German Idealism names Einbildungskraft, the imagina­
tion which in Sanskrit and Greek is middle-voiced. For Kant this
�
power is a mediator between the passive power o se�sibility and �he
active power of the understanding and reason which lffipose mea�mg
on sensibility, sense on sense. So its own power can be ne1ther
passive nor active in the manner of the faculties it unites. If this
power hidden in the depths of the soul is understood as the common
source of sensibility and reason, the fount of bme _ or spabo­
temporality, as Heidegger, following Kant, understa�ds it, it begins
to be understandable how this power for construction and decon­
struction can be a hybrid or low-bred mongrel which is neither purely
Something Like the Middle Voice 231
passive nor purely active, but an adynamical or, as Levinas would say,
anallergic alternative: not a prime mover but, as Derrida would say,
an always secondary mouvance. Neither the Kantian space and time of
matter in motion nor spatiality and temporality, understood in their
phenomenological originarity as Heidegger understands them, are
active or passive. They are the anactive, apassive presuppositions of
the final analysis spatiality become with Heidegger the key to the
sense of being and when being, phusis, is understood as language,
logos, the power of imagination exchanges its concealment in the
depths of the soul for the concealment-unconcealment of language.
The soul becomes language which, Heidegger says, is the house of
being. Heidegger also says that this is a clumsy phrase (US 90,
OWL 5). Jt is clumsy because it conceals as much as it reveals that
being is the house, being is language, not just language's address. The
'of' of the phrase 'house of being' registers an apposition, not a
position or opposition.
Once the power of imagination, which in its productive and
transcendental form in Kant is the fount of schematic Bildung and
of exemplification through the Type, is interpreted by Heidegger (and
Gadamer and others) as the power of speech it is apt for construal or
deconstrudion by Derrida as archi-writing and literal font outside the
oppositions of production and reproduction, transcendental and
empirical, synthetic and associative. Except that the phrase 'decon­
strudion by Derrida' is misleading as to what Derrida means by
deconstruction. For it suggests that deconstrudion is something
Derrida does, something for which there is a method or procedure,
a mode d'emploi. This is as misleading as it would be to suppose that
when Kant writes that the schematism of the imagination is a
procedure or performance (Verfahrm) it provides rules for applying
rules, a supposition that would commit Kant to an infinite regress
which is not implied in what he says. To forestall and correct this
misapprehension, and after noting that in Of Grammatology 'decon­
struction' translates, among other things, Heidegger's Dekonstruktion
and Abbau, Derrida writes that what he means by 'deconstruction' is
neither analysis, nor critique in the Kantian sense, nor method. It is
not analysis, because it is not a regress to simple elements but to an
indecidable intrigue of chiasmically crossed supplements.3 For the
same reason it is not critique, division into faculties and allotment to
them of distinctive jobs. But Kant himself acknowledges in practice
that critical analysis is not complete unless we recognise that the
232 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
elemental faculties it distinguishes are aspects of a complex synergic­
ally synthesizi ng whole the unity of which he attribut es to
Einbildungskraft and the unity and wholeness of which Heidegger
attributes respectively to the temporalising ecstases of care and the
imagination of my death, imagination which stretches my imagination
beyond the possibility of (p)representati on (Vorsfellung) and the
(p)representation of possibility. However, what prevents decons truc­
tion bei ng analysis or critique is not simply complexi ty. Jt is the kind
of complexity, a complexity which is unstable because it analyses and
dissolves itself, se deconstruif (as was shown by the deconstruction of
the concept of rational animality inspected in the first section of
Chapter 7). This is why 'Deconstruction is not a method and cannot
be transformed into one.'4 It is because of the grammar of the
ostensibly reflexive verb se deconstruire. And this also explain s why
deconstruction is not an achievement or an act or operation but an
operation which is not an operation, as Derrida says. To have
recourse once again to his passing hint, deconstruction is written in
something like what Sanskrit and Greek grammars call the middle
voice, n either active nor passive. And, he tells us, this is not o nly
because deconstrudion is more passive than the passivity that is
opposed to activity, where the 'not only' does however allow the
possibility that this passivity and therefore perhaps the superlative
passivity of which Levinas and Blanchot speak enter into the syntax
of decons trudion. The force of deconstruction cannot be likened
without qualification to that of the middle voice since the official
middle voice of Greek grammar is sometimes tantamount to a
reflexive verb/ whereas deconstruction 'does not return to an
(individual or collective) subject who would take the initiative and
apply it to an object, a text, a theme, etc.' even if the object be the
subject itself. And if there is no individual or collective subject,
neither is an impersonal subject involved, despite the unavoidability
of the form ra se deconstruil. No definition or analysis of deconstruc­
tion is possible other than something like Russellian definition in the
con text of use, though Russell, following Frege, has a more cosy
conception of context than Derrida. Wittgenstein broaden s that
conception in his later writings, but he does so in the interest of
reminding philosophers of the way meaning is to be understood as
use, where use is an actual practice and definition in use definition in a
practice. With him, as with Husserl, the imagination of possible ·
practices is in the interest of testing the limits of a concept, testing
the concept to de st ruction to bring out the conditions of its
Something Like fhe Middle Voice 233
possibility. Derrida is no less interested in bringing out the respect
in which the conditions of the possibility of a concept or practice
include conditions that are also conditions of its impossibility, as
possi bility and impossibility are conceived traditionally in modal logic
and metaphysics and even by Heide gger in his rethinking of these
modalities in Being and Time. Thus also when Levinas maintains that
death is the impossibility of possib ility, not, as Heidegger says, the
possibility of impossibility, he, like Derrida, is subverting from within,
and not simply imposing from outside a boundary to the parabola of
possibility, as the said is not allowed to lord it over the saying. This
holds not only of the prosaically constative said. It holds too of the
poetic said when, endorsing what is said about the poem by Celan,
Levinas allows that a poem may have a proto-ethical signifiauce as
well as semantic signification. And one would therefore suppose that
Levinas ll would allow that this holds for Heidegger II's dichfendes
Denken.
'A "poem"? How is that to be translated?' asks Derrida at the end
of the letter to the Japanese friend who had asked him to explain
what he meant by 'deconstruction'. The only kind of explanation
there can be of 'deconstruction', Derrida writes, is one 'in which in a
certain context it replaces and lets itself be determined by so many
other words, for instance "writing", "trace", "supplement", "hymen",
"pharmak on ", "margin", "entame", "parergon" and so on' indefin ite ly
across so-called language-barriers including that between and, since
'the threshold is the centre', in French or English and Japanese.
Having already expressed doubts over the Heideggerian idea of
diachronically divided epochs distinguished from each other by the
different ways in which being conceals and reveals itself such tha t
'deco nstrudion', for example, would be the destiny of modernity,
Derrida is no more comfortable w ith synchronic divisions, as one
would expect in the light of his mistrust of a simpl e opposition of the
synchronic to the diachronic. Hence his questioning of the contrast
between the Jew and the Greek and between the East and the West.
There are frontiers, but they are not herrnetically sealed againt all
dissemination.
The chance, first of all the chance for (the) 'deconstruction' would
be that another word (the same and an other) be found or be
invented in Japanese to say the same thing (the same and an other),
to speak of deconstrudion, and to lure it elsewhere, to write it and
transcribe it, in a word which will be also more beautiful.
234 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience Something Like the Middle Voice 235

When I speak of this writing of the other which will be m�re to, and the formation of concepts different from the usual ones will
beautiful, I clearly understand translation as involving the same nsk become intelligible to him. .
and chance as the poem. Compare a concept with a style of painting. For is even our style
of painting arbitrary? Can we choose one at pleasure? (The
Egyptian, for instance.) Is it a mere question of pleasing and ugly?
If we are ready to say that the poem is untranslatable or that its
translation is another poem, we should be ready to say the same of
In Glas and elsewhere Derrida performs experiments that show how a
what is not thought of as a poem or a fable, namely assertions in
linkage that at first sight seems unnatural. artificial. forced or
apparently flat prose. The same story must be told of meaning quite
inconceivable might become conceivable and naturaL thanks to a
�
generally. Meaning as such se deconstruif. Wor s in the sam� or
leakage between the natural and the artificial which enables the quirks
different languages which have the same meanmg have meanmgs
of so-called false etymologies and allegedly accidental similarities in
which in that very sameness differ from and defer to each other. Why
spelling and misspelling (e.g. the Freudian slip) to exercise a
do they not have the same meaning? Once 'a chain of possible
motivating force. And thanks to the chiasmus of discovery and
substitutions' has begun to stretch itself out, what prevents it
invention.
stretching all of the way until every word or every word of the
This last chiasmus is a repetition of that between passivity and
same grammatical category has been linked in and we have one great
activity and between sensibility and understanding which is marked
absolute idea? If that were possible a terminus would have been
by the Derridean rewriting of Heidegger's rethinking of Kant's theory
reached at which there would cease to be any difference between the
of the productive imagination: the redrafting of the schema in which
brief catechism Derrida's letter to a Japanese friend contains and its
the already given of thrownness (Geworfenheit) and the outlined future
inversion. Derrida writes: 'What deconstruction is not? Why, every­
(Zu-kunft) of projection (Entwerferr) are tied to each other and to what
thing! What deconstruction is? Why, nothing!' Under the hypothesis
Saussure unhappily names the 'material envelope' of the word. It
of the possibility of unlimited substitution i t would be equally
hardly needs repeating at this late stage that D�rrida's focus on the
possible to say: 'What deconstruction is not? Why, nothing! W at � inscription that marks the word is only provisionally a focus on what
deconstruction is? Why, everything!' That is to say, the oppostte
is ordinarily meant by the written as opposed to the spoken word,
answers would mean the same, namely nothing. But Derridean
and that he has in view the 'common root' or common rootlessness of
deconstruction of limits, de-limitation, does not allow that every
these in proto-writing. This explains why it should not need
substitution is pqssible. What it allows and affirms is th�t �ny
repeating either at this stage that his denial that 'proto·writing',
substitution could become possible. That is, freedom of subsbtubon
'deconstruction', 'differance', etc. are strictly speaking concepts or
is limited by neces§ity. There is law. But the necessity of law is not
words (despite his using the word 'word' of 'deconstruction' for
such as to prevent presently prohibited translations from becomi�g
example in sentences quoted from his letter above), is not a denial
legitimated. This is not a generalisation of poetic licence to the pomt
that there are concepts and words. It is a questioning of a certain
of arbitrariness, for rights of passage have to be demonstrably already
philosophical conception of the concept and the word, a questioning
there or manufacturable as motivation.
he tries to justify with the help of neographisms, like 'deconstruction'
Wittgenstein writes in the Philosophical Investigations (p. 230):
of which Derrida writes to his Japanese friend that he does not think
it is un bon mot and that it would be good if a more beautiful
I am not saying: if such-and-such facts of nature were different substitute for this bad language could be found in Japanese, though
people would have different concepts (in the sense of a hypothesis). presumably here again it is not a mere question of pleasing and ugly.
But: if anyone believes that certain concepts are absolutely the Derrida's correspondence with his Japanese friend in 1983 is a
correct ones, and that having different ones would mean not repetition (same and other) in writing of a spoken Gespriich von der
realizing something that we realize - then let him imagine certain Sprache, called by its translators a 'Dialogue on Language', that took
very general facts of nature to be different from what we are used place in 1953-4 between Heidegger and a Japanese and which is
236 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
already a repetition of dialogues he had had with another visitor from
Japan at Marburg in the early 1920s. Thus does 'deconstrudion' and
its series of Derridean displacements find itself in correspondence
with Gelassenheit. For although, unlike what we must now refer to
more fully as the 'Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking' of
approximately ten years earlier in which the word Gelassenheit is
being mentioned continually, in the Dialogue this word is not
mentioned once, both exchanges indicate that leaving a notion to
namelessness is consistent with its being a central topic (US 121,
OWL 29). But Heidegger's approach by non-denominative indirection
is neither psychological nor, in a strict and narrow sense, methodo­
logical. It is, in a broad but still strict sense, logical. It is called for by
logic and language, logos. This means that the non-naming of
Gelassenheit is called for by Gelassenheit. For Gelassenheit is the way
in which the thinking of language and the language of thinking are
released from being the domination of and by denomination and
assertive pro-position into letting things be. This is why after
employing the word Gelassenheit freely throughout the Conversation
he avoids it in the Dialogue. In that Dialogue Heidegger explains that
he discontinued having recourse to the words 'phenomenology' and
'hermeneutics' because they were in danger of becoming mere
catchwords. Now in that Dialogue Gelassenheif has joined them so
that letting be can be let be. Yet the Dialogue resorts twenty-five
times to constructions with lassen, just as Derrida allows himself to
continue to resort to the middle-voiced verb se laisser despite his
reservations regarding one aspect of the way in which Heidegger
resorts to lasseri in his interpretation of the essence of logic and
language. In the ,Dialogue Heidegger's Japanese interlocutor regrets
that the topic of language had not been more fully treated in Being
and Time. Heidegger says in response that he had attempted to go
too far too soon in that book and that although he had written about
language and logic there and in his doctoral dissertation of 1914, it
was not until the course entitled 'Logic' given in the summer of 1934,
contemporary with his first public pronouncements on the hymns of
Holderlin, that he ventured to treat of these topics in class. In fact his
topic was the logos, and 'it took nearly another ten years before I was
able to say what I was thinking - the fitting word is still missing even
today'. This points to the importance of the lecture entitled 'Logos'
delivered in 1944 and of the 'Conversation on a Country Path about
Language' committed to print in 1944-5. Note that the latter title is
more dominatively denominative than a title need be in that it says
Something Like the Middle Voice 237
that it is about or on thinking, aber das Denken. The Dialogue of
nearly another decade later is a dialogue of or from language, von der
Sprache, in accordance with the distinction made in the course of it.
But even a dialogue of or from language or thinking remains too
dominative for Derrida, one suspects, if it is guided too closely by the
reading of logos given by Heidegger in his eponymous lecture; and it
may be that here lies the reason why das gemiisse Wort is still missing
even today.
For although in the lecture entitled 'Logos' the essential saying of
language is understood through the middle-voiced legesthai, following
Aristotle's account of legein as middle-voiced apopMinesthai 01A3 4, 9,
EGT 60, 64; BT §7b), Heidegger's translation of this is that this saying
is gesammelt-sammelndes beisammen-vor-liegen-Lassen, a letting-lie-toge­
ther-before which gathers and is gathered. This lays more stress on
unificatory assembly than Derrida would like, particularly when it is
taken in conjunction with Heidegger's reading of Gelassenheit as
Gelesenheit through the analogy he draws between the gathering
(lesen) of grapes and reading (lesen) and with his tying of gathering to
the idea of sheltering and safekeeping (bergen}. While tying 'decon­
strudion', 'differance', 'trace', et al. to the family of middle-voiced
verbs formed with lassen, and while acknowledging the example of
Heidegger's penetration beyond the opposition of philosophy and
literature to dichtendes Denken, Derrida questions whether Heidegger
acknowledges sufficiently the radical alterity that is allowed and
enabled by the proto-writing and proto-reading that expose Sagan,
the root of thinking and poetry, like the word 'poem' mentioned at
the end of his 'Letter to a Japanese Friend', to the traductive chances
of translation, chances which are both risks and opportunities, like
those run when es gibt gets translated by il y a which Heidegger
points out in his 'Letter on Humanism' to a French friend, perhaps
with more pessimism than Derrida would consider called for.
Heidegger's pessimism is a consequence of harbouring what Derrida
would be inclined to consider a misplaced 'Heideggerian hope', the
same hope that is manifest in· Heidegger's talk of epochs, dispensa­
tions, and destiny, words that Derrida reinscribes, but without the
idea of telos and final destination still apparent in Heidegger's
admission that he had still not found the mot juste, as if such a
word could ever be finally found or, come to that, invented. It
sometimes seems as though Heidegger renounces the renunciation
(Verzicht} which the poet has learned, forgets the secret that in the
end and in the beginning it is not a question of there being a word, Es
238 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
gibf .das Worf, but of Es, das Wort, gibt, the word gives - and gives
way, bricht and gebrichf, falls away. The lapse of memory may be not
a merely contingent but an essential and original lapse. On account of
this propensity for this necessary accident the seeker after the 'as
such' needs the poet to remind him that 'the word is denied . . . held
back', and that the poet's astonished singing of the word is an
unremitting seeking 'to say otherwise or more than he said before'
(US 194, OWL 88).
The further loosening of Dekonstruktion that happens when it
crosses the Rhine and is translated into deconstrudion - or when the
latter becomes transatlantic, 'deconstruction in America' - does not
weaken the claim of the poetic middle voice to be the voice of proto­
ethical responsibility. On the contrary, that claim is strengthened by
the increased freedom of motivated, i.e. non-arbitrary, movement, the
supplement of mouuance, which this crossing licenses for crossing over
lines drawn between classes simply opposed or additively-juxtaposed
to each other in the classical logic of genus and differentia. If
deconstruction is to be construed as middle-voiced and this means
that it breaks the bounds of classical decision procedures of definition
or terminating analysis, allowing at best quasi-analysis down to the
non-elemental or indecidable and only definition in the context of
practice or use, responsibility to the other is increased. It does not
mean that deconstruction is unbound from responsibility, for the
repercussions of keeping or breaking a law are likely to be less
extensive than those of making it and still less extensive than those of
breaking or unmaking the law. Further, definition in the context of
practice or use wilf be the only sort of definition we can hope to give
of the catachretic ,quasi-concept middle voice; and as the context
alters so will that which we are trying to define, for example, as its
context alters from Greek to Hebrew or from Heidegger to Levinas.
The middle voice is always ahead of itself, playing hard to get, letting
itself be quasi-analysed only in the middle voice, allowing itself to
deconstruct. This means that our responsibility is all the greater to
fine-tune our ears to the alteration in tonality as between Heidegger's
middle voice of poetry and Levinas's middle voice of prophecy. At
the outset we warned that we should not expect too much guidance
from what Greek grammarians say, for there is little that is shared by
all the various examples they catalogue other than the negative
property of being expressed neither by the active voice nor by the
passive. In our reading of Kant and Heidegger we have nevertheless
welcomed the fact that in Greek and Sanskrit 'to imagine' is middle-
Something Like tfre Middle Voice 239
voiced. This seemed to license our regarding the imagination as
middle-voiced in the sense that it is neither purely active or
spontaneous, as reason and understanding are for Kant, nor purely
passive, as sensibility and passion are for him. But this is a switch
from a grammatical contrast of active and passive to a contrast
between activity and passivity that it is tempting to describe as
dynamical, though it applies not only to mechanical systems but also
to conflicts between wills which are in a broader sense allergic, as
Levinas says. Fortunately, the grammatical contrast does seem suited
to the quasi-dynamical one, and although the nemesis of failing to
notice that a switch is being made is inscribed in the awkward fact
that in Greek and Sanskrit 'to suffer' is active, this awkward fact may
be an argument for the validity of Sartre's analysis of passion as what
is suffered always in an active sense of suffering. It may also be part
of the explanation �f. or explained by, the fact that, as Levinas notes,
'the passivity of sensibility . . . moves into activity' (TI 212; 235).
This is one reason why what he calls patience is even more passive
than the passivity that is contrasted with the activity of a system of
forces. This patience is that of obedience prior to hearing the other's
command, a pre-echo, a response which is a priori - an ethical
analogue of an effect that precedes its cause - yet a response which is
at the same time a posteriori n i that it is utterly adventitious.5 Since,
however, this advent of the Infinite Other, the trace of illeity of the
other human being, is what in the language of transcendental egology
would be said to constitute me, my ipseity is that of an autonomy or
freedom other than that of freedom of will. It is the .difficult freedom
due to heteronomy which frees me from my will: a freedom which is
not the initiative of an ego jealous of its persistence in being, but a
freedom which initials, countersigns or affirms, or rather, since this is
beyond any act or contract of commitment, finds itself already having
testified in witness of a proto-ethical responsibility which is
unconditional upon possibility and power, a du sollsf which, giving
the other a blank cheque, takes no notice of whether dt4 kannsf (ADV
176). Perhaps this having willed before will, this first will and
testament, is a Levinasian translation of our suggestion that in the
Critical analysis of faculties will is medial between the activity of pure
reason and the passivity of feeling, a suggestion that would not go
over into a Levinasian version of the middle voice if will were always
conation. Non-conative will would be what Levinas writes as Desire,
modelled on the Desire without lack of the Republic, the ethical
superlation of desire as concupiscent wanting which, along with will
240 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
as commitment to act, is one of the meanings of ambiguous vouloir.
Perhaps, finally, there is a trace of this already having been freed from
free will, power and will to power in the past participial having been
let free from selt-will of Gelassenheit.
That is enough to say that there is a chiasmic interchange between
autonomy and heteronomy in Levinas's pro-phetic proto-ethical
responsibility which is at once similar to that of the hearing­
belonging together of, on the one hand, thinking and being in
Heidegger's repetition of Parmenides and of, on the other hand,
poiesis and beings in our reading of Heidegger: a chiasm of chiasms.
Because it is beyond being and possibility the similarity is also a
difference, but the difference is not so great that we should abstain
from marking the similarity by describing each as an example of the
middle voice, so long as we allow that examples can be Bei-spielen of
each other and that a voice can speak or sing in different tones.
Ill
What has a fine ear for nuances and Wechsel der Tone (for example in
the title of Chapter 3) to do with ecological responsibility? Every­
thing. As is shown in Heidegger's reflections on Trakl's poem 'A
Winter Evening' in a lecture entitled 'Language' which is none the less
about things and the world.
Window with falling snow is arrayed.
Long tolls the vesper bell,
The house is provided well,
The table is for many laid.
Wandering ones, more than a few,
Come to the door on darksome courses .
Golden blooms the tree of graces
Drawing up the earth's cool dew.
Wanderer quietly steps within;
Pain has turned the threshold to stone.
There lie, in limpid brightness shown,
Upon the table bread and wine.
Something Like the Middle Voice 241
Man speaks, Heidegger says at the end of the lecture, in so far as he
listens to language. The speaking of mortals relies on its regard,
Bezug, for pure language, the reine Bezug, Rilke would say. Putatively
pure language is pure poietic language, the oxymoronic lingua
naturans where the opposition between nature and convention
collapses into chiasmus. It is Dichten, tihton, Heidegger says in the
Dialogue, and, as the lecture on 'Language' explains, is opposed not
'
to prose but to the prosaic and to everyday language, whether
spoken or written, when that becomes 'a forgotten and used-up poem,
from which there hardly resounds a call any longer' (US 31, PLT 208).
Mortal speaking is a response (Entsprechen) to the call (auf den
heissenden Ruf) and need (Brauch). But this is a response to the call
and need of things because language is the house of being. and being
is always the being of beings, in the sense of the participial, middle­
voiced Sein that advenes, ereignet and es gibf. This twofold of beings
and being is mirrored in the fourfold of mortals, immortals, earth and
sky, condensed, erdichtet, in the twofold of things and world which
are invoked, called to come, respectively in the first and second
stanzas of Trakl's poem. The third stanza calls the twofold of things
and world into the onefold of the dif-ference, Unter-Schied, which is
the call of language itself. The onefold of the dif-ference is the
threshold spoken of in Trakl's third verse, of which Heidegger writes
that 'it is the middle in which the two, the outside and the inside,
penetrate each other. The threshold bears the between (das Zwischen).'
It is painful because it is the place or no-place of exits and separation,
Scheiden, but of separation that at the same time draws everything to
itself, like the drawing of a plan or sketch, Heidegger adds, reminding
us of Kant's comparison of the temporal schematization of
Einbildungskraft to the drawing of a line. And Kant's insistence that
the schema is not a static picture but a proceeding or procedure
comes to mind when Heidegger says that 'The dif-ference stills the
thing, as thing, into the world' and adds that this stillness is not to be
confused with rest understood as motionlessness, but as rest or, as
Derrida might even say restance, that 'is always more in motion than
all motion and always more restlessly active than any agitation',
restance-mouvance.
This Bewegung or waymaking of which Heidegger speaks here and
elsewhere might seem to be the opposite of what Levinas, with
Blanchot, calls the passivity more passive than the passivity which is
the polar opposite of activity. But is it? How much violence has to be
242 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
done to Levinas's astonishing notion before it can be brought into
proximity with Heidegger's no less astonishing construal of the poetic
middle voice? Heidegger writes:
Speaking comes to pass in what is spoken in the poem. It is the
speaking of language. Language speaks. It speaks by calling the
called, thing-world and world-thing, to come to the between of the
dif-ference. What is so called is commanded to arrive from out of
the dif-ference into the dif-ference . . . . The calling of language
commands the called thus to the calling of the dif-ference. The dif­
ference lets the thinging of the thing rest in the worlding of the
world. The dif-ference expropriates (enteignet) the thing into the
repose of the fourfold. Such expropriation does not diminish the
thing. Only so is the thing exalted into its own, so that it holds up
world (Welf verweilt). (US 28-9, PLT 206)
Why should there be any diminishing of the person when the thing
of which Heidegger speaks is a mortal human being and we regard
the human being as Levinas regards the Other, as the origin of the
command Thou shalt do me no harm'? My proto-ethical respons­
ibility to the Other is neither greater nor less whether the Other be a
second person or a third, because proto-ethical responsibility is not
comparative or commensurable and like true love is (wonder of
wonders) not diminished or divided when directed to more than one
human or other being. So why should my proto-ethical responsibility
be in any way diminished if it is a responsibility to non-human as well
as human being&? Why should one not regard a non-human being as
an other Other that concerns me, qui me regarde, in Levinas's phrase,
so that it could be said of it too that On regarde un regard (DL 21) and
so that it could be said, as Heidegger does say, speaking of man in
the great age of the Greeks, 'man is the one who is regarded by that
which is (der vom Seien.den Angeschaute)'. He is the cynosure of the
perspicuous belonging together which Heidegger calls Ereignis and
which we might call Eriiugnis given the connection he claims the
former word has with Auge, eye (10 28-9; 100-1). Hence in order to
fulfil his essence man 'must gather (legein) and save (sozein), take up
and preserve, what opens itself in its openness' (H 83-4, QCT 131)7
Sa/us mundi. If the human being is looked to and needed in this way,
the other human being is not the only neighbour I am called upon to
love and not the only being toward whom my responsibility is
undividedly direct.
Something Like the Middle Voice 243
If man is looked at and needed in this way in the great age of the
Greeks, might not poetic thinking enable man to rediscover that he is
looked at and needed in this way today, in the age of technology? 'As
Andre Marchand .says, after Klee: "In a forest, I have felt many times
over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that
the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me . . . . I was there,
.
I.1stenmg . . .'".6
Poetic thinking is not incompatible with technology understood as
applied science, the availability of labour-saving appliances and the
mastery of the skills required for their use. The poetic, Heidegger
says, is the capacity for human dwelling. It is sometimes suggested by
commentators on Genesis that when man is said to have dominion
over things, the word dominion has to be understood through the
Latin domus, which is its etymological root, not through dominus.
which is .the root of domination. Whether or not there is a common
root to these two notions, there is every reason why human beings
should make use of science and technology in their human dwelling
with the non-human, provided this use is guided by the responsibility
that lets things be. What stands in the way of this ecological
responsibility is not technology thus understood, but the essence of
technology understood as the prevailing of the unreadiness to regard
things and human beings other than as objects or stock, the incapacity
to think of ecology in terms other than those of the economics of
monetarist enter-prise which breaks and enters and takes and where
profit ( Verdiensf) has priority over proffering (Oiensl). But this
incapacity to think otherwise is not absolute. Holderlin:
Vo/1 Verdienst . . .
Full of merit, yet poetically, man
Dwells on this earth.
Although, as Heidegger speculates prophetically in 1955, 'calculative
thinking may someday come to be accepted and practised as the only
way of thinking' (Gel 27, DT 56), he also writes that the time of
deepest need is, like the darkest time before the dawn, the time most
ready for a revolution of thinking, a Kehre. Holderlin:
But where danger is,
Grows the saving power also.
244 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience

When Heidegger proclaims 'Only a god can now save us' he is not Postface
saying that there is nothing at all that we can do. Such extreme
fatalism would be out of keeping with his often repeated statement
that being, hence beings, things and the world need man, and with his
Das fo/gende Nachworf ist . . . ein anfanglicheres Vorwort.
statement that Ge-stell, the disposition to classify everything and
Martin Heidegger, Nachwort zu: 'Was ist Metaphysik?'
everyone as manageable stock, the cancellation of Gelassenheit, 'is no
blind destiny in the sense of a completely ordained fate' (T 45, QCT
47). What we can do is think poetically, in particular think the essence
of technology, since for us in the age of technology that is the way
to become mindful again of our forgetting of the question of being
My proto-ethical responsibility, the direct and so to speak prima facie
and our consequent 'injurious neglect of the thing'. 'Only when man,
responsibility of the face to face, de-systematizes the ecological
in the disclosing coming to pass of the insight by which he himself is
economy of the world of which Heidegger with Holderlin and Rilke
beheld, renounces human self-will and projects himself towards that
describe the fourfold space. It does so by disrupting its symmetry. On
insight, away from himself, does he correspond in his essence to the
the other hand, Heidegger with Holderlin and Rilke indicate how the
claim of that insight.' It is Heidegger who says this, but it is
ran�e of that responsibility may be extended more widely than
something to which Levinas could perhaps say Amen, emphasizing
Levmas - or as should now perhaps be said, Levinas I - is ready to
by way of supplement that notwithstanding the entrapment in purely
allow. This extension is not necessarily an extension from the proto­
calculative thinking of some politically powerful men and women
(their want of femininity and maternity in Levinas's ethical sense not
�
e hic�l to the ethical such as takes place when the two-person
_
uahon g1ves
s1t way to that in which the third is brought" into the
being necessarily a lack of these in the biological sense of the words),
centre of the scene. It is an extension beyond humanity of the range
the chiasmus between the responsibility of poetic thinking and the
of beings with which I can be face to face.
responsibility of prophecy · produces a responsibility that is invested
What licences this extension, it was argued, is need. It is not only
here and now in me. Prior to the opposition between freedom of will
�he other human being that can be hungry, thirsty, orphaned, cold or
and constraint by other wills and my wider environment. it is a
m some other way in need. And if my not giving the other food is
responsibility which gives ear to the others and to the salutary
tantamount to murder it is not only the other human being whom I
thought that before they are part of my environment I am part of
murder or culpably kill. My culpability extends to other animals.
theirs, who or (pace Martin Heidegger) whatsoever they may be, and
Some difficulty was encountered over the way Levinas and the
that beneath the strident clamour of egological enterprise, of the
Bible oscillate between Thou shalt not murder' and Thou shalt not
unconditional play of stock-market forces and stocking-masked greed
kill'. It was suggested that the concept of murder is usually restricted
calls the still small middle voice of neighbourhood and ecological
in its application to human or human-like beings whereas 'Thou shalt
need.
not kilJ' would admit of application to animals as well - and indeed, it
can now be added, to whatever can die, including plants. It can also
now be said that whereas Levinas makes little of the difference
b�tween the two formulations because it is culpable killing he has in
mmd and so can equate this with murder, the word 'murder' is more
suited to the project of expanding the range of direct responsibility
beyond that admitted by Levinas and Kant just because it marks, as
the word 'killing' does not, the legal or ethical wrongfulness of the
deed. To this it will be objected that this project is hindered rather
than assisted by this preference precisely because it bursts the concept

245
246 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
of murder at its seams. There is something in this objection. But there
is something amiss with the notion that a concept is sewn up like a
cricket ball from which maltreatment can result in all its sawdust
seeping out. What is right is that no one has it in his power to move
the limits of the employment of a word anywhere he likes and still be
sure of being able to get that word to do all the jobs it used to do.
This is illustrated by the fact that anyone who stipulates a use too
remote from the usual one will find himself either failing to be
understood or being given the word to use it as he wants by people
who, when in his company, will coopt a new word or phrase for the
job for which the old one was employed. However, the compensatory
conservatism of language is consistent with conceptual change,
though the conservatism is also reflected in the fact that where
there has been conceptual change it may seem in retrospect that no
change has taken place. An illustration of this phenomenon of
conceptual deja vu was provided by the idea that although at an
earlier point in the history of a civilisation a group of people, for
example women or infants or slaves, may have been treated as
chattels without any rights at all, we are inclined to believe that they
nevertheless had them, and that their having them was independent
of anyone's then acknowledging that they did. What should have
been acknowledged is what matters. However, we may be mistaken in
thinking that the ancient Athenians, for example, had the concept of
right that we have but simply denied as a matter of fact that
particular rights were possessed by certain minorities. The exclusion
of a group from ,the range of application of a word can be indicative
of a difference 'of concept. Whether or not it is depends on the
consequences of going on using a particular word as against using it
with a qualifier in a certain context or not using it there at all:
consequences such as those which accrue if we include non-humans
among those whose being killed is reclassified as murder. If the
consequences of such a reclassification are to be that in other respects
too we come to treat non-humans in ways which we previously
reserved for our treatment of humans there must be some semantic
continuity; it must be possible for the extended use to come to be
seen to be at least partly implicit in the original. Only then is the
reclassification likely to be more than shortlived, as it is likely to be if
all that is carried over from the old to the new application is the
emotive force of the word.
Where reclassification is underway then (tautologically) the
extended application will be more or less (trans)figurative and
Postface 247
(trans)literal. Even if historically an incipient reclassification never
catches on, whether in lay discourse or the discourse of specialists, it
may have profound repercussions. And even if it does not catch on in
the sense of coming to be taken literally, it can catch on as a figure of
speech. The most daring departure from tradition is for that reason
�erhaps least likely to become part of it except as consciously
.
figurahve speech. As such its consequences are incalculable.
There is no denying the daring in Levinas's claim that when he
drinks his coffee and eats his croissant he is murdering somebody. To
say, as Levinas would be reluctant to say, that to kill a non-human
animal could be murder is also a claim that will not go without
challenge. These claims can be taken seriously, it will be said, only if
they are taken as figures of speech. Indeed, it will be said, they cannot
� �
e taken (li erally) as claims, but as the exercise of poetic licence. This
IS what w1U be said too when the dichtendes Denken of Martin
Heidegger comes up with the thought that man can be the murderer
�
(Mdrder) of Be n� or when Levinas, despite his protestations that
Totahty an� Infrmty is philosophy and that philosophy is not to be
confused With poetry, employs the word 'justice' of the dyadic face to
face . In his most recent writings he reserves for this word its
customary third-personal employment. Whether or not these second
thoughts are evidence of a failure of nerve and whether or not they
are better advised, Levinas continues to insist that the dyadic face to
face is the ethical par excellence, and to insist still on this, it will be
said, is still to do violence to the customary notion of the ethical
which the objector will maintain is universalistic.
Levinas will not disagree. To say that the dyadic face to face is the
ethical par excellence is to admit that the exigency of the face to face
excels the ethical as this is customarily understood. It is the
customary notion's excession or, in Levinas's word, emphase. The
face to face is n�t strictly the essence of the ethical. To say that
.
would be like saymg that God is the being that most of all is. If the
ethical is beyond being, the face to face must be more than its
essence, other"':'i �e than being and beyond essence, however great
may be the d1ff1culty of getting this idea across without having
recourse to the language of being and the idea. The Other, like God
�xceeds being and the idea. But our saying that it does wil i
�cessantly decline into a categorized propositional said. What an
1rony that the very word 'accusative' to which Levinas resorts in
order to describe the exigency of the Other's look should be the one
that most faithfully reflects the idea of being arraigned which is at the
248 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
Greek root of the notion of the category. and yet that this exigency
is what Levinas tells us exceeds, resists, what since Aristotle
philosophers have referred to as the category. Greekjew is Jew­
greek. Prophecy declines into philosophy.
There is some irony also in the fact that the mechanism of
declination, like that to which the notion of the ethical succumbs.
though described by Levinas himself. for instance in Otherwise than
Being or Beyond Essence. gets its most thorough examination, after
Nietzsche, in the hands of the author of Being and Time. Jewgreek is
Greekjew. For when Heidegger says that we have murdered being he
is indulging in what Levinas would describe as emphase, emphaino,
hyperbole that brings out what is concealed through the propensity
of language to become reduced to the common denomination or what
Nietzsche calls the language of the herd.
It is yet another irony that Heidegger's reference to the murder of
being is a reference to Nietzsche's revaluation of values. The
dethroning of the transcendent values of Platonism and Christianity.
Heidegger maintains, leaves in place the notion of value. Reading
Nietzsche through the glass of Lotze and his own neo-Kantian mentor
Rickert, Heidegger contends that their doctrines of value invite a
charge analogous to what he regards as the blasphemy of describing
God as the highest being. To describe God as a being is deicide. No
wonder that God is dead. He has been killed by belief in his existence.
I am not of the opinion that there is a God. Likewise when the Good
is represented as a value regarded as a subsistent entity, as a
superimposed �ertiary quality or relation. As such
Value is the objectification ( Vergegensfiindlichung) of needs as goals,
wrought by a representing self-establishing within the world as
picture. Value appears to be the expression of the fact that we, in
our position of relationship to it, act to advance just that which is
itself most valuable; and yet that very value is the impotent and
threadbare disguise of the objectivity of whatever is, an objectivity
that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for
mere values. (H 94, QCT 142)
These are sentences that could well have been written by Levinas
to say what he means when he writes that goodness is otherwise than
being. He could even endorse Heidegger's statement that if goodness
is not otherwise than being as beingness then 'value does not let
Postface 249
being be being' (H 239, QCT 104). When Heidegger writes that
'value does not let being be being' and that value murders being he
means that we have come to think that the world is no more than
what there is, and we think this even at the very moment that we
think that what there is is not how it ought to be. not its Sollen. To
think the latter is to represent what ought to be as a norm in relation
to which the value of what is can be measured, to represent it, to put
it before us as a teleological object, a summum bonum for which we
can at least hope, but which, as an object of representation, is
destined to be a god that failed, that failed, to mention one case
only, the young John Stuart Mill.
When Heidegger writes that man is a murderer of being implicit in
what he says is what Levinas says when he writes that the Other is
otherwise than being. They are both saying at least that the human
being is not a being on whom one can place a value. To say even that
a human being is the most valuable being of all is to treat him or her
like a commodity that can be bought and sold. The human being is
werf-los. beyond the measuring scales of value, price and worth,
beyond compare. This is to say that the human being is beyond being
described as better than another human - or non-human being. as he
is described in the words of Matthew 10: 31: 'Don't be afraid: you are
worth more than many sparrows'. A desire to avoid such comparative
evaluation seems to be at the bottom of Levinas's restriction of direct
responsibility to the sphere of the human vis-a-vis the human. Perhaps
it is at the bottom of Kant's introduction of the word 'dignity' when
explaining what he means by an end in itself. Kant and others,
however, equate this notion with that of what has intrinsic, inherent
or absolute value or worth. Although this succeeds in marking a
difference from instrumental value or worth, it fails to exclude
altogether the idea that what is being referred to is a maximum on
a scale. This may be no cause for alarm where what is being said to
be of intrinsic value is an abstraction like benevolence, knowledge or
virtue. There is cause for concern however where the phrase 'intrinsic
value' is predicated of human beings and other beings one considers
to be ends in themselves. For the description of a value as intrinsic, as
not being instrumental or otherwise extrinsic, is consistent with and
perhaps suggests the idea of one value's being lower than another.
Now although ethical decisions will sooner or later involve compar­
ison and ranking, for example where the question of distributive
justice is at stake, it is n
i order to avoid the hierachizing of human
and non-human beings regarded as ends in themselves that we are
250 Tite Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
trying to find proto-ethical space for incomparability in the sphere of
the human vis-a-vis the other human or non-human being.
This last sentence must not be misunderstood. It does not say that
what we are seeking, absurdly, is incomparability in the sphere of the
human in comparison with the human or non-human being, or indeed
incomparability where the class of comparision is animals or other
non-human beings. There is no question here of a class of comparison
or a comparison of classes. The vis-a-vis, the face to face, is not a
lateral relation but the vertical dimension of height or depth in which
I am devant, before and obliged by the other. It is not one in which
my position and the position of the other are up for appraisal before
me, before him or her or before anyone else. However inclusive or
exclusive the notion of the Other is allowed to be, we must
distinguish on the one hand lateral or horizontal comparison such
as that upon which we have just touched, where as though from the
point of view of a Grand Exagminer creatures are given higher or
lower marks, and on the other hand the primary and proto-ethical
hierarchy of the Other vertically vis-a-vis me.
When Levinas writes that 'Goodness consists in taking up a
position in being such that the Other counts more than myself' (TI
225; 247) he only seems to be making a comparison, because as a
philosopher he cannot avoid taking up a third-personal point of view.
But, as we explained in Chapter 2, the point of this third-personal
assertion is missed unless the reader grasps that he is being invited,
called, perhaps commanded, not to forget that with respect to its
author and every other human being he is in the position of an
addressee, even though he is being commanded to command. He is, I
am, I hereby ack11owledge I am, at the pointed end of an accusative
provocation. So when I endorse the philosopher's assertion about the
Other counting more than myself. the 'about' disappears and along
with it the relation between myself and the Other that would be
presupposed by any comparison. The 'more' of the Other's counting
for more than myself is not relative and comparative, but the
absolutely superlative proto-ethical claim which is the quasi-transcen­
dental condition of the possibility of third-personal ethics and of the
justice that compares ethical or political claims.
When, as Heidegger puts it hyperbolically, man is the murderer of
being, man is the murderer of man. But mortal human beings are
participants with other beings in the fourfold. Hence, remembering
Heidegger's statement in later editions of the Postscript to 'What is
Metaphysics?' that being never holds sway without beings (cp H 83,
Post[ace 251
98, QCT 131, 147), the question arises whether we are also
murdering being when we treat other members of the fourfold as
no more than commodities. We already know what Heidegger means
when he says with Nietzsche that we have murdered the immodals.
But what of the other regions of the fourfold, the earth and the sky?
Do not the fruits of the earth include commodities, that from which
we live, les nourritures terrestres? So surely the sense of 'murder' cannot
be extended so far that it can cover the idea of murdering the things
of the earth? If the things of the earth are commodities and we
murder when we treat something as a commodity there is no
alternative to murdering these things; but if there is no conceptual
space for not murdering these things there is no conceptual space
either for murdering them. They are either already dead or not dead
because they were never in the appropriate sense alive, even if the
things we are speaking of are thriving animals and plants.
I t depends on what is meant by 'things'. In the sense of the word in
which a thing is a member of the fourfold it is not just a commodity.
The earth and the sky of the fourfold are not objects or raw material.
So, if we wish to go along with Heidegger's extended notion of
murder we can extend its range to every thing. To murder a thing
will be to treat i t as no more than more or less valuable stock.
We do not have to go along with Heidegger's hyperbole, but
before we decide not to we should at least take time to consider the
possibility that we are acting irresponsibly if we eschew all modes of
speech other than those which go along with the conventional
classifications of the prose of the world, if we turn a deaf ear to
what must be otherwise said by the poet-thinker and the thinker­
poet.
II
Among the parts of the exposition conducted in the preceding
chapters that may seem most vulnerable to criticism are those in
which poetry is invoked to help convert the disagreement between
Heidegger and Levinas into a chiasmic exchange. It was in those parts
that we had to face the embarrassment of appearing to rest the
possibility of this conversion on metaphors and other tropes, pathetic
fallacy, anthropomorphism and the unargued postulation of animism.
In these final pages we shall say something about argued animism.
But let us first repeat rapidly what we have already said more than
252 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
once about poetry and tropes. Although the art to which we have
most frequently referred has been the art of poetry it is through them
to poiesis or Oichten that we have appealed, meaning by this
language in the making, where the chatter of machines calculating
cost benefits is remote enough for the middle voice to be heard. The
middle voice of poetry speaks in several tongues.
On at least one occasion even the scientist as such is said to dwell
dichterisch on the earth. In a paragraph of Holder/ins Hymne 'Andenken',
lectures dating from the early 1940s (G52 40), we are told: The
Dichfen of astronomy and meteorology, the "Dichten" of modem
explanation of nature is of the calculative and planning sort.' Why
Heidegger reaches for quotation marks half-way through this sentence
becomes clear in the next: 'Planning is also a Dichten, namely the
counter-essence and dis-essence of poetry (das Gegenwesen und
Abwesen der Oichtung).' One cannot help wondering whether he
would be willing to pay a similar back-handed compliment to the
scientist by allowing that the scientific explanation of natural
phenomena is a kind of essential Denken or 'Denken', if only because
it is the dis-essence or counter-essence of essential thinking. The
furthest he is willing to go in this direction i s to remind his readers
that the scientist ,as a thinking human being is capable of essential
reflective Besinnung, something Heidegger's conversations and corre­
spondence with certain eminent scientists of the day put him in a
position to verify at close hand. If he had not assumed that it was
unnecessary to remind his readers of this more often his other
assertions about science might have had a less antipathetic reception
among some of ! them (VAI 62, QCT 181-2. Nl 372-4). That
reception would h�ve been still warmer if instead of repeating that
modern science is a thinking that 'captures' space and time in a net of
numbers, as he does in Hiilderlins Hymne 'Der lster' (G53 45-6), he had
recognized that in pure scientific research there is a moment of
responsive and responsible letting be, what could be called, in the
light of what we shall say below, the poietic moment of science or
the moment before the law.1
We have spoken, perhaps at unnecessary length, of the middle
voice of poetry being at the threshold of strange worlds, before new
legislations. Poets are not exactly the unacknowledged legislators of
the world, as Shelley would have them be. Poetry in the sense of
poiesis or Dichten is before the law and before its enactment, more
like a parliamentary white paper. At the hinge between one paradigm
or episfeme and another, Heidegger' s remark that we murder being
Postface 253
implants the thought that perhaps we murder beings which in
everyday discourse we think of only as beings we kill or cull or
destroy - the thought that if we can shift talk of destruction from the
destruction of an inanimate thing (like a building) where it most
comfortably belongs to that of an animal ('The Rottweiler had to be
destroyed'), perhaps we can shift talk of murder from the killing of
human beings under certain circumstances to the killing of animals
under certain circumstances, eventually perhaps to the destruction of
forests and inorganic things.2 Poiesis is not legislation. Law is
instituted only when the poet's vision becomes public opinion and
public opinion becomes enshrined in a public concept, when meine
Meinung becomes veriiffentliche Meinung and veroffentliche Meinung
becomes Bedeutung or vouloir dire.3
So it may seem that all that poetry can do is prepare us for a
different disposition of and toward the world by a softening up which
will have to wait upon the discovery of good hard reasons justifying
induction into that new disposition by demonstrating the cash value
of the poetic musings which will otherwise remain vulnerable to the
charge of being n o more than the playing of a refined and rarified .
sport. This is the charge we would like to think we have at least
begun to meet in the preceding chapters. We can at most have begun
to meet this charge because most of our space in those chapters has
been given to arbitrating between Heidegger and levinas, relatively
little being given to independent arguments for any of their doctrines
or some other. We have done little more than attempt to remove
objections explicit or implicit in what each of them says regarding
what is said by the other. And what we have said regarding the
poietic middle voice of art has taken the form of a response to
Levinas's assertion 'Perhaps art seeks to give a face to things and it is
in this that resides at once its grandeur and its delusion' (DL 22). The
risk of delusion that the ludic character of art brings with it is worth
running not only because there are laws that require to be subverted
as well as ones to be kept, whether these be laws of language or laws
of the land. As well as the grandeur which art can attain by saying
the unsaid, signifying the as yet unsignified, there is that which it can
attain by unsaying the said in the face to face with the Signifier, the
other human being, as levinas I!, who may be a contemporary of
Levinas I, concedes. We have wanted him to take a further step, to
concede that art does not always lie when it tries to give a face to
things. We have tried to show that the middle voice of poetry is or at
least is in concord with the middle voice of prophecy, but that the
254 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
Posfface 255

other to whom it responds is not only the other human being. To

rather than the 'what it is', where this 'rather than' postpones the
show this we enlisted the help of Heidegger and the poets with
implication affirmed by the words 'and that is' in the dass es ist und das
whom he speaks.
i$t, was es ist of Heidegger's Grr.mdfragen der Philosophie (G45 174).
In appealing to the mutuality of need that binds the regions and
Qualitative difference may be a further reason why I should seek to
individuals in Heidegger's Holderlinian fourfold world we were
preserve something in its existence, for instance where o�timal
appealing at the same time to the notion of needfulness to which
breeding conditions or the quality of life call for heterogeneity of
on Levinas's metaphysics of ethics responsibility is a response. It is
kinds. But the naked alterity of a finite vulnerable thing suffices to put
the needfulness of the other that matters, the other's being besogneux
me under a direct responsiblity toward it.
(DDVI 156). That is already enough to put me under a responsibility,
Hence, conversely, qualitative similarity is not required. This means
although I shall of course want to know what the other's actual needs
that the responsibility does not require that the being toward which I
are if I am to be able to exercise my responsibility n
i a fitting way. To
am directly and immediately responsible be, ike l me, characterized by
do that I shall also want to know about the characteristics of the
consciousness, sentience or life. In The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue
particular other, but again that knowledge is not a condition of my
Kant writes: 'beneficence toward those in need is a universal duty of
primary responsibility. That stands whether I serve the Other better
man; this is so because they are to be regarded as fellow men, i.e., as
by payment or by non-payment of an unjust tax, and whe�her the
. needy rational beings, united by nature in one dwelling place for
Other is better served by my supporting a total ban on trade m Ivory
mutual aid' (§30). We are proposing a notion of neighbourhood in
or by my supporting a scheme of management of elephant herds
which responsibility is toward needy beings, whether or not these
which permits the trade within limits. This brings us back to the point
about argued and unargued animism mentioned above.
beings be rational, sentient or living. If it is objected that su � a
notion can be entertained only by the covert anthropomorphtst . .
1t 1s
in order to begin one's defence by pointing out that this is an
objection that would have been made against lapsed Cartesians by
lil
those who followed Descartes in believing that animals were
insentient machines. But it has to be said further that anthropomor­
Our argument is that no specific characteristic other than its in some
phism or animism seems unavoidable only if it is assumed that there
way needing me is required in order that I should be directly
can be ethical claims and rights only among beings that share a
responsible toward another thing. To say that this proto-ethical
certain property so that we can be in sympathy with them to some
responsibility of :the dyadic face to face is prima facie is to say
degree. The precondition of an ethics of mutuality is the proto-ethical
neither that on closer inspection it is discovered not to be a
face to face where empathy or sympathy is irrelevant. Sympathy
responsibility nor that under certain circumstances, when other
based on likeness, if not liking, may make it easier to believe one has
things are not equal, as the saying goes, it is a responsibility that
a moral obligation to another, but it cannot be the foundation of a
may lapse.4 It remains the tender matrix within which the prima facie
moral obligation or what makes a relationship moral. It will prevent
responsibilities of the tough-minded ethics of the ecological manifold
my relationship being moral unless the relationship is primarily one in
arise and without which this toughness would be calculated violence.
which I am faced by another in need whether or not we are eo­
But it is not a transcendental condition separable from, parallel to and
members of a certain class. &istet ergo debeo. It is enough that it exist
underlying the conditioned. Rather is it a quasi-transcendental
for me to be bound, bound to let it be, where this may be either to
condition intricated with the conditioned, producing an androgynous
leave or not to leave it alone.
chiasmus with it. Given the ecological interdependence of things,
Although qualitative unlikeness cannot be the ground or disground
human and non-human, other non-human beings no less than other
of moral obligation any more than can qualitative likeness, it will be a
human beings have a claim upon me through their simply being
prophylactic against comfortable codifications that encourage the
needy beings other than me. The claim to my non-indifference is
extension of moral regard only to members of our dub, or to
based on their non-qualitative difference, the 'that it is' of each thing,
those, like chimpanzees, to whom we find it easier to grant associate
256 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
membership because we perceive a biological affinity. Moral regard
must break the rule which makes man the measure of all things. And
the lure of moral parochialism and anthropocentrism is made easier to
defeat the more we attend not only to the similarities but also to the
differences between human and non-human animals and the differ­
ences among each of these.
Natural historians insist that their work can only proceed beyond
the anecdotal by continuous, repeated close observation - for there
are no essences, there is no such thing as 'the chimpanzee'. You
can't bring a few into a laboratory, make some measurements,
calculate an average, and find out, thereby, what chimpness is.
There are no shortcuts. Individuality does more than matter; it is of
the essence. You must learn to recognize individual chimps and
follow them for years, recording their peculiarities, their differ­
ences . . 5
. .
So one cannot but agree with David Wood when he says:
The assumption has been that we can talk about humans and
animals as if all the other animals are all alike . . . I think that is
something we've got to stop; we've got to dissolve these
categories. At the same time we must wonder about precisely
where the limit would come, and we should ask which limit. For
there are lots of limits . 6
. . . describe an attribute I can ascribe to myself. They are words for
There are indeed. So there is nothing necessarily final about the
number four. The supposition that there is is something we've got to
stop. But the best way to start stopping it may be to ask whether of
prior ethical significance over similarities and dissimilarites of kind,
and otherwise than kindredhood or essence, is the non-qualitative
alterity over against myself of existents whose only moraLly relevant
predicate in the first place is the predicament of their being related to
me in need, the crying need of their finitude and fleetingness, their
Vergiinglichkeit, as Rilke would say. Lacrimae rerum. For which things
may need (brauchen, chre) my eyes and my mouth - and my hands. In
'The Saying of Anaximander' Heidegger writes 'Chreon is derived
from chrao, chraomai. It suggests e cheir, the hand; chrao means: I get
involved with something, I reach for it, extend my hand to it' (H 337,
EGT 51). As even a poem might do, we are reminded by Levinas and
Celan.
Postface 257
Finitude is definitive of the infinitude of the claim made upon me in
the way that for Levinas it is the needfulnes of the other that
commands. Since every other is, we are arguing, in ecosystematic
need of every other other, that need is not a property that
distinguishes one other thing from another, so it is not a distinguish­
ing predicate. It is not a real predicate at all as we tend to think of
predicates in describing finite things in the world when these are
contrasted with an Infinite God. God, it is sometimes maintained,
cannot be a bearer of predicates or properties in any sense we can
comprehend, for such properties, for example biological maleness or
femaleness, would limit God's infinity. If this traditional idea is taken
together with the further idea that existence is not a real predicate,
we may begin to see how an account of primary responsibility
interpreted through the notion of a needful existent other than me
may yet be anarchic in not being derivative from an ontic fact or state
of affairs such as the finitude exemplified by a particular need.
Primary responsibility will be a response to the infinity of the finite
other thing over against me, to the trace of illeity beyond the
ontological difference, beyond the simple opposition of 'is' to 'ought'
where the 'beyond' of the 'good beyond being' is, like a Klein bottle,
beyond the simple opposition of inside and outside, hence beyond
that of the holy to the sacred and of the sacred to the profane. This,
let it be said in passing, does not amount to pantheism or
panentheism, for the words 'infinity', 'illeity' and 'holy' do not
the asymmetrical 'relation' of the other to me which Levinas calls the
face to face, except that the other of this relation of relations is not
limited to human or animate alterity.
Animism is unavoidable only if we choose to say that a thing is
what it is and not another thing thanks to its animal, vegetable or
mineral anima, psyche or soul. Aristotle chooses to say this in De
Anima and we can go along with him, as Duns Scotus and Gerard
Manley Hopkins seem to do, without this implying that everything
has consciousness or life in some degree as Leibniz and Whitehead
maintain.7 If we can be persuaded that a stone, which we thought was
lifeless and worldless, is or is composed of elements that are sentient
and to some degree weltbilderzd, we shall find it comes easier than it
did to think of it as making a claim upon us. But what if the
conclusion that the stone is like us in this way happens to be false? Or
what if the arguments for this metaphysical view are beyond the
comprehension of people untrained in philosophy, as they are indeed
258 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
beyond the comprehension of many who are so trained? If the truth
or belief in the panpsychist (panvitalist, pantheist, panentheist)
conclusion is a condition of the validity or possibility of the belief
that I can be ethically responsible for the stone, its falsity. or my
disbelief will enable me to evade recognition of that responsibility.
Recognition of the responsibility is less likely to be evaded if it
depends only on the existence of the thing under its lay description,
whatever that may be - and which in some cultures may be more or
less indistinguishable from that of the animist or panpsychist
metaphysics to which I have referred. Not that that will suffice to
guarantee recognition, else why am I writing this book? There is still
an enormous amount of persuading to be done. As there was when
only Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and a few others were
beginning to persuade their contemporaries that animals might have
rights and when they, Mary Wollstonecraft and a few others were
saying the same about women.
There's the rub, it will be protested. What a nerve to draw an
analogy between the emancipation of women and the emancipation of
beasts. As for an analogy with the emancipation of stones, the mind
boggles. The mind does boggle. But it boggles less if we take care
not to be misled by the word 'analogi here into supposing that the
extension of recognition of direct responsibility toward inorganic
things turns on qualitative similarities or differences. It depends, we
are arguing, only on the fad of a thing's being non-qualitatively other
than me and on its being needy n i the way we have tried to flesh out
with the help . of Heidegger's fourfold ecology whose reciprocal
systematicity is interrupted when it is supplemented by the asym­
metry of what Lev,inas calls the face to face and when, departing from
Levinas, we add that it is not only with another human being that I
can be face to face. Not that knowledge of the nature of things is
irrelevant to the strategy and rhetoric by which ears may be made
sensitive to hitherto unacknowledged demands. Hence our pages on
poetry or poiesis and persuasive reclassification. Not that the poiesis
of art - or science - is the only route to a rewording of the world. If
someone is at a loss to understand how one can show respect to non­
sentient things, how the idea of such respect can make sense, let him
walk across the Meadows at Edinburgh when the reachable and
breakable branches of every cherry tree in the avenue have been
reached and broken as the blossoms are about to appear, or let him
walk a little further to the back of Blackford Hill where the faces of
the rocks have been daubed all over with paint, or still further to the
Postface 259
Pentland Hills where someone who believes himself the owner of one
of them has, to facilitate access by his remunerative grouse-shooting
parties, slashed an unsalvable road across its cheek. That teaches us
what showing disrespect can mean. And it is a question of teaching,
of our education, with which we are here concerned. For disrespect is
not necessarily a manifestation of malice aforethought. It can be a
blindness and failure to think fostered by our inherited linguistic and
cultural ways of categorizing the world. (With 'all mankind are
brothers' compare 'human brutality and betise'.) Dichhmg is deep de­
categorization resulting from the interruption of the esprit de geometrie
by the esprit de finesse. H is, to borrow the pseudonym whose forces
were plotted in Chapter 10, deconstrudion: the violation of the esprit
des lois by the esprit de jusfesse; the insistence of primary justice in the
insistence on rights.8
IV
It is not a good objection to treating animals as ends in themselves to
say that doing this demeans human beings. That is to beg the
question. If we are to stand on our dignity. setting such store upon
human dignity versus the alleged indignity of the sub-human, the 'less
than human', perhaps it redounds to this dignity that human beings
can acknowledge the dignity of what in the classical great chain of
being is ranked below. This, to return as promised to a point touched
on in Chapter 3, has implications for the obJection to Kant's argument
that respect for animals is justified on the grounds that it strengthens
the respect we owe to persons. It is argued that Kant's defence is
objectionable because. by parity of reasoning we ought to respect
inanimate things like hammers and stones. This, it is said, is absurd.
What we are arguing is that this is not absurd, but that we ought not
to treat even tools only as means. The hammer too should be treated
also as an end in itself, and treated so not only on the grounds that
its haft is elegantly shaped or out of respect for the craftsman who
shaped it or even for the tree which was killed to provide the raw
material. All these consid�ration.s are relevant to the question of the
value we put upon it, but this question of value is separate from and
secondary to the proto-ethical question of my responsibility not to
treat things merely as means. It is maltreatment of things to suppose
that the first question to be asked when we decide how they should
260 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
be treated is one whose answer depends on appeal to what Viktor in
Vasily Grossman's Life and Destiny dubs the principle of quantum
politics. This is the principle to which appeal is made when (as in
Matthew 10: 31) it is a question of how many, if any, sparrows' lives
equal the life of one human. This is but a stone's throw from the
question. How much will they fetch o n the market? To suppose that
appraisal is the primary business of ethics is to confuse ethics with
economics, with business. It is a devaluation of ethics to ground it on
valuation and questions of comparative worth of the kind that
preoccupied the author of a letter to the recently-launched Oxford
Today when he wrote to the editor to say
I despair of all the trees which, unsolicited, pass through my letter­
box every day to provide nothing better than employment for the
Refuse Officer. Although your magazine is not as beautiful as a
tree . . . I do not think iLwould be too preposterous to vie for
some comparison in merit.
That it is an ethical issue that worries this correspondent is one of the
contentions of this book, indeed it is one that worries this book's
author; he too despairs of all the trees . . . . It is also a contention of
this book however that a place for the recognition of our
responsibility to all things is secured only if the proclivity toward
anthropocentric or other parochial preference is put in its place
second to the idea of a thing's being in need, however that thing
and its need be specifically described. Of course there is no thing or
need that cannot :in principle be described or misdescribed, and the
responsibility to describe and classify with esprit de finesse is one that
follows immediately upon the recognition of my having a respons­
ibility as soon as I have the thought that there is something in
distress. This is not enough to give us directives as to what actions
will meet our specific responsibilities. It is enough to establish that we
do have responsibilities to human, non-human and non-sentient
things whatever be the criteria for the identification of things.
Proto- or pre-ethical responsibility is pre-criteriological. It is not of
course pre-metaphysical in Levinas's sense. But it is pre-metaphysical
if metaphysics is understood as what informs us of the criteria by
which we judge what a thing really is. It is therefore not embarrassed
by such questions as the following one posed by Timothy Sprigge:
'how can one have a reasonable view on the independent value of a
river without some clarity as to what unexperienced water really is,
Postface 261
since this, in its familiar form, seems virtually to disappear as a
9
chemist or physicist describes it7'
Similarly, quite independent of whether a tree or a stone are
creatures of God, we have responsibilities toward them in their own
right, where their right does not presuppose a system of purely
human law but an ecological system of dependencies or needs from
which it follows that I do not have a right to do with them as I please
in the manner encouraged by Augustine's teaching that 'there are no
common rights between us and the beasts and trees'. 10 It will be said
we are extending the concept of right from a human legal context
where it is at home to the context of non-human beings where it is
not. Against this it can be said that its not being at home there is a
corollary of our being deaf to our ecological responsibility, and that
to speak of a non-human being having a right will sound all right
once our hearing has improved. This is not an arbitrary extension of
the meaning of the word 'right', though it may take more than the
argument of this book to persuade some readers that it is not. It can
be said, secondly, that the idea of a non-human right is not an
extension from the idea of a human right, but that the latter is a
restriction of the former. That the notion of an ecological dike binding
humans and non-humans makes sense i s what is shown bv
Heidegger's doctrine of the fourfold which we examined in Chapt�r
6. What that doctrine also shows is that the idea of a thing as a
substantial object, event or process to which qualities and relations
adhere in a mathematically describable neutral space-time may be
derivative from a notion of a thing and its place which can
accommodate the conception of 'common rights between us and
the beasts and trees' and stones and artefacts like a jug or a bridge.
The bridge gathers to itself in its own way earth and sky, divinities
and mortals' (VA2 27, PLT 153). This gathering is a letting be or
enabling in ifs own way. which is to say that the bridge does not have
to be endowed with consciousness if it is to be able to enable.
From the simple oneness in which earth and sky, divinities and
mortals belong together, building receives the directive for its
erecting of locations. Building takes over from the fourfold the
standard for all the traversing and measuring of the spaces that in
each case are provided for by the locations that have been founded.
The edifices guard the fourfold. They are things that in their own
way preserve the fourfold. To preserve the fourfold, to save the
earth, to receive the sky, to await the divinities, to escort mortals -
262 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
this fourfold preserving is the simple nature, the presencing, of
dwelling. (VA2 33, PLT 158-9)
Mortals dwell in that they save the earth - taking the word in the
old sense still known to Lessing. Saving does not only snatch
something from a danger. To save really means to set something
'free into its own presencing. To save the earth is more than to
u ti lize it or even wear it out. Saving the e arth does not master the
earth and does not subjugate it, which is merely one step from
despoliation . (VA2 24, PLT 150)
There is then in this idea of a fourfold directive or measure and in
Anaximander's doctrine of dike a foothold for the notions of non­
human right and wrong and of justice and injustice toward or injury
of the non-human things of the world. The meas ure or standard of
rightness and justice will have no more exactness than Aristotle
requires for ethi cs or than the natural law analogy which Kant calls a
schema or type imposes on our appli cations of the moral law, where
this room for play is what we should expect if, as we have argued,
moral respect and responsibility express in the field of practical
judgement what the schematism of the imagnation expresses in the
i
field of theoretical and aesthetic judgement, and if in all three cases or
at their common root judgement is a middle voiced Verfahren, 'an
operation which is not an operation', as Derrida says, an operation
sans operati on, as he might otherwise say.11 So we shall continue to
speak of non-human ri ghts and justice. We do not insist on the
language of rights in this context however, and when we talk of
justice our primary concern is with an ecological analogue of the
primary justice of proto-ethical responsibility on behalf of which
Levinas speaks. What we do insist on is the language of respons­
ibility, the responsibility to consider a thing's need, whether the thing
be human or not. Thus 'Building . . . is a distinctive letting-dwell.
Whenever it is such i n fact, building already has responded to the
summons of the fourfold. All planning remains grounded on this
responding . . . ' (VA2 33-4, PLT 159).
The responsibility to consider a thing's need is the responsibility of
prima facie primary justice. As we have noted, when we describe this
primary right and jus ti ce as prima facie we do not mean that it lapses
when the neediness of the thing must be neglected in order to meet
the greater need of something else. It stands. And although, as
Levinas maintains, it is not derivative from my conafus essendi, neither
Postface 263
is it founded in th e conatus essendi of that toward which I have this
responsibili ty. It stands whether that toward which I have the
responsibility has a drive to persist in its being and whether it does
not as mos� people �hink is the case with the stone.
Although a deeper knowledge of something's nature may lead us
to admire or respect it more, as when we learn of a perso n's
generosity or courage, proto-ethical respect is not a matter of
degree. To suppose that proto-ethical respect is correlated with the
thing' s having in some degree a quality we value, like consciousness
or life, is to degrade it. Even to insist on the ch impan zee's closeness
to the human as the basis for acknowledging my direct proto-ethical
hence ethical responsibility toward it is to confuse primary with
secondary justice and respect. To look for sensitivity in the plant or
the stone in order to provide a basis for primary justice and respect is
to do the same. That Himalayan birch and this striated pink and green
pebble have a claim on my respect whether or not they are seats of
consciousness or unconsciousness.
Likewise, this claim would not lapse if this tree and this pebble
were not as lovely as they are - even if the tree were not as beautiful
as the magazine for which it was pulped. I have a responsibility to
things around me whether or not they are cuddly, beautiful or
sublime. Toward even mosquitoes and midges. Toward 'even the
most contemptible clod of earth', as Thomas Taylor writes in what
with ironic intention he entitled Vindication of the Rights of Brutes, a
book aimed at reducing to absurdity the idea that brutes have
rights.12 And no doubt it will seem to some that our idea of an
ecologically extended proto-ethical responsibility is reduced to
absurdity by our contention that it extends to even the cancer virus
as well as to the person or brute whose body it riddles. Are we not
exposed to the absurdity to which Plato suspected he would be
exposed if he all owed that there are Forms of hair or filth and hence
that they are sub sumed under the Form of the Good? Are we
maintaining that faeces have a face?
What we are maintaining is that i t is not only with the other
human being that we can be face to face. We are not maintaining that
it is always or ever easy to decide what is a thing and what i s
amorphous, what whole and what part or append age. Since such
difficulties beset human ethics, why should we say ecological ethics is
a non-starter because analogous problems arise? Is an agate more
honoured by being left untouched than by slicing it across to reveal
the swirling patterns inside? If we do cut it in two, have we now two
264 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
halves or one agate more than we had before? For things td)count,
must we always be able to count them? Is it persons or peoples that
matter? Why not both? Can matter maHer? Can material or the
immaterial en masse, for example earth, water or air? Or for something
to be singularly deserving of respect must it be possible to find a
count noun for it, or the name of a god? When a sapling is
overtopped by a parent tree is it clear whether it should be felled
so that the offspring may enjoy a place in the sun? When is the
human or non-human foetus a part of the mother? When does it have
a face? Some of the regard we acquire for the child after birth can be
recruited for the foetus by taking note that it too may be able to kick
its legs and suck its thumb. Our argument is an extension of this
which neither denies the ethical importance of these decisions nor
results in their being easier to make. On the contrary it makes them
more difficult, since it calls for respect for something as soon as it is
distinguished as something over against me, whether it be a whole or
a part and whatever be the criteria which decide what it is. Precisely
where such decisions are pending, where it is not possible to separate
what Kant calls reflective judgement from what he calls determinant
judgement because there is an interplay in the proto-ethical imagina­
tion of judgement as to what falls under a law and judgement as to
what laws there shall be, where Ur-teil is still poietic and apoietic
mother-wit. law in the making and unmaking, lexic and dislexic, and
where eo-respondence - the Ent-sprechen or Gesprach which we
already are, in which hearing with understanding is responding with
responsibility to the call of the friend or neighbour that accompanies
each one of us {BT 163; G4 38-40, EHD 36-8, EB 300-3) - has not
yet congealed into correspondence or adequation, there is the most
urgent call for the middle-voiced responsiveness of proto-ethical
responsibility.
Proto-ethical responsibility is difficult. It is difficult because it is
prior to the fixation of form. Without idees fixes, before clear and
distinct reasons have been separated from feelings that are obscure
and confused, it is a response to the apeiron common to folly and the
sublime, the 'humbler tenderness' of equity at the point of balance and
risk of imbalance between singularity and the case. The sublimity of
its folly derives from its always being open to reason and sense, not
on any ·self-congratulatory thought of the superiority of rationality,
linguisticality or the moral law within over my sensible nature below
or the starry sky above. Whether or not the great chain of being is
vertically suspended from a divine or Daseinal hook, when it comes
Postface 265
to my proto-ethical responsibility the chain is spread out in one plane
and the only relevant hierarchy is the neediness that elevates each
link above and vis-a-vis me. However we divide the world up into
things or discover it to be already divided, the crucial djfference, the
difference which makes monism impossible and ethics possible, but
possible as impossibility, as the impower of the responsibility which
exceeds the 'I can', is the difference of the other vis-a-vis me. That
difference remains whether or not what is asymmetrically other than
me is many, few or one. That it is all three is suggested by the
belonging together of the regions of the fourfold. The four of the
fourfold, Heidegger says in the course of interpreting Holderlin's
'Greece', is ever present in Holderlin's hymns despite its never being
reflected upon there as such. 'Four' here stands not for a calculated or
counted (gerechnet, geznhlt) sum but for the stature or figure (Gestalt, as
opposed to Gesfell) of mutual regard in which the regions are held, or,
since the mutual regard of mortals and immortals and earth and sky is
a responding of each to the other's call, for the 'relation' or narration
· (Erzahlung) in which the voices of the polylogue are medially
transmitted. Miffe, ermiltelt and Geschick are Heidegger's words here.
Heidegger hopes that in the last of these words, Geschick, his
readers will hear the resonance of Geschichte, history. Whether we
hear that resonance or not, a reminder of some sort. or other may be
in order of the fact that both what we regard as ethical and what we
regard as ethics do not stand still. This bes in with what was said a
moment ago about appendices and the amorphous. What is here or
now counted to be an appendix or without form may be counted at
some other place and other earlier or later time as a relatively
independent well-formed thing. This historical e-ducative dimension
of the ethical is recognized in a conception of ethics which locates its
proto-ethical condition in the reference of the least common
denominator of informative terms: existence. The amorphous (heaps
of compost? mist?) and the appendix (hair?, the vermiform - hence not
amorphous - non-organic appendix of the intestinal organ?) exist.
To the objection that one can di.vide through by existence and so
existence cannot be ethically significant on its own the reply is that it
is proto-ethically significant and for that reason ethically significant in
that it keeps open the possibility of what is not at a particular time or
place counted as having specifically ethical significance to be counted
as having such significance. This service is sustained across time in
that the notion of existence is still operative in the idea of what does
not exist yet or does not exist any more: I am proto-ethically bound
266 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
to the dead and destroyed, as well as to things to come. The salutary
service it does may be compared to that performed by the Rawlsian
idea of the original position and the Buddhist idea of rebirth, except
that these ideas are senHo-cen�ric or bio-cen�ric; and there is a danger
of anthropo-centrism and ego-centrism if more than rhetorical and
strategic priority is claimed for questions like What if you were a
stone?' or 'What if you were to be reborn as a stone?' - or 'What if
you were to be recycled as a stone?' where this last formulation takes
care of the possibility of rebirth being thought to be strictly
synonymous with entering into a new life.
V entity or state or event, it is of the kind that can be predicated of or
However, it is not bare existence that is proto-ethically and therefore
ethically significant. It is the existence of another being in need,
whether that be a positive need to be supported in its existence or a
need not to be interfered with. Assuming that numbers and the moral
law, for example, are existents which could not conceivably be in
need, is it because of this inconceivability that they and similar
abstract existents cannot conceivably be referents of moral respons­
ibility and respect? There may be respect or awe of some other kind,
but can there be moral respect for an existent that could never
conceivably be in need, where by need is meant a need for what
maintains it or does not interfere in its existence? Levinas says that it
is from the needfulness of the other that derives the other's imposing
majesty and height. But he does not say that my moral response is
evoked by abstract needfulness as such. It is provoked by the
needfulness of every jedeinig first other who confronts me face to
face with his, her or (we would add) its accusing look, singling me out
as host or hostess and hostage. So we can reframe our question. Do
numbers or universals and principles have in Levinasian language a
face? Are they individuals with needs? If they are, has not the attempt
to broaden the reference of ethical responsibility been reduced to the
absurd? What nonsense to suppose that we could have responsibilities
toward the number five or owe blueness moral respect! Have we not
opened the floodgates? Must we not beat a fast retreat to humanity,
consciousness, sentience or at least life as a necessary condition for
being a referent of moral regard?
Not if the referent is a singular thing. Not if it is a singular thing.
With respect to singularity: even if we do hold the view that a
Posfface 267
number or a universal is an entity, it must be an entity in a way that
allows it to be an instantiable property. The very word universal
implies this, and that very word disquaHfies it from being a face. For
that with which I am proto-ethically face to face is a singular, not
what can be instantiated. And although in that face to face regard it is
a singular that I regard, that singular is not there regarded as an
instance of singularity. It could be said that I do not regard it as an
instance of singularity because i t is its singularity that above all
concerns me, me regarde.
An analogous defence disposes of the objection that a pain is an
existent too and that it might need not to be interfered with by the
administration of Aspirin if it is to remain extant. If a pain is a kind of
suffered by an entity or part of an entity of the sort that cannot thus
be predicated of something else. A thing must be of the latter
categorially different kind if it is to be a referent of ethical
responsibility and respect. Furthermore, since such responsibility
and respect presuppose the concept of need and since the concept
of need presupposes the concepts of injury or harm, if we were to say
that a pain could be the referent of ethical responsibility or respect we
should have to say that a pain could be injured or harmed.
Still, mention was made above of the historicality of concepts and
in particular the concepts of ethics. In the light of this and of the
historical and cultural prejudices of which with hindsight we have
learned, it would be both rash and inconsistent to deny that the
argument just rehearsed in order to stem the flood may be overtaken
in a manner similar to the way in which have been, in some
communities at least, those arguments employed to deny full ethical
regard to certain groups of sentient beings. And, of course, that
argument may be refutable here and now. For the following two
reasons this would not be fatal to the achievement of our aim here,
however, nor would the postponement of a more thorough examina­
tion of the ontological issues touched on in these last paragraphs -
issues such as whether the existents with responsibility-generating
needs in the ecological fourfold, fivefold or manifold include
institutions like democracy and philosophy and whether their needs
are logical constructions out of the needs of citizens, students and
teachers.
First, we have begun to show that direct ethical responsibility and
respect may have as its referent at least something that is not human
or even sentient, a thing like a tree or a stone. If we have begun to
268 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
show that, we shall have begun to draw a little wider the curtain to
what Victor Hugo described as that 'great ethics, scarcely perceived
as yet, which will at length break through into the light, and which
will be the corollary and the complement to human ethics.' 13
Second - and here we return to the singularity of things - in the
greater ethics which will be the combination of human ethics and
Hugo's great non-human ethics, objections of the kind to which we
have just replied will not arise at the level of our being face to face
with non-human things any more than they do in our being face to
face with the other human being. Neither when the other faces me
nor when I am with the other is the other an object with properties.
So the notion of singularity to which we appealed cannot be primarily
that of an individual or parHcular in the sense in which they are
understood a s the bearers of properties and contrasted with
universals, notwithstanding the fact that these categories were
borrowed from the objector in attempting to, as we put it, stem
the flood. In borrowing these logical and ontological categories we
were making a concession that must now be recognized as one that it
is appropriate to make only when we have left behind the proto­
ethical rapport without which ethics and politics are violence. We
have left behind the radical alterity of which Levinas writes. And we
have lost sight of Heidegger's distinction between an object and a
thing. We must therefore bring these back into view by reminding
ourselves of what was said about 'ontological need' in Chapters 6 and
7. In doing so we shall also discover that although we have from time
to time spoken of ecological systematicity in the objectifying way in
which the eco1qgical scientist does, and although this manner of
speaking of an environment is appropriate and necessary if we are to
make responsible 'choices about what to do in that environment, that
point of view is not one from which can be perceived even the
scientist's own rapport with his research if perception is the
perception of an object and its properties or of a state of affairs.
The scientist's involvement with his subject matter can be made an
object of study in its own right, but that study cannot describe that
involvement without residue. It cannot do this not because there
always remains something more to be theoretically described, but
because there always remains something that exceeds theoretical
description. Exceeding theoretical description too is the proto-ethical
rapport of the face to face, belonging together with things in a
manner like that of which Heidegger's fourfold is an illustration, and
the ecological ethics which would be a chiasmus of such belonging
Postface 269
and the face to face. To suppose that there is no more to these than
what can be the content of assertoric propositions is like supposing
that there is no more to conversation than the constatation of facts,
�he descripHon of data. It is to overlook the fad that affirmation as
the constatation of a fact is affirmation as the performance of a non­
constative act, a pledge of a speaker's word, /'engage of langage, the
troth of the truth. This act is the appendage of my signature (an
essential appendage!), a declaration of fidelity made to the other's
face, a trust which is engaged before contract and which binds not
only factual statements but words in which are performed any
illocutionary deeds, so that my signing 'Here am I' is already
assigned before the fact and before the act: I have received my
authorship from the other.
In human ethics the other's face will be the face of another human
being. It may be otherwise than human in the ecological ethics
construed from a cross-reading of Levinas and Heidegger. If the
responsibility that such a green ethics entails is to give rise to
practical policies heed must be given to the findings of ecological
science understood as the study of the relations between organisms
and their environment and to the technologies by which those
policies are to be put into effect. But the primary response that
responsibility also entails will be ecological in the primitive sense in
which oikos means home. In the oikos thus understood things, as
Levinas properly says, are not only data, what is given to us. Nor
however are they only donanda, what is to be given to the other man
or woman, my guest. As well as their to-be-given-to-the-other is their
to-be-given-to touf courf. At the very least they are to be given
respect, the prima facie gift of being let be.
In an ecological system as a neighbourhood of which the system­
aticity, symmetry and balance are upset by the primary justice of
prejudice in favour of the other, it is false to say as Aquinas,
following Aristotle, does that '"neighbour" [nomine proximi) cannot
be understood to include irrational creatures because they do not
share man's rational life. Therefore charity does not extend to
14
them.' In the greater ethic which is the extension of the human
ethic charity and its responsibility extends even to the stone. In
arguing this we have gone to what looks like the least defensible
extreme. We have done this partly because one of our points of
departure is Heidegger, and a stone is the example he usually gives of
a being that has no world. We are thereby committed to an example
of a thing that belongs to an ecosystem as scientifically defined, but
270 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
only as a thing in the environment of something else of which it
might supply a need, for instance of lime for the Anemone Pulsatilla or
of reflected heat for the grape. It is not itself an organism and
apparently has no needs. Yet we have made the neediness of a thing
part of our account of our responsibility toward it. We could
therefore take as examples other inorganic things of which it is less
difficult to suppose they have needs, for instance stalactites, which
need atmospheric conditions of a specific sort if they are not to
disintegrate.
However, it is only apparently that the stone has no needs in the
ecological manifold of the Welt or Umwelf construed as neighbour­
hood, as we are construing it here. In that neighbourhood we are as
much in the environment of other things as they are in ours. In that
neighbourhood ontic need as specific want (benotigen), want of water,
food and warmth, is the specification of ontological exigency to be let
be. If this stone is to be let be it is necessary that I do not grind it
into dust. This is a prima facie responsibility in the sense that a reason
is called for if I do destroy it. And not every reason will do. Bad
reasons are those which would not persuade us to think of such
destruction as anything but an act of vandalism. We shall be unlikely
to think the reason bad if the stone is being powdered to make
pigment for van Eyck. We shall be likely to consider the destruction a
sacrifice not worth making if the resulting pigment is used only to
deface those rocks on Blackford Hill. We may be in two minds if the
paint is used to decorate pebbles from a beach or the gable end of a
Glasgow tenement. Our judgement will turn in part upon how well
the painting is dooe, on whether the texture of the stone has been
taken into account, whether its nature has been expressed, and on
whether the process is reversible or not. Where the process is
reversible one might alternate between painting the pebbles and
, returning them cleaned to their status quo in one's 'stone sanctuary', or
to their status quo ante on the beach. The question underlying these
questions is whether whatever is done is done with care, with Sorge,
with the soin that is part of the meaning of besoin, need.
It may be argued that this reference to need raises so many
problems that it would be better to make do with the notion of
respect toward being or beings.15 There is no objection to this
provided this notion is understood to make that reference. On this
understanding these pages can be read as a spelling out of the idea of
respect. It would be dangerous to forfeit Levinas's idea that what
commands my respect for the other and gives the other his, her or its
Postface 271
commanding height is the other's lowliness, poverty or need (an idea
that on our interpretation, it will be recalled, does not exclude giving
generously to him that hath). For without that idea there is a risk of
moral respect becoming confused with worship or awe in the face of
the non-morally sublime - though perhaps a need to be worshipped
could give rise to a prima facie ethical claim. We want the non-morally
sublime to be at the receiving end of a moral rapport, a rapport in
which the call to moral responsibility is initially middle-voiced, but
which, instead of remaining a contemplative aesthetic or mystical
trance, leads on to my asking what action that responsibility and
respect demand of me. Moral respect puts me under a claim; it puts
something on my agenda; there is something that needs to be done.
This is so only where the referent of respect is not entirely self­
sufficient. Thus the sublime mountain needs man not to move it and
not to bestrew it with abandoned oxygen canisters or empty Coca­
Cola tins and worse, whether or not this respect extends to the point
of denying access to the summit as with Machapuchhre, one of the
holy peaks in Nepal. And, of course, what needs to be done here
needs to be done not only for the sake of other climbers. It needs to
be done also for the sake of the mountain itself. Even inorganic things
have sakes. The sake, the Worumwillen, does not always come back to
me or to another human being. It is not necessarily a who. It may be
those sublime mountains, any gods that inhabit them provided they
have needs, and the unsublime canisters, tins and other remains.
We have conceded that aesthetic considerations can be relevant to
ecological ethicality. We can also now concede that the very idea of
complex ecological interdependence has an aesthetic aspect. Neither
of these concessions is inconsistent with our wish to make sense of a
notion of eco-ethical responsibility which does not discriminate
against the ugly, and these concessions might have been expected
in the light of our endorsement of the idea that the work of art can be
the extending of a hand. Of course, it may be argued that to
recognize something ugly as the referent of such a responsibility is to
begin seeing it as beautiful. if only because we see how it fills a niche
in a complex whole. It is not our intention to pursue this argument
here. We should certainly not want to pursue it to the point at which
the referent of responsibility had become the totality at the expense
of direct responsibility to this singular thing that faces me here and
now, this human being, this animal, this tree, this stone. This is why
Levinas' s notion of the face to face plays so crucial a part in the
argument we have wished to pursue.
272 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
Vl
At the beginning of Othen.oise than Being or Beyond Essence Levinas
cites among his epigraphs two Pensees of Pascal: ' . . . They have used
concupiscence as best they could for the general good; but it is
nothing but a pretence and a false image of charity; for at bottom it is
simply a form of hatred.' '"That is my place in the sun". That is how
the usurpation of the whole world began.' What we have been saying
is that the other is entitled to what Pascal figuratively calls a place in
the sun, but that the other is every other thing in the whole world -
including the sun whose becoming burnt out was among the
philosophers of Laputa the cause of the fear to which Mill likened
the source of his own anxiety. We have expressed our agreement
with Bentham that it is less important than Kant thinks to ask of these
others the question 'Can they reason?' and less important than
Levinas thinks to ask 'Can they talk?' This gave rise to the difficulty
of making sense of the idea that the other others, the wordless ones
who are worldless (or poor in world), as Heidegger says, can be
Signifiers, as it would seem they would have to be if they are to voice
a claim. Ein Zeichen sind wir, 'We are a sign', says Holderlin's
Mnemosyne of at least some of us, however near to being cut off
from meaning the sign may be (G39 135). to Our question is: are they
a sign too? If they are, and by Zeichen is meant what is not or not
only a natural sign in the way smoke is a sign of fire, do we not
concede that the important question is after all 'Can they talk?'. Do
we not return to., panlogism, albeit panlogism of the Saying rather
than panlogism of fhe Said such as Levinas (who however holds that
there can be no Sayipg without Said and no Said without Saying) sees
in the philosopher of System and Totality from which Infinity is
supposed to beckon us away? Will we not then have made the
capacity to speak a necessary condition for being a thing toward
which I may have a proto-ethical responsibility, an even more specific
condition than panpsychism lays down in that one version of the
latter does allow that the soul a thing must have may be a vegetable
or animal soul for instance and not necessarily endowed with reason
or speech in the way that panlogism demands? True, assuming a
panlogism of pure Saying were conceivable (perhaps it would be
something like a purely performative version of productive intellect­
ual intuition in a universe of discourse where no purely constative
speech act was ever included among the deeds performed by the
words), it would not entail that everything was of a certain being or
Posfface 273
essence, for saying is otherwise than being and beyond essence. It
would entail however that everything was metaphysical in Levinas's
sense, for to say in his sense that something is metaphysical is to say
that it is beyond being and essence. If it is incoherent to say �ha�
everything is metaphysical in this sense Levinas runs no risk of such
incoherence on this score since his philosophy of the otherwise than
being and beyond essence is not a denial of the being and essence of
the physical. On the other hand, neither does his combining a
scrupulous refusal to refuse phHsis with a witness to the mela fa
phusika mean that he is arguing for a metaphysical dualism in the way
that such a dualism is argued for by, for example, Descartes as he is
usually read. For as Descartes's metaphysics is usually read and as
metaphysics is commonly conceived, the question at stake has been
the nature or natures of substance, being or nature. Even Heidegger's
questioning is beyond metaphysics in that sense. And Levinas testifies
to what is beyond metaphysics in that traditional onto-theological
sense and beyond the fundamental ontology which is Heidegger's
questioning of it. lt testifies to a so-called metaphysical responsibility
which is even beyond the piety of the asking of questions (as, it calls
to be said, is Er-sfaunen, thaHmazein, the ontological wonder which
according to Heidegger is the originative voice, the Grundbestimmung,
which calls forth originative thinking).
We have said 'hear hear' to that testification while enlarging the
range of that responsibiLity. Since we have wanted to say that this
responsibility has no ground or unground except in a thing's being a
dependent non-self-sustaining existent other than me and hence has
no nature as its necessary condition, not even the nature or non­
nature of being a being that speaks, we have argued that something
or someone can have a claim although it may have to be voiced on its
behalf by my speaking for it. And my advocacy may be one of its
primary needs. The voice may have to be a borrowed voice. What
ultimately and pre-originally speaks in this voice is what Levinas calls
the trace of illeity and what Heidegger calls the voice which 'comes
from out of me and yet down to me', Der Ruf kommt aus mir Hnd doch
r:iber mich (BT 275). So it is a voice which even I borrow from time
immemorial and a voice which borrows me, as according to
Heidegger being and beings call to the human being and man listens
to them. It is a middle voice that affirms in being heard and before it
is heard is obeyed. To pronounce again Levinas's difficult sentence:
'The possibility of finding, anachronously, the order in the obedience
itself, and of receiving the order out of oneself, this reverting of
274 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
heteronomy into autonomy, is the very way the Infinite passes itself.'
That the poor in world or the worldless are wordless is tolerable if
The command is uttered by the mouth of him it commands' (AEAE
187-9, OBBE 147-8). The command is uttered in the voice which we
have called ,.the middle voice of ecological conscience.
That the middle voice is not unequivocal has become plain at
several points in our invocation of it throughout the preceding
chapters to articulate a resemblance between the account of
responsibility we find given by Levinas and Heidegger's account of
Gelassenheit and letting be. This resemblance consists in the fact both
authors stress, that I do not belong to myself: even authentic jemeinig
Dasein is not quite self-possessed. But while, as we discovered in
Chapter 9, the author of Totality and Infinity takes pains to exclude
exercitive will from the welcome which responsibility presupposes,
Heidegger admits that there is a trace of will in the approach to
Gelassenheit. Conscious of the problem even a trace of will presents
for Heidegger's account of gelassene thinking and for his hopes of
overcoming what he takes to be Nietzsche's subjectivist philosophy
of wilJ to power, we raised the .question of the ambiguities of efhelo,
velle, vouloir and wollen. Now that we have come back to the concept
conscience it becomes doubly relevant to note Heidegger's warning
in Being and Time that what he there names Gewissen-haben-wollen,
translated by Macquarrie and Robinson as 'wanting to have a
conscience' (BT 288), 'does not mean that one cultivates the call
voluntarily; it means solely that one is ready to be appealed to'. It is
not self-evident how 'voluntarily', willentliche, is to be interpreted
here, but it is apparent from the second part of the sentence that it
would involve more than being ready, more than the Bereitschaft of
Heidegger's Gelassenheit, and that it would mark the difference
between both this and Levinas's 'welcome' in at least one of its
interpretations from what in Chapter 9 we referred to as Meisterschaft.
In Chapter 10 we cited a passage from Otherwise than Being or
Beyond Essence that brings to a head this question of the polemical
chiasmus between what Heidegger and Levinas say about vocation
and responsibility. Heidegger writes that wanting to have a
conscience is what is meant by 'understanding the appeal'. Levinas
writes that 'the appeal is understood [and heard, s'y entend] in the
response' (AEAE 190, OBBE 149) and that the response, obedience,
precedes any hearing of the command. That Levinas is here marking
out the angles of convergence and divergence between himself and
Heidegger is confirmed by the fact that both of them find room for a
Postface 275
notion of indebtedness or guilt which is not derivative from any
particular ontic misdemeanour or from the avoidable contravention of
a law on the guilty person's part, but is the already having become
guilty �oward o�hers through being essentially in their neighbour­
hood. Now although according to Being and Time conscience cannot
be chosen having a conscience can, where this having a conscience is
,
glossed as 'being free for one's ownmost being guilty'. This choosing
is understanding the call, hence wanting to have a conscience. This
identification of choosing with understanding tallies with the warning
that wanting to have a conscience is not to be understood
voluntaristically and with the gloss of this understanding-choosing
on the same page as letting. This soft-pedalling of the wilfulness of
choosing foreshadows the analysis of Gelassenheit that Heidegger will
later give, an analysis that will be closer to the spirit of what Levinas
writes about responsibility, despite the latter's continuing reservations
about the limitation of that analysis to Sein. Meanwhile, although
Levinas should find congenial the warning Being and Time issues
against misinterpreting what is written there about will - and that
warning embraces too the Worumwillen, 'for the sake of', of that book
- he must have serious misgivings over such statements there as the
following one which, while introducing the gloss upon choosing as
letting, nevertheless emphasizes Dasein's initiativ-e: 'In understanding
the call Dasein lets its ownmost Self fake action in itself [in sich
behandeln] in terms of the potentiality-for-being which it has chosen'
(Heidegger's italics).
Not least because it compels us to read it against what Levinas
writes about goodness or saintliness as being more attached to the
being of the other than to one's own (PL 172), we must ask what
Heidegger means by the sentence, in Macquarrie and Robinson's
translation: 'one's wanting to have a conscience becomes the taking
over of that essential consciencelessness within which alone the
existentiell possibility of being "good" subsists . Gewissenlosigkeit,
'
here translated as 'consciencelessness', is the normal word for
unconscientiousness. However we translate it, Heidegger's point
seems to be that essential Gewissenlosigkeit is the ontological ­
existential precondition of goodness as judged by the standard of
the conscientious concern to live up to instituted public norms. It is
the positive condition of being guilty which provides the ontologi­
cal-existential space for moral badness understood as failure to do
what a rule or a norm requires or doing what such a rule or norm
prohibits. Although positive in the sense that it discloses Dasein's
276 The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience Postface 277

most primordial ability to be as being guilty, what it discloses is the rules or laws but from the singularities which they are supposed to
essential void (Nichtigkeit) of Dasein's being cast away (ent-werfen) serve and which, simply because they are existents in need, make a
with no self-subsistent ground. This ontological or meontological claim upon us to be prepared to overrule those rules, to outlaw those
absence of ground is the groundlessness or abyss over which is laws, perhaps to revise our idea of what it means for something to
suspended the law that grounds moral good and evil. Hence it is a make a claim, a claim that puts us under a direct responsibility toward
being guilty before the law, prior to morality and prior to respons­ it and under a responsibility to review our idea of neighbourhood and
ibility understood as answerability according to the law. Here responsibility, as we have been trying to do in this book.
responsibility must be otherwise understood. And here we are in
the realm of the questioning that brings Heidegger and Levinas
together, while keeping their answers far apart.
Despite Heidegger's description of this realm as that of uncons­
cientiousness, since we are in the realm of what makes possible
conscientiousness narrowly interpreted, we could say that we are
here, as throughout many of the preceding chapters, especially
Chapter 6, asking about the proto-ethical responsibility that is
involved in proto-conscientiousness, conscientiousness which does
not have to do simply with determinant judgement but with the
interface of determinant judgement and reflective judgement.17 We
are in the realm of what we have been calling primary or proto-ethical
justice.
'Proto-' means the same as 'primary'. We could throughout have
said 'pre-' instead of 'proto-', except that we should then have lost the
complexity of the relation of what Levinas commonly calls 'the
ethical' to ethics understood as a system. We should also have
concealed the complexity of the relation between the ontological and
the ontic as Heidegger understands these terms. For these are not
externally related terms. This is what we tried to bring out, for
example, in the fourth section of Chapter 6 in connection with one of
the changes Heidegger introduced in the fourth edition of the
Postscript to 'What is Metaphysics?' The advantage of retaining the
prefix 'proto-' in expounding Levinas is that the force of 'primary' or
'early' which it carries matches the idea that imminent if not
immanent in the dyadic face to face is a reference to the third with
whom systematic ethics comes on the scene as well as the public
linguistic system without which the other cannot address me. Autrni
is singular, but a singular plural, the first Other who is primus inter
pares.
Gewissen is not gewiss. Conscience is not certain. This is because it
is exposed to proto-ethical conscientiousness and because this is
undetermined, underdetermined or overdetermined by rules and takes
its guidance in the first and last place not from the universality of

Notes
Preface
I. Jan Gonda, 'Reflections on the lndo-European Medium', Lingua, IX
(1960), p. 49.
2. Jacques Derrida, 'Violence et metaphysique', in L'icriture et la difference
(Paris: SeuiL 1 967) pp. 11 7-228, 'Violence and Metaphysics', in
Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978)
pp. 79-153. Jacques Derrida, 'En ce moment meme clans cet ouvrage
me voici', in Fran.;ois Laruelle (ed.), Textes pour Emmanuel Levinas (Paris:
Jean-Michel Place, 1980) pp. 21-60. A translation of this by Ruben
Berezdivin is forthcoming in Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley
(eds), Re-Reading Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
3 . The proceedings of the Cerisy sessions are, expected to be published in
Jean Greisch and Jacques Rolland (eds). Efhique et philosophic premiere
(Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1990) as a volume in the collection 'La nuit
surveillee'.
4. John Llewelyn, Derrida on the Threshold of Sense (London: Macmillan,
New York: St Martin's Press,1986) pp. 90-4. See also John Llewelyn,
'Heidegger's Kant and the Middle Voice', in David Wood and Robert
Bemasconi (eds), Time and Metaphysics (Warwick: Parousia Press, 1982}
pp. 87-120.
5. Jacques De.rr.ida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuil, 1972) p. 9,
Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, Brighton: Harvester Press. 1982) pp. 8-9.
6. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Watson, 1970) p. 218. Maurice
Blanchot, L'icrifure du disasfre (Paris: GaUimard, 1980). I thank Robert
Gibbs also for drawing my attention to Michael E. Zimmerman,
1mplications of Heidegger's Thought for Deep Ecology', The Modem
Schoolman, LXIX (1986) pp. 19-43, and to Erazim Kohak. The Embers
and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nalure
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
1. Introduction to Metaphysics
1. John Stuart Mill, Autobiograpf1y (London: Oxford University Press,
1924) p. 113.
2. Ibid., p. 123.
278
Notes 279
3. Richard Price, A Review of the Principle Questions in Morals, ed. D. D.
Raphael (Oclord: Clarendon Press, 1974) p. 149.
4. Mill, op. cit., pp. 120-1.
5. Joseph Butler, Fiffeen Sennons Preached af file Rolls Chapel (1726),
Sermon XL preached on Advent Sunday.
6. David Hume, A n Inquiry Conceming the Principles of Morals (1752),
Appendix 11, 'Of Self-love'. Compare Nietzsche, The Will to Power 688:
'there is no striving for pleasure: but pleasure supervenes when that
which is being striven for is attained: pleasure is an accompaniment,
pleasure is not a motive·. Compare Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 11 74b.
7. Jean-Paul Sartre, L'ltre et le neant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943) p. 228, Being
and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (London: Methuen, 1969)
pp. 179-80.
8. Jean Wahl, Eristence humaine et transcendance (Neuchatel: Editions de la
Baconniere, 1944) p. 37.
9. Jacques Derrida, L'ecriture et la dif[erence (Paris: Seuil, 1967) p. 163,
Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978) p. 110.
10. S0ren Kierkegaard, Concluding Un.scientific Postscript, trans. David F.
Swenson and Waiter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1941) p. 350.
11. Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Oclord: Clarendon Press,
1970).
12. Martin Luther, Works, Lectures on Romans, ed. Hilton C. Oswald (Saint
Louis: Concordia, 1972-) p. 513. I am grateful to Fergus Kerr for
directing me to some of the material referred to in this section.
13. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, I, 26, 27, cp Senno 179A, 4. See
Oliver O'Donovan, The Problem of Self-love in Augustine (Newhaven
and London: Yale University Press, 1980} p. 130 and p. 194 note 47.
14. John Calvin, 'Catechism of the Church of Geneva', in Calvin:
Theological Treatises, trans. J.K.S. Reid (London: SCM, 1952) p. 117.
15. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 2a2ae, 25, 4.
16. Karl Barth, Church Dogma/ics, vol. I, 2, trans. G. T. Thomson and
Harold Knight (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1956) pp. 451-2. See S. G.
Smith, The Argument to the Other: Reason beyond Reason in the Thoug!rf
of Karl Barlh and Emmanuel Levinas (Chico, California: Scholars Press,
1983).
17. S0ren Kierkegaard, journals and Papers, ed. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967-75) vol. I. No 944.
18. S0ren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian
Marvin Swenson (London: Oxford University Press, 1946) p. 74.
Compare Heidegger's 'translation and commentary' of Heraclitus's
Fragment B 50: 'Do not listen to me, the mortal speaker, but be in
hearkening to the Laying that gathers; first belong to this and then you
hear properly, such hearing is when a letting-lie-together-before occurs
280 Notes
by which the gathering letting-lie. the Laying that gathers, lies before
us as gathered; when a letting-lie of the letting-lie-before occurs, the
fateful comes to pass; then the truly fateful, i.e. destiny alone, is: the
unique One unifying All' (VA3 21-2, EGT 75).
19. Ibid., p. 46.
20. Levinas refers to the descriptions of the il y a in Maurice Blanchot,
Thomas /'Obscur (Paris: Gallimard, 1941, 1950).
21. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, p. 38.
22. Blaise Pascal, Oeuures (Paris: Hachette, 1925), Vol XIII, Pensees II.
section VI. pp. 26Cr8. Compare Heidegger G39 124 on Heraclitus
Fragment 48: '"Dem Bogen ist namlich der Name [bios) Leben, das
Werk aber Tod" (die ausserste Gegensatze des Seyns in einem
Zusammen]'.
23. In an interview with Fran�ois Poirie in Emmanuel Llvinas: Qui eres-vous?
(Lyon: La Manufacture, 1987), p. 103, Levinas says that the foundation
and exigency of all justice is natural benevolence. This appears to
contradict the claim that the exigency of justice is otherwise than being
or beyond essence: meta-physical. The appearance of contradiction can
be at least diminished by noting that in apposition to 'this natural
benevolence' is 'this simple and direct responsibility with regard to the
other' and by insisting that this latter phrase must be read as a
reference to the metaphysical 'foundation', which is more strictly a
groundlessness than a ground or principle: an anarchic responsibility. A
similar problem is raised a few pages later (p. 109). The topic there is
what levinas calls fraternity. Having stated that this is not to be
understood in a biological sense he goes on to say that Cain is not the
brother of Abel and that 'true fraternity should be established after the
scandal of this murder'. This suggests that tnte fraternity is incompat­
ible with mC;ns reus and that Cain's being in a true sense brother to
Abel is dependent on Cain's being in a state of good will. But Levinas
tells us elsewhere: 'that all men are brothers is not added to man as a
moral conquest [a virtue7), but constitutes his ipseity. Because my
position as an 1 is effectuated (s'euertue) already in fraternity the face can
present itself to me as a face' (TI 25 7; 279-80). So since the
commandment 'Thou shalt not murder' is to be read in Abel's eyes,
is not Cain a true brother of Abel even when the murder is being
committed?
2. Anarchic Resp onsibility
1. Jacques Derrida, Parages (Paris: Galilee, 1986).
2. Shawabti: 'mummyform figure, whose function was to ad as substitute
for the dead if called for forced labour in the next world. Each one is
generally inscribed wirh the owner's name and magic formula as
follows: (name of the owner) says "0 shawabtL if (owner's name) is
Notes 281
detailed for any task to be done there (in the underworld) as a man s i
bound. namely, to cultivate the fields, to flood the banks (of the fields,
i.e. water them) and carry sand to the East and to the West, then say
You, Here am I'" (Burrell Colledion, Glasgow).
3. The Penlateuclt and Haftorahs: Leviticus. ). H. Hertz (ed.) (Oxford:
University Press, 1932) p. 223.
4. John Rawls, A Theory of justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1972) Chapter 3.
5. P. F. Strawson, 'Social Morality and Individual Ideal', Philosophy, 36
(1961). }. 0. Urmson. 'Saints and Heroes', in A. I. Melden (ed.) Essays in
Moral Philosophy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1958).
6. However, it is Hegel who is the author most in question in Totality and
Itrfinity. What we have referred to as Levinas's desire to have it both
ways is his reopening of a question similar in its structure to the one
dealt with by Hegel under the headings of sense- and self-certainty.
Levinas is taking up a challenge something like the one Hegel believes
he defeats when he shows · that the proponent of sense-certainty can
only say the opposite of what he means.
7. Emmanuel Levinas, Verite du devoilement et verite du temoignage', La
Testimo11ianza (Padua: Cedam, Archivio di Filosofia, 1972), p. 110.
8. Jacques Derrida, La veriti en peinture (Paris: Flammarion. 1978) p. 189,
The Truth in Paint ing, trans. Geoff Bennington and !an McLeod
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 1987) pp. 165-6.
9. The subtitle of the paperback edition of Glas is Que resle-t-il du savoir
absolu?
10. G. W. f. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1977) pp. 125-6.
11. I am grateful to Basil O'Neil for inducing me to sharpen this point.
12. Jacques Derrida, 'Nombre de oui'. in Psyche: Inventions de /'autre (Paris:
Galilee, 1987) pp. 648-9.
3. Who is My Neighbour?
1. )eremy Bentham. An Introductron to the Principles of Morals arrd
Legislation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907) p. 311.
2. See on the subject of shoes Emmanuel Levinas, Du sacre au saint (Paris:
Editions de Minuit, 1977) pp. 117-lS.
3. lmmanuel Kant, The Metaphysical Principles of Virhte (part 11 of The
Metaphysics of Morals) trans. lames Ellington (New York: Bobbs­
Merrill. 1964) p. 105.
4. Ibid., p. 106.
5. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William H. Hallo
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1970).
6. Ibid., p. 214.
282 Notes
7. See also Emmanuel Levinas and Franc;:oise Armengaud, 'Entretien avec
Emmanuel Levinas·. Revue de metaphysique et de morale, 90 (1985)
296-310, p. 302.
B. The reply made to the question the author put to Levinas on this issue
at the decade on his work at Cer isy in 19B6 included reference to
whether in the animal's eyes it is possi ble to read the command Thou
shalt not kill'.
9. lmmanuel Kant. The Moral Law (Kant's Groundwork of the Melaphysic of
Morals) trans, H.J. Paton (London: Hutcheson, 1963) pp. 67, 90-1.
10. Alexander Broadie and Elizabeth M. Pybus. 'Kant's Treatment of
Anim als', Philosophy, 49 (1974) 375-83, p. 376.
11. J.P. Hyatt, Exodus (New Century Bible) (London: Oli phant, 1971)
p. 214.
12. See Catherine Chalier, Torah, cosmos et nature', Les nouveaux cahiers,
79 (hiver 19B4-5) 3-13.
13. Maurice Blanchot, L'ecrilure du desaslre (Paris: Gallimard, 19BO} p. 49.
4. Critical Responsibility
1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Praclical Reason and Ofher Works on the
Theory of Ethics, ed. T. K. Abbott (London: Longmans. Green, 1B89)
p. 169.
2. Ibid., p. 18.
3. Ibid., p. 310.
4. Meister Eckhart, Sermons, in Meisler Ed:hart, ed. Raymond B. Blackney
(New York: Harper and Row, 1941) p. 220.
5. Jean Wahl. Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (Saint­
Pierce de Salerne: Montfort, 2nd ed. 1951} pp. 26-7.
6. Jacques Derri�a. 'Mochlos ou le confli t des facultes', Philosophie, 2
(19B4) p. 30.
7. 'Philoso phy is being at home with self, just like the homeliness of the
Greek; it is man's being at home in his mind, at home with himself. If
we are at home with the Greeks, we must be at home more particularly
with philosophy.' G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy,
vol . l, trans. E. S. Haldane (Lo ndo n: Kegan Paul, Trench, Triibner & Co.,
1892) pp. 1 51-2.
B. Kant, ibid., pp. 78, B1.
9. In a lecture given at Edinburgh in 19B9 Jane Goodall spoke of
McG regor, one of the chimpanzees whose biography she had been
writing, and of her waiting nearby lest he should die alone. See her In
the Shadow of Man (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolso n,19B9) Chapter
17, and The Chimpanzees of Gombe (Camb ridge. Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 19B6). But there are manifold ways of being near
and being alone. Not leHing someone die alone has to be interpreted
in such a way as to be consistent with a concern not to be intrusive.
Notes 283
Captain Oates wished t o die alone. That wish may have extended to
his wishing his companions not to have him present in their thoughts
as he died. Could it have extended to his wishing them not to have
him present in their thoughts after he had died? Could his last will and
testament have been to be forgotten? Would that have been a betrayal
of their companionship, or a mark of his companionship's strength?
10. See John Llewelyn, 'Heidegger's Kant and the Middle Voice', in Da vid
Wood and Robert Bemasconi (eds}, Time and Metaphysics (Warwick:
Parousia Press, 1982), pp. 87-120; John Llewelyn, Derrida 011 the
Threshold of Sense (London: Macmillan, New York: St Martin's Press,
19B6} pp. 90-4; Charles E. Scott. The Middle Voice n i Being and Time',
in John C. Sallis, Giuseppina Moneta and Jacques Taminiaux (eds} The
Collegium Phaenomenologicum: Tire Firs/ Ten Years (Do rdrecht: Kluwer,
1988) pp. 159-73.
11. Hildegard Feick, Index zu Heideggers 'Sein und Zeif' (Tiibinge n :
Niemeyer, 1968).
12. Richard Kearney, Poetique du possible (Paris: Beauchesne, 1984} Chapter
6. Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens (Tiibin gen: Ni emey er,
1969} pp. 1-25, On Time and Being, trans. joan Stambaugh (New
York: Harper and Row, 1972).
13. B. F. C. Atkinson, The Greek Language {London: Faber and Faber, 1931)
p. 136ff. T. Burrow, The Sanskrit Language (London: Faber and Faber,
1955) pp. 293-4. Hans Krahe, Grundz.Uge der vergleichenden Syntax
der indogermanischen Sprachen (Innsb ruck: Wolfgang Meid. 1972)
pp. 114-16.
5. Post-Critical Poiesis and Thinking
I. Cp John Llewe lyn, 'Bel ongings', Research in Phenomenology. XVII (1987)
pp. 1 1 7-36.
2. Robert Bernasconi, The Question of Language iu Heidegger's History of
Being (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, London: Macmillan, 1985)
p. 31. Joseph J . K ockelmans, Heidegger on Arf and Art Works
(Dordrecht: Nijhoff. 1985) pp. 194-202.
3. Heidegger's reference on p. 52 of G39 to the Abgrund between the
mountains seems to confirm that the picture he intends to evoke is one
of peaks that are close to each other as the chough flies, but divided by
a deep cleft. Not that the geography matters much, for, as he says in
The Essence of Language', 'Two isolated farmsteads separated by an
hour's walk across the fields can be the best of neighbours, while two
townhouses facing each other across the street or even sharing a wall
may know no neighbourhood.'
4. B ernasconi, ibid.. p. 46, no te 2.
5. E mmanuel Levinas, 'La realite et son ombre', Les temps modernes, 38
(1948) pp. 769-B9; 'Reality and its Shadow' (CPP 1-13).
 284 Notes
6. Lucien Levy-BruhL Les fonctions mentales dans les societi
s in[i!rieures
(Paris: Alcan, 1910) pp. 76-7.
7. See R. D. Miller, Schiller and the Idea of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1970) p. 115. Friedrich Schiller, On fhe Aesfhefic Education of
Man, ed. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1967).
8. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Aesthetic judgement, trans. J. C. Meredith
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911).
9. The first line of the chorus is cited in Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy
(London: Penguin, 1959) p. 54. On the following page and as the
motto of his book Otto cites the line from Goethe's Faust which
Levinas cites as motto of the last chapter of Otherwise than Being or
Beyond Essence and which we have recited as a motto of this chapter.
Otto was Professor of Theology at Marburg during the years
Heidegger was there. The first edition of Das Heilige was published
in 1917. By 19.36 there had already been twenty-four editions. The
explicit and tacit references made by Heidegger and Levinas to Otto
and what he writes concerning the numinous merit dose study. See
Edmund Husserl, Letter to Rudolf Otto (5 March 1919), in Thomas
Sheehan (ed.), Heidegger the Man and the Thinker (Chicago: Precedent
Publishing, Inc., 1981) pp. 23-6, and Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger:
Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1988)
pp. 1 15f, 126.
10. 'Das anfangliche Denken (Oanken) ist der Widerhall der Gunst des
Seins, in der sich das Einziges Uchtet und sich ereignen lasst: dass
Seiendes ist (. . . in der es sich lichtet und das Einzige sich ereignen
liisst: dass Seiendes ist). Oieser Widerhall ist die menschliche Antwort
auf das Wort der lautlosen Stimme des Seins. Die Antwort des
Denkens (Die , sprachlose Antwort des Dankens im Opfer) ist der
Ursprung des i-nenschlichen Wortes, welches Wort erst die Sprache als
1: die Verlautung <des Wortes in die Worter entstehen lasst'.
11. Emmanuel Levinas, 'Philosophie, justice et amour', Concordia, 3 (1983),
'I
p. 69.
l Erich Dinkler, Das Apsismosaik van 5. Apo/linare in Classe (Cologne and
I
12.
Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1964) pp. 77-8. Catherine Chalier,
'Torah, cosmos et nature', Les nouveaux cahiers, 79 (1984-85) pp . .3-13.
1.3. To mention but four of the many places at which Levinas cites the
1 sentence from Dostoevsky, on p. 186 of AEAE (p. 146 of OBBE) and
p. 179 of PL the words 'and for everything' are omitted, whereas on
p. 107 (101) of El and p. 119 of DDV they are not. The spirit of these
latter passages is expressed most astonishingly of all in the sentences
we cite from Levinas as an epigraph of our book (an epigraph which
mentions oxygen in the next breath). How astonishing these sentences
are will depend on whether visible entities have an invisible face; that
is to say, on whether their visibility can be transformed into invisibility
Notes 285
by song (see Chapter 7), or at least on whether they make an audible
call.
Given the mention this epigraph makes of respiration and given the
irnpor�ance of the metaphor of brea�hing in Emmanuel Levinas's work
it is intriguing to discover that his son, the distinguished pianist and
composer Michael Levinas, has written a piece for amplified bass flute
called 'Arsis and Thesis' and that in the note for the programme which
he and other members of the group L'Itineraire presented at the
Edinburgh Festival in 1989 he writes that arsis and thesis, terms to
describe the rise and fall of a musical phrase in G regorian plainsong,
are 'firstly inhalation and exhalation'. He says that the piece is 'a song
of human breathing . . . inspired by listening to the breathing of the ill
(see also the death of the grandmother in Le cote de Guermanles . . . )'.
Speaking of this vent de crise as oxygen is administered to the
grandmother, Marcel records: 'ma grand'mere semblait nous adresser
un long chant heureux qui remplissait la chambre, rapide et musical . . .
Peut-etre a l'haleine, insensible comme celle du vent dans la flUte d'un
roseau, se melait�il dans ce chant quelques-uns de ces soupirs plus
humains qui, liberes a l'approche de la mort, font croire a des
impressions de souffrance ou de bonheur ·chez ceux qui deja ne
sentent plus, et venaient ajouter un accent plus melodieux, mais sans
changer son rhythme, a cette longue phrase qui s'elevait, montait
encore, puis retombait pour s'elancer d e nouveau de la poitrine allegee,
a la poursuite de 1'oxygene'. Although, like Marcel in this long
sentence, Michael Levinas is speaking of human breath, he also says
'An instrument must breathe like a singer'. He is speaking of course of
the flute. But would it be complete nonsense to say this of an
instrument like a hammer? It could be an interim metaphor through
which to say that an instrument should not be treated only as an
instrument, but also as an end in itself. Interim, because to treat an
instrument as a human being to the end is not to treat it as an end in
itself. See Postface.
14. Maurice Blanchot, 'L' etrange et !'etranger', Nouvel/e revue franr;aise, 12
(1958) p. 673. For a finely nuanced discussion of this essay and of the
relationship between Blanchot and Levinas see Paul Davies, 'Difficult
Friendship', Research in Phenomenology XVIII (1988) pp. 149-72.
6. Ontological Responsibility and the Poetics of Nature
1. Although the four 'regions' are distinguished by Holderlin and by
Heidegger in Wie wenn am Feiertage . . ., the word Geviert does not
appear in Heidegger until ten years after the date of this essay. Michel
Deguy tells me that he and Franc;:ois Feclier did not consciously intend
here any association ecarteli may have with Geviert. So their translation
really was inspired !
284 Notes
6. lucien levy-Bruhl, Les fonclions mentales dans /es societe s infirieures
(Paris: Alcan, 1910) pp. 76-7.
7. See R. D. Miller, Schiller and tire Idea of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1970) p. 115. Friedrich Schiller, On lhe Aesthetic Education of
Man, ed. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1967).
8. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Aesthetic judgement, trans. J. C. Meredith
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911).
9. The first line of the chorus is cited in Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy
(London: Penguin, 1959) p. 54. On the following page and as the
motto of his book Otto cites the line from Goethe's Fa�1sf which
levinas cites as motto of the last chapter of Otherwise lha11 Being or
Beyo�rd Essence and which we have recited as a motto of this chapter.
Otto was Professor of Theology at Marburg during the years
Heidegger was there. The first edition of Das Heilige was published
in 1917. By 1936 there had already been twenty.four editions. The
explicit and tacit references made by Heidegger and Levinas to Otto
and what he writes concerning the numinous merit close study. See
Edmund Husserl, Letter to Rudolf Otto (5 March 1919), in Thomas
Sheehan (ed.), Heidegger the Man and the Thinker (Chicago: Precedent
Publishing, Inc., 1981) pp. 23-6, and Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger:
Unterwegs zu sei11er Biograpl1ie (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1988)
pp. 115(, 126.
10. 'Das anfangliche Denken (Danken) ist der Widerhall der Gunst des
Seins, n i der sich das Einziges lichtet und sich ereignen lasst: dass
Seiendes ist (. . . in der es sich lichtet und das Einzige sich ereignen
lasst: dass Seiendes ist). Dieser Widerhall ist die menschliche Antwort
auf das Wort der lautlosen Stimme des Seins. Die Antwort des
Denkens (Die sprachlose Antwort des Dankens im Opfer) ist der
Ursprung des menschlichen Wortes, welches Wort erst die Sprache als
die Verlautung des Wortes in die Worter entstehen lasst'.
11. Emmanuel Levinas, 'Philosophie, justice et amour', Concordia, 3 (1983),
p. 69.
12. Erich Dinkler, Das Apsismosaik von 5. Apollinare in Classe (Cologne and
Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1964) pp. 77-8. Catherine Chalier,
'Torah, cosmos et nature', Les nouveaur cahiers, 79 (1984-85) pp. 3-13.
13. To mention but four of the many places at which levinas cites the
sentence from Dostoevsky, on p. 186 of AEAE (p. 146 of OBBE) and
p. 179 of PL the words 'and for everything' are omitted, whereas on
p. 107 (101) of El and p. 119 of DDV they are not. The spirit of these
latter passages is expressed most astonishingly of all in the sentences
we· cite from Levinas as an epigraph of our book (an epigraph which
mentions oxygen in the next breath). How astonishing these sentences
are will depend on whether visible entities have an invisible face; that
is to say, on whether their visibility can be transformed into invisibility
Notes 285
by song (see Chapter 7), or at least on whether they make an audible
call.
Given the mention this epigraph makes of respiration and given the
importance of the metaphor of breathing in Emmanuel Levinas's work
it is intriguing to discover that his son, the distinguished pianist and
composer Michael Levinas, has written a piece for amplified bass flute
called 'Arsis and Thesis' and that in the note for the programme which
he and other members of the group L'Itineraire presented at the
Edinburgh Festival in 1989 he writes that arsis and thesis, terms to
describe the rise and fall of a musical phrase in Gregorian plainsong,
are 'firstly inhalation and exhalation'. He says that the piece is 'a song
of human breathing . . . inspired by listening to the breathing of the ill
(see also the death of the grandmother in Le cote de Guermanfes . . . )'.
Speaking of this vent de crise as oxygen is administered to the
grandmother, Marcel records: 'ma grand'mere semblait nous adresser
un long chant heureux qui remplissait la chambre, rapide et musical . . .
Peut-etre a l'haleine, insensible comme celle du vent dans la flute d'un
roseau, se melait:il dans ce chant quelques-uns de ces soupirs plus
humains qui, liberes a l'approche de la mort, font croire a des
impressions de souffrance ou de bonheur chez ceux qui deja ne
sentent plus, et venaient ajouter un accent plus melodieux, mais sans
changer son rhythme, a cetle longue phrase qui s'elevait, montait
encore, puis retombait pour s'elancer de nouveau de la poitrine allegee,
a la poursuite de l'oxygene'. Although. like Marcel in this long
sentence, Michael Levinas is speaking of human breath, he also says
'An instrument must breathe like a singer'. He is speaking of course of
the flute. But would it be complete nonsense to say this of an
instrument like a hammer? lt could be an interim metaphor through
which to say that an instrument should not be treated only as an
instrument, but also as an end in itself. Interim, because to treat an
instrument as a human being to the end is not to treat it as an end in
itself. See Postface.
14. Maurice Blanchot, 'L'etrange et l'etranger', Nouve/le revue frallt:aise, 1 2
(1958) p. 673. For a finely nuanced discussion of this essay and of the
relationship between Blanchot and levinas see Paul Davies, 'Difficult
Friendship', Research in Phenomenology XVIII {1988) pp. 149-72.
6. Ontological Responsibility and the Poetics of Nature
I. Although the four 'regions' are distinguished by Holderlin and by
Heidegger in Wie wen11 am Feierfage . ., the word Gevierl does not
.
appear in Heidegger until ten years after the date of this essay. Michel
Deguy tells me that he and Francois Fedier did not consciously intend
here any association ecartele may have with Geviert. So their translation
really was inspired !
286 Notes
2. In spelling out this 'prefiguration', ni determining how much what it
prefigures is a refiguration of it, attention would have to be given to
the difference between the oneness of the totality of being with which
metontology is occupied and the onefoldness of the fourfold. Attention
must be given to this also in assessing Reiner Schiirmann's statements
in Le principe d'anarchie: Heidegger et it! question de l'agir (Paris: Seuil,
1982) p. 176: The point of the concept of the fourfold is thus directed
against every representation of a "universe", of a world turned towards
the One . . . The event of appropriation is such only as "essential
being toward one another" twesenhafles Zueinander] of dimensions of
manifestation that have only multiplicity in common with the former
phenomenological "regions"'.
3. On the question of Levinas's 'metontology' see Robert Bernasconi,
'Fundamental Ontology, Metontology, and the Ethics of Ethics', Irish
Philosophical Journal 4 (19B7} p. BB. See also by the same author, "The
Double Concept of Philosophy" and the Place of Ethics in Being and
Time', Research in Phenomenology, XVlli (19BB), pp. 41-57. The latter
suggests a double reading of the Marburg lecture courses and of Being
a11d Time which would 'take the language of the ontico-ontological
assertions and seek to maintain the ontical and the ontological in their
distinctness, while at the same time acknowledging that the two
depend on each other in such a way that their separation cannot be
sustained [. . .] in such a way that a place is found for ethics whereby
it is no longer simply subordinated to ontology and so reduced to
some kind of supplement or appendage' (p. 54). The parties to a
chiasmus, for example Heidegger and Levinas as read in this book, are
not appendages to each other, but they are supplements in the
Derridean sense explained in the Preface, and Bernasconi's reading
of Heidegger seems to presuppose something like a double supple­
ment in this sense. The phrase 'original ethics' introduced in the 'Letter
on Humanism' could be pressed into service to mark this chiasmus
were it not that it is there applied, as Bernasconi notes, to the truth,
that is to say, the history of being (G9 356, W 187, BW 235}. Hence
our phrases 'ontological responsibility' and 'ontological obligation',
making the most of the hints regarding Verbindlichkeit in The
Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, as in the second epigraph of
our book.
4. See the remarks on Levinas's 'methodology' in Adriaan Peperza.k's
review of Autrement qu'etre ou au-dela de /'essence in the Philosophische
Rundschau 24 (1977} pp. 113-16.
5. See William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought
(The Hague: Nijhoff, 1967) p. 51B.
6. Ibid., p. XIV.
7. Ecdesiastes 3: 1-4. I am grateful to Beryl Llewelyn and the late Jack
Spruce for reminding me of the aptness of these words.
Noles 287
B. See Werner Marx, Gibt es auf Erde11 ein Mass? (Hamburg: Meiner,
19B3}, and Ethos und Lebenswelt: Mitleidenkonnen als Mnss (Hamburg:
Meiner, 1986).
9. Beda Allemann, Holder/in und Heidegger (Freiburg im Breisgau: Atlantis,
1954) p. 24.
10. I am grateful to David Llewelyn for suggesting the comparison and
contrast with Popper.
11. Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (London: Cape, 19B7) p. 14
7. The Responsibility of Saving the World through Song
1. See also John Llewelyn, 'On the saying that philosophy begins in
thaumazein', in Andrew Benjamin (ed.) Post-Structuralist Classics (London
and New York: Routledge, 19B8) pp. 173-91. (On p. 173, after '. . .
Meno' read 'likens the effect Socrates has on those he approaches.
Theaetetus and Meno . . .'.)
2. Michel Haar, Le chant de la terre: Heidegger et les assises de /'histoire de
l'etre (Paris: L'Herne, 1985} pp. 242ff. But this fine book must be read
and reread in its entirety. Another key study of the topic of this
chapter is David Farrell Krell, 'Daimon Life, Nearness and Abyss: An
Introduction to Za-ology', Research in Phenomenology, XVII (1987)
pp. 23-53.
3. Maurice Blanchot, L'espace liUiraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955) p. 1B2ff.
Paul de Man, 'Tropes (Rilke)' in Allegories of Reading (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1979) pp. 2o-56.
4. Hermann Kunisch, Rainer Maria Rilke: Dasein und Dichtung (Berlin:
Duncker & Humblot, 1975) p. 36.
5. Ibid., p. 404.
6. See forthcoming publications by Charles Bigger on Kant's methodo­
logy for ingenious suggestions as to how mathematical construction
may be reconstrued.
7. Jean Wahl, Existence humaine et franscendance (Neuchatel: Editions de la
Baconniere, 1944) p. 38.
B. Jacques Derrida, De /'esprit: Heidegger et la question (Paris.: Galilt�e, 19B7}
p. B9, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington
and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) p. 57,
and Psychi: Inventions de /'autre (Paris: GaliJee, 1987) p. 411. I thank
Manfred Riedel for a suggestion I have followed in the tentative
proposal for a solution of this problem which I go on to make in the
text.
9. Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Works, trans. G. Craig Houston (London:
Hogarth, 1954) vol. I, p. 39.
10. David Farrell KreiL 'Spiriting Heidegger', in Research in PhellOmenology,
XVIll (19B8}, pp. 205-30. On p. 215 Krell writes: 'if the lizard on
288 Notes
a rock is benumbed, benommen, so is Dasein, precisely when it
confronts the uncanniness of its existence in anxiety.' Perhaps some­
thing like this is being said in the article referred to in note 1 above,
and the paragraph in this chapter to which that no te is appended
where attention is drawn to the kinship between the ontological
astonishment of thaumauin, of being tr-sfaunt, and the stupor of
being stunned, of being all but turned to stone, to the estate of the
rock underneath the lizard and the lichen, dust returned to dust.
8. The Absolute Master
1. Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972, 1980).
2. Maurice Blanchot, L'espace litteraire (Paris: Gallimard. 1955) pp. 163-4.
3. Paul de Man, Tropes (Rilke)' in Allegories of Reading (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1979) pp. 2Q-56.
4. Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having, trans. Katharine Farrer (Westminster:
Dacre Press, 1949) p. 171.
5. See Tina Chanter's The Question of Death: The Time of the I and the
Time of the Other', Irish Philosophical journal, 4 (1987) pp. 94-119.
6. See the report of the dialogue with Heidegger at the evangelical
Academy of Hofgeismar, December 1953, along with other statements
on the subject of theology and religion extracted from Heidegger's
writings, in Richard Kearney and Joseph Stephen O'Leary (eds),
Heidegger et la question de Dieu (Paris: Grasset, 1980) pp. 313-36. I
thank John Sallis for the generosity which enabled me to see this
report.
7. See Alphonso Lingis, 'The Elemental Imperative'. forthcoming.
8. One revised version of Kitchener's 'Your country needs YOU' poster
says 'YOU have the power to change the face of Britain. Vote For
Trees'. In another the message that The Blue Cross needs you' is
conveyed by a dog pointing at you with a bandaged paw.
9. I thank John Haldane for directing me to literature on Hopkins.
10. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell,
1953) p, 221.
9. The Feeling Intellect
1. 'Nur noch ein GoH kann uns retten', conversation with Martin
Heidegger on 23 September 1966, Der Spiegel, 23 (1976), pp. 193-219.
2. R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1940). John Llewelyn, 'Collingwood's Doctrine of Absolute Presuppo­
sitions', Philosophical Quarterly, 1 1 (19i>I), pp. 49-60, and 'Propositions
as Answers', American Philosophical Quarterly, 2· (1965), pp. 305-11.
Notes 289
3. Ludwig WiHgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell,
1953) p. 178.
4. See Catherine Chalier, Figures du fi!minin: lecture d'Emmanuel Levinas
(Paris; La nuit surveillee, 1982), ]acques Derrida, 'En ce momen t meme
dans cet ouvrage me voici', in Fran.;ois Laruelle (ed.), Tertes pour
EmmJlnuel Livinas (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1980), Tina Chanter,
'Feminism and the Other', in PL, pp 32-56.
5. In John Clarke's work in progress Levinas's doctrine of creation is
applied in conjunction with certain dochines of Maximus the
Confessor to develop a doctrine of the Trinity. See also John D.
Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church
(London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985) pp. 44-6, 86.
6. Robert Nye, in a review of Donald Plater, A Ringing Glass - The Life of
Rainer Maria Rilke, in The Scotsman, 16 August 1986.
7. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, What the Germans lack',
§6 and §7. Oavid Farrell Krell, 'Heidegger's Reading of Nietzsche:
Confrontation and Encounter', journal of the British Society for
Phenomenology, 1 4 (1983), p. 280. See also Waiter Kaufmann,
Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (New York: Vintage
Books, 1968) pp. 200 ff.
8. Charles E. Scott, 'The Middle Voice in Being and Time', in John C.
Sallis, Giuseppina Moneta and Jacques Taminiaux, eds, The Collegium
Phaenomenologicum: The First Te11 Years (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988)
pp. 159-73, and Charles E. Scott, 'The Middle Voice of Metaphy­
sics', Research in Phenomenology, XLII (June 1989), pp. 743-64.
9. Jacques Derrida, Chora, in Poikilia, Etudes offertes a ]ean-Pierre Vernant
(Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1987) pp. 265-96.
10. Martin Heidegger, Quesfions Ill, trans. Andre Preau, Roger Munier and
Julien Hervier (Paris: Gallimard, 1966) p. 212.
11. Jacques D errida, 'Psyche: Invention de !'autre', ni Psyche: Invenfions de
/'autre (Paris: Galilee, 1987) pp. 11-61. See also John Llewelyn,
'Responsibility with Indecidability', forthcoming in David Wood
(ed.), Derrida: a Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell).
12. Jacques Derrida, La virite en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978) p. 189,
The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and !an McLeod
(Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1987) pp. 165-6. See
also 'Geschlecht: difference sexuelle, difference ontologique' and 'La
main de Heidegger (Geschlecht 11)' in Jacques Derrida, Psyche,
pp. 395-414 and pp. 415-51, a translation of which by John P. Leavey
Jr under the title 'Geschlechf 11: Heidegger's Hand' appears in John Sallis
(ed.), Deconslrucfion and Philosophy (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
1987) pp. 161-96. For the first of these two essays see also Michel
Haar (ed.), Marlin Heidegger (Paris: L'Herne, 1983) pp. 419-30. See also
Jacques Derrida, 'En ce moment meme dans cet ouvrage me voici', in
Fran�ois Laruelle (ed.), Texfes pour Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Jean-Michel
290 Notes
Place, 1980) pp. 21-60. A translation by Ruben Berezdivin of this
essay is forthcoming in Robert Bemasconi and Simon Critchley (eds),
Re-Reading LeviHas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
One can imagine a psychoanalyst asking whether the story of
Adam's rib could be read nachtraglich as a story of penis envy and
whet-her, since male castration is emasculation, female castration could
conceivably be effemination? Is not this ef- a privative ex-7 Does it
point in the direction of a dissemination of sex. as a seventeenth­
century text cited in the Oxford English Dictionary appears to do when
it alludes t o 'effeminacy (by some esteemed the property of a
souldier)'7 Does it point in the direction of a word that points in
opposite directions? For a discussion of Karl Abel's The Antithetical
Sense of Primal Words' see Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the
Complele Psychological Wo rks, vol. XVII (London: Hogarth Press and the
Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1955) pp. 218ff. See also John Llewelyn,
Derrida OI'J fhe Threshold of Sense (London: Macmillan, New York: St
Martin's Press, 1986) pp. 9 4-7.
13. Maurice Blanchot, L'ecrifure du dsastre
e (Paris: Gallimard, 1980).
14. Emmanuel Levinas, 'Verite du devoilement et verite du temoignage', La
Teslimonianza (Padua: Archivio di Filosofia, Cedam, 1972), p. 105.
15. See John Llewelyn, 'Belongings , Research in Phenomenology, XVII ( 1 98 7)
'
pp. 128-9.
10. Something Like the Middle Voice
I. Austin Farrer, Reflective Fait11 (London: SPCK, 1972) p. 193.
2. I thank David Bastow. lames Giles, George Hall and John Peacock for
coming to my assistance with Tao and other topics in Oriental
thought. For a discussion of Heidegger's analysis of thaumazein in
the Grundfragen der Philosophie (G45) and of what Plato, Aristotle and
other philosophers say about this, see John Llewelyn, 'On the saying
that philosophy begins in thaumaz.ein', in Andrew Benjamin (ed.), Post­
Structuralist Classics (London and New York: Routledge, 1988)
pp. 173-91. See Chapter 7, note l .
3. See John Llewelyn 'Responsibility with Indecidability', forthcoming in
David Wood (ed.), Derrida: a Critical Reader (Oxfo rd: Blackwell).
4. Jacques Derrida, 'Lettre a un ami japonais', in Psychi: Inventions de /'autre
(Paris: Galilee, 1987) p. 390, and David Wood and Robert Bernasconi
(eds), Derrida and Differance (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1988) p. 5.
5. Levinas sometimes s ays that the obedience is prior to hearing the
command or that it is at least a hearing of the command in the
obedience. The latter is less difficult to understand if we remember that
the root meaning of obedience is listening or hearing. In his
'Revelation in the Jewish tradition'. (1977) contained in L'au-de/a du
Notes 291
verset, the translation he gives of Exodus 24: 7, 'All that the Lord hath
said will we do, and be obedient' does remember this and has 'we shall
do and hear it'. In his comment on this verse he speaks of ' the
anteriority of the term evoking obedience over that which expresses
the hearing' (or und�rstanding, entendement), which requires that the
meanings be distinguished. In the same connection he refers to the
obedience as the manner in which what is revealed is received or
welcomed (le mode d'accueillir) (ADV 176). If this welcome or reception
is to suit Levinas's notion of extreme passivity it must be interpreted
differently from how it is earlier in the same book in 'The Name of
God according to certain Talmudic Texts' (1969) where it is said that if
the call to responsibility is to be 'traumatising' it must be neither
expected nor welcomed, on pain of being the quasi-activity of
assuming (ADV 157). Cp our discussion of welcome and woman in
Chapter 9.
6. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 'The Eye and the Mind', in The Primacy of
Perception, James M . Edie (ed.) (Evanston: Northwe stern University
Press, 1964) p. 167. One can at the moment only speculate whether
this idea is mentioned in the notes on Klee rumoured to be among
Heidegger' s unpublished works.
Postface
1. In Niefzsche (Volume II:The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans.
David Farrell Krell (New York : Harper and Row, 1984) pp. 112-13)
Heidegger writes: 'mere science is only scientific - that is to say,
partaking of genuine knowledge - above and beyond being a
repertory of certain techniques - to the extent that it is philosophi­
cal'; 'In spite of the enormous distance that separates thinker and
researcher in their realms and modes of work, there is every likelihood
that they will enter into an inherent and mutually fructifying relation­
ship. a way of being with one another that is far more efficacious than
the much-acclaimed but extrinsic "cooperation" of a group allied with a
view to some specific purpose'. For drawing to my attention the pages
of G52 and G53 referred to in this paragraph I am grateful to Michael
Zimmermann.
2. See Julius Kovesi, 1'v1oral Concepfs (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1967), R. W. Beardsmore, Moral Reasoning (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1969) and John Llewelyn, 'Moral Concepts, Conformity
and Conscientious Actions', in Peter A. French (ed.), ConscimtioHs
Ac tions: the Revelation of the Pentagon Papers (Cambridge, Mass.:
Schenkman, 1974) pp. 98-109.
3. Herein lies one reason why l have elsewhere written about the
difficulty I have with Levinas's statement that Derrida has 'felicitously
and boldly translated this term [Meinung } by "vouloir dire"' (AEAE
290 Notes
Place, 1980) pp. 21-60. A translation by Ruben Berezdivin of this
essay is forthcoming in Robed Bemasconi and Simon Critchley (eds),
Re-Reading Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
One can imagine a psychoanalyst asking whether the story of
Adam's rib could be read nachfraglich as a story of penis envy and
whet-her, since male castration is emasculation, female castration could
conceivably be effemination? Is not this ef- a privative ex-7 Does it
point in the direction of a dissemination of sex, as a seventeenth­
century text cited in the Oxford English Dictionary appears to do when
it alludes to 'effeminacy (by some esteemed the property of a
souldier)'7 Does it point in the direction of a word that points in
opposite directions? For a discussion of Karl Abel's 'The Antithetical
Sense of Primal Words' see Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works, vol. XVII (London: Hogarth Press and the
Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1955) pp. 218ff. See also John Llewelyn,
Derrida on the Threshold of Sense (London: Macmillan, New York: St
Martin's Press, 1986) pp. 94-7.
13. Maurice Blanchot, L'ecriture du disastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980).
14. Emmanuel Levinas, 'Verite du devoilement et verite du temoignage', La
Teslimonianz.a (Padua: Archivio di Filosofia, Cedam, 1972), p. 105.
15. See John Llewelyn, 'Belongings', Research in Phenomenology, XVII (1987)
pp. 128 9.
-
10. Something Like the Middle Voice
1. Austin Farrer, Reflective Faith (London: SPCK, 1972) p. 193.
2. I thank David Bastow. lames Giles, George Hall and John Peacock for
coming to my assistance with Tao and other topics in Oriental
thought. For a discussion of Heidegger's analysis of thaumnuin in
the Grundfragm der Philosophie (G45) and of what Plato, Aristotle and
other philosophers say about this, see John Uewelyn, 'On the saying
that philosophy begins in thaumazein', in Andrew Benjamin (ed.), Posi­
Strucfuralist Classics (London and New York: Routledge, 1988)
pp. 173-91. See Chapter 7, note 1 .
3. See John Llewelyn 'Responsibility with Indecidability', forthcoming in
David Wood (ed.), Derrida: a Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell).
4. Jacques Derrida, 'Lettre a un ami japonais', in Psyche: Inventions de /'autre
(Paris: Galilee, 1987) p. 390, and David Wood and Robert Bernasconi
(eds) Derrida and Diffirance (Evanston: Nodhwestern University Press,
,
1988) p. 5.
5. Levinas sometimes says that the obedience is prior to hearing the
command or that it is at least a hearing of the command in the
obedience. The latter is less difficult to understand if we remember that
the root meaning of obedience is listening or hearing. In his
'Revelation in the Jewish tradition' . (1977) contained in L'au-dela du
Notes 291
verse/, the translation he gives of Exodus 24: 7, 'All that the Lord hath
said will we do, and be obedient' does remember this and has 'we shall
do and hear it'. In his comment on this verse he speaks of 'the
anteriority of the term evoking obedience over that which expresses
the hearing' (or understanding, entendement), which requires that the
meanings be distinguished. In the same connection he refers to the
obedience as the manner in which what is revealed is received or
welcomed (le mode d'accueillir) (ADV 176). If this welcome or reception
is to suit Levinas's notion of extreme passivity it must be nterpreted
i
differently from how it is earlier n i the same book in 'The Name of
God according to certain Talmudic Texts' {1969) where it is said that if
the call to responsibility is to be 'traumatising' it must be neither
expected nor welcomed, on pain of being the quasi-activity of
assuming (ADV 157). Cp our discussion of welcome and woman in
Chapter 9.
6. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 'The Eye and the Mind', in The Primacy of
Perception, lames M. Edie (ed.) (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1964) p. 167. One can at the moment only speculate whether
this idea is mentioned in the notes on Klee rumoured to be among
Heidegger's unpublished works.
Postface
1. In Nietzsche (Volume II:The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans.
David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1984) pp. 112-13)
Heidegger writes: 'mere science is only scientific - that is to say,
partaking of genuine knowledge - above and beyond being a
repertory of certain techniques - to the extent that it is philosophi­
cal'; 'In spite of the enormous distance that separates thinker and
researcher n i their realms and modes of work, there is every likelihood
that they will enter into an inherent and mutually fructifying relation­
ship. a way of being with one another that is far more efficacious than
the much-acclaimed but extrinsic "cooperation" of a group allied with a
view to some specific purpose'. For drawing to my attention the pages
of G52 and G53 referred to in this paragraph I am grateful to Michael
Zimmermann.
2. See Julius Kovesi, Moral Concepts (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
1967), R. W. Beardsmore. Moral Reasoning (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul. 1969) and John Llewelyn, 'Moral Concepts, Conformity
and Conscientious Actions', in Peter A. French (ed.), Conscientious
Actions: the Revelation of the Pentagon Papers (Cambridge, Mass.:
Schenkman, 1974) pp. 98-109.
3. Herein lies one reason why I have elsewhere written about the
difficulty I have with Levinas's statement that Derrida has 'felicitously
and boldly translated this term [Meinung ] by "vouloir dire"' (AEAE
292 Notes Notes
293
46, OBBE 189). Part of the difficulty turns on. the ambiguity of vor1loir the point made about it earlier in the text, as well as for the point that
referred to in the discussion of will in Chapter 9. the question as to the morality of carving one's initial s on the
4. See W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Clarendon Press, pyramids should not prevent us asking the question as to the morality
1930) p.20. of building the pyramids in the desert in the first place. Henry Moore's
5. Stephen Jay Could, 'Animals and Us', The New York Review of Books, concept of 'nests of stones' raises related questions, as does Robert
XXXIV, 1 1 (25 June 1987), p. 23. Smithson's concept of earthworks. I thank Gary Shapiro for drawing
6. Research in Phenomenology, XVII (1987} p. 47. the latter to my attention. See his 'Entropy and Dialectic: The
7. For a recent defence of panpsychism see Timothy Sprigge, The Signatures of Robert Smithson', Arts Magazine, Summer 1 988,
Vindication of Absolute Idealism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University pp. 99-104, and, for a thought-provoking treatment of that concept
Press. 1983). See also his 'Non-human Rights: An Idealist Perspec­ in conjunction with Heidegger's reflections on the artwork, his
tive', Inquiry, 27, pp. 439-61. 'Working the Earth', forthcoming.
8. Jacques Derrida, 'Force of Law: The ''MysHcal Foundation of Author­ 16. But for an interpretation of Zeichen as 'monster' in this phrase from
ity"', presented at the conference on 'Deconstruction and the Holderlin' s Mnemosyne see Jacques Derrida, 'La main de Heidegger
Possibility of Justice' held at the Cardozo School of Law, New York. {Geschlecht 11}', in Psyche: Inventions de /'autre (Paris: Galilee, 1987)
in October 1989. pp. 420-4, and in the translation by John P. Leavey Jr., 'Geschlecht II:
9. T. L..S. Sprigge, Non-human Rights: An Idealist Perspective', Inquiry, Heidegger's Hand', in John Sallis (ed.) Deconstruclion and Philosophy: The
27, p. 460. Although I do not share his idealist perspective, I share Texts of ]acques Derrida (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987)
many of the conclusions my friend and colleague Timothy Sprigge pp. 166-9.
draws. 17. This terminological decision is not made solely out of sentimental
10. Augustine, The Catholic and Manichaean Ways of Life. trans. Donald A. attachment to the author's first philosophical publication. See John
Gallagher and Idella ]. Gallagher (Washington: Catholic University of Llewelyn, 'Conscientiousness', Australasian joumal of Philosophy, 38
America, 1966) p. 102. (1960), pp. 219-24. See also the last item mentioned in note 2 above.
11. Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972) p. 9,
Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982) p. '!.
12. Thomas Taylor, A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes (1792) (Gainesville,
Florida: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1966), cited by John
Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature (London: Duckworth, 1974)
pp. 115-16.
13. Victor Hugo. En voyage, A/pes et Pyrenees (Paris: Hetzel. 1890) p. 180.
14.. Aquinas. Summa Theologiae, 2a2ae, Q25, 3. Aristotle, Politics, 1256b:
'Now if nature makes nothing incomplete, and nothing in vain, the
inference must be that she has made all animals for the sake of man.'
15. For this idea I thank Rockingham Gill. For helping me get clearer about
what I am trying to say in this and adjacent paragraphs I thank him
and all the other participants in the Philosophy Colloquium at Saint
David's University College, Lampeter. Robert Sharpe raised the
question about the need of (as distinguished from for) philosophy.
My phrase 'primary response' was suggested to me by his question
whether one might read in terms of each other what Levinas says
about the Dire before the Dit and Wittgenstein's question at p. 218 of
the Philosophical Investigations: 'What is the primitive reaction with
which the language-game begins . . . . The primitive reaction may have
been a glance or a gesture, but it may also have been a word.' To
Lynne Evans I am grateful for the concept of the stone sanctuary and
 Bibliography 295

TI Totalite et lnfini: essai sur /'ertirioriti (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1961,

1965, 1968).
Totality and Infinity: an Essay on Erteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis
Bibliography (PiHsburgh: Duquesne University Press, The Hague: Nijhoff. 1969).
TO Time and the Other (and additional" essays), trans. Richard A. Cohen
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987).

The most detailed bibliography is Roger Burggraeve, Emmanuel Levinas: une

The following publications are referred to by abbreviations in the text. The bibliographie primaire et secondaire (1929-1985) (Leuven, The Centre for
translations referred to are the ones usually cited there, but not always Metaphysics and Philosophy of God: Peeters, 1986). See also the biblio­
\-Yithout modification. graphy in PL above.

Emmanuel Levina s
Martin Heidegger
ADV L'au-dela du verset (Paris: Minuit, 1982).
AEAE Autrement qu'itre ou au-dela de /'essence (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974, BPP The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter
1978). (Bloomington: Indiana Univeristy Press, 1982).
CPP Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alph on so Lingis (The Hague: BT Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson
Nijhoff, 1987}. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962).
DDVI De Dieu qui vient a l'idie (Paris: Vrin, 1982). BW Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, David Farrell Krell (ed.) (London:
DE De l'ivasion (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1982). Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).
DEHH En dicouvrant /'existence avec Husserl et Heid£gger (Paris: Vrin, 1982). DT Discourse Qn Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund
DL Difficile liberli (Paris: Albin Michel, 1963, 1976). (New York: Harper and Row, 1966).
EE De /'existence a l'existant (Paris: Vrin, 1947, 1981). EB Existence and Being, with Intro. by Werner Brock (London: Vision;
Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Nijhoff, Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1949).
1978). EGT Early Greek Thinking, hans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi
El Ethique et infini (Paris: Fayard, 1982). (New York: Harper and Row, 1975}.
Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Co hen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne EHD Erliiuterungen zu Holder/ins Dichtung (Frankfurt am Main: Kloster­
University Press, 1985). mann, 1944).
HAH Humanisme de /'autre homme (M ontpell ier: Fata Morgana, 1972). EM Einfuhrung in die Metaphysik (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1953).
HQO 'Mourir pour . . .', in Heidegger: Questions ouvertes (Paris: College G Heidtggtr Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann. 1975).
International de Philosophie, Osiris, 1988) pp. 255-64. Gel Gelassenheit (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959).
NP Noms propres (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1976). H Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1950).
OBBE Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The HCT History of the Concept of Time, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington:
Hague: Nijhoff, 1981). Indiana University Press, 1985).
PL 'The Paradox of Morality: an Interview with Emmanuel Levinas', in HQD Heidegger et la question de Dieu, Richard Kearney and Joseph Stephen
The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, Robert Bernasconi O'Leary (eds) (Paris: Grasset, 1980).
and David Wood (eds) (London: Routledge, 1988) pp. 168-80. ID Identittit und Differenz (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957).
QLT Quatres lectures talmudiques (Paris: Minuit, 1968). Identify and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper
SMB Sur Maurice Blanchot (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1975). and Row, 1969).
ss Du Sam! au saint (Paris: Minuit, 1977). lM An Introdr•c/ion fo Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (Newhaven:
TA Le temps et /'autre (Montpellier, Paris: Fata Morgana, Quadrige­ Yale University Press, 1959; New York: Doubleday, 1961).
Presses universitaires de France, 1979, 1983). MFL The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloo­
mington: Indiana University Press, 1984).

294
296 Bibliography

N Nietzsche, 2 vols (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961).

Nietzsche, 4 vols, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank Capuz.zi (New
York: Harper and Row, 1979-82).
OWL On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper Index
and Row, 1971).
PLT Poetry, Language, Thought, hans. Albert Hofstadter (New York:
Harper and Row, 1975). accusative, 1 0, 33-4, 59 Autrui, 37-8, 41, 50, 53-5, 181,
QCT The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. trans. William activity, xi, 52-3, 142, 209, 212, 195, 276
Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). 230. 239
s Schellings Abhandlung llber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809) Baillie, ]., 43
ad-spiration, 28 (see also inspiration)
(Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1971). alienation, x Banquo, 21
Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Barth, K., 16, 18, 22, 24
Allemann, B., 140, 144
Stamburgh (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985). alteration, viii Beaufret. J ., 13, 84
T Die Technik und die Kehre (Pfullingen: Neske, 1962). alterity, 14, 29, 3 8 beautiful. 98, 100, 102, 104-5,
TB On 'Time and Being' trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and 116-17
altitude, 39
Row, 1972). Bedau, M., xiii
altruism, 13, 14, 25, 33, 42
us Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959) .
amour-propre, 24 being, 4, 5, 19, 38, 134, 136
VA Vortrage und Aufsatze, 3 vols (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954). anachoresis, viii beings, 108, 134, 136
w Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1967). an-archy (anarchh 10, 24, 26, 28, beneficence, 3 7
WCT Whaf is Called T11i11king?, trans. Fred D. Wieck and John Glenn Gray benevolence, 1, 6, 10, 13, 20
36, 42, 192
(New York: Harper and Row, 1968). Bentham, ]., 2, 3, 10, 20, 49-50, 194,
Anaximander, 125, 130, 132, 142,
WHD Was heisst Denken? (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1954). 262 258
ZSD Zur Sache des Denkens (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1969)._ Bergson, H., 19, 161 188
Andenken, 141. 168, 207-8, 228 .

animal, Ch. 3 passim, 76-7, 83, Berkeley, G . 146-7, 159

.

The most detailed bibliography is H.-M. Sass, Marfin Heidegger: Bibliography 107, 148-51, 153-7, 160, 165, Bernasconi, R., xi, xii, 95
and Glossary (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University beyond, vi (see also epekeina tes
167-8, 172, 193, 259
Philosophy Documentation (enter, 1982). ousias)
animism, 251, 254-7
anonymity, 19 Bigger, C., xi
anthromorphism, 198, 251 Blake, W 160
..

apology, 33, 35 Blanchot, M., 19, 28, 33, 63, 113,

Aquinas, 15, 16, 21, 24, 269 160, 175, 232, 241
Aristotle, 8, 15, 21, 35, 186, 193, Borrow, G., 50
215-16, 269 Buber, M., 10, 38, 192
Arnold, F., xiii Butler. ]., 8-10, 13-15
art, Ch. 5 passim, 163, 253
as oneself. thyself, 6, 14, 17, 18, 23, calculus, 1, 4 1
24, 27, 30, 36 call, 19, 30
astonishment, vi (see also wonder) Calvin, J.. 1 5
asymmetry, 25, 33, 35 care (Sorge), 20, 21, 40
atheism, 41 caritas, 21
Augenblick, 23 Carlyle, T., 8, 9
Augustine, 14-16, 126, 239, 261 Celan, P., 1 1 1-13, 117, 140, 179,
Austin, }.. 30, 90 206, 250
autonomy, 28, 31, 274 cezanne, P., 159

297
 298 .Index Index 299

Chanter, T., xi Deuteronomy, 28 face to face, 10-11, 22-3, 25, 28, Grossman, V., 260
Chatwin, B., 143, 159 diachrony, 29-32, 63 35-9, 41, 53, 55, 59, 62, 74, guilt, 22, 32, 40
chi, 43, 198, 220 dialectic, 19, 28 106, 168, 188
chiasmus, viii, ix, xi, 5, 24, 25, 177, Dichfen, 88, 91-2, 94-7, 106, 109, faculty, 68, 79, 81, 85 Haar, M., 160-2
' 0
197-8, 224, 235, 240-1, 268-9 119, 136, 147, 170, 237-8, 252 faith, 225-6 haecceitas, 192
Christ, 5-6, 14, 117, 140, 189-90 differance, xi fallenness (falling), x Halm of Volozhin, Rabbi, 59-61,
Christian, 6, 21, 25 dike, 128, 142-4, 261-2 fecundHy, 200, 205 193
Cicero, 8 Dionysius the Areopagite, 21 Feick, H., 85 Halevy, )., 34
classification, 78, 93 Dire, 19, 29, 41, 44-5, 47, 62-3, feminine, 100, 135, 202-6, 212, 216, happiness, 1-2, 7-11, 13, 21
Coleridge, S., 3 107, 272 220 hearing, 30, 274
Collingwood, R., 198 disclosure, 41-2 filiation, 23, 200, 203 Hebel, J., 230
Comte, A., 10, 189 dis.·ontology, xii, 1 0 folly, 13 hedonism, 5
conafus, 13, 16 dissymmetry, 20, 3 9 for the other, x, 13, 25 heed, 81
concern, 21, 40 distance, 5, 9 fourfold (Geviert), 1 1 9-20, 122, Hegel, G. W. F., 11-13, 29, 32, 35,
conscientiousness, 276 dit, le, 41, 44-5, 62, 192, 272 (see 138-9, 141, 143-4, 193, 251, 39, 41, 43-4, 55, 116, 144,
consumption, vi also said) 254, 261, 265, 267 192, 204
creation, 61, 205 Dostoevsky, F., xiii, 112 Francis, Saint, 169, 190, 194 height, 39
Critchley, S., xii droiture, 14, 59 fraternity, 23, 169 Heraclitus, 72, 127, 142
Crusoe, 37 duty, 27, 51-2 freedom, 73 heterology, 4 1
culpability, 22 dyad, 35-42 Frege, G., 232 heteronomy, 28, 30-1
curuitas, 13-14, 21 friendship, 15, 21 Hillel, 15
Fursorge, 21 Hobbes, T., 13
earth, viii, 152, 164, 262
Danken, 228 Holderlin, F., 89, 96, 100, Ch. 6
Eckhart, Meister, 75, 239
Darwin, C 67 passim, 183, 186-7
ecosystem, 199, 269
Dasein, 20, 22, 80-3 Galatians, 14 holy, viii, 32, 79, 95, 100, 105,
egoism, 13-14, 25
death, 20, 21, 28, 31-2, 36-9, 80-2, Gandolfo, D., xiii 1 1 1-13, 118, 150, 184-5
egology, 2, 14
101, 151, 167-8, 170, 174-6, Gaunilo, 3 7 Hopkins, G., 166, 216, 257
Elohim, 60, 220
181, 183 Gelassenheit, 87, 130, 133-4, 138, Hugo, V., 268
Empedocles, · 117, 140
deconstruction, 4, 232, 234-5, 238 172-3, 175, 209, 211, 229, humanity, 47, 76-9
emphasis (emphase), 121
grisemenf, 18 (see also sobriety)
di 236-7, 244, 274 Hume, D., 3, 8-10, 13, 20
En Sof, 5 4
democracy, 3 Genesis, 169, 220 Husserl, E., 9-10, 39, 42, 180, 184,
epekeina les ousias, 74-5, 79, 128,
Denken, 87, 91-2, 94-7, 106, 119, Gibbs, R., xiii 232
186
136, 147, 170, 172, 199, 207, Gide, A., 20 Hyatt, J., 61
epiphany, 30
228, 237 God, god(s), 52-6, 75, 80, 89, 96, Hyperion, 1 1 7
Ereignis, 41, 109, 124, 135-6, 242
denudeation, vi 119, 140, 161, 166, 181, hypostasis, 20
es gibt, 19, 41, 74, 85
deontology, xii, 10, 67 183-90, 257
essence, 4, 19, 42
deponence, x Gogh, V. van, 158 illeity, 47, 193, 257, 273
excluded middle, 19, 47
Derrida, J, viii, ix, xi, 11-12, 28, 33, golden rule, 5, 36 if y a, 18-19, 41, 47, 55, 58, 1 1 7,
Exodus, Book of. 50-1
42, 48, 90, 172, 178, 181. 197, Gonda, )., ix-x, 222 188, 221
expiration, 19, 28
209, 231-3, 235-7 good (goodness), 5, 10-11, 26, 32, imagination, 2231 230-2
exteriority, 4, 5, 35
Descartes, R., 7, 18, 54, 79, 181, 35, 75, 78, 212 immemorial past, 46, 101-2
externality, viii, 19, 2 1
186, 201, 255 grace, 106, 141, 207-8, 225-7 imperativity, 30
dis-intiresse-ment, 9 9 great chain of being, 67, 154 infinition, 4, 9
Desire, viii, 3-4, 10, 23, 48, SS, 61, face, 11, 23, 57, 63, 65-6, 123, 188, Greatest Happiness Principle, 6 infinitive, 4
74, 83, 201, 213-15, 239 202, 253 Greisch, J., x Infinity (Infinite), 3, 18, 22, 31, 201
300 Index l11dex 301

injustice, 4 loveliness, 1 1 6 New Testament. 5, 21, 36 pneuma, 28

innocence, 34 Luther, M., 13-16, 24, 1SS, 239 Nietzsche, F., s. 46, lOO, 102-3, poetry, 21, 48, S7-S, 93-6, 109,
inspiration, 19, 28 105, 14S. 191, 209, 2IS ll5, 147, 160-4, 252, 254
n
i terest. 98, 100 Macbeth, 2 2 non-being, 19 polytheism, 4 1
interior, 20 Malebranche, N., 200-1 nothingness, 19 possibility, SO, 82
ipseity, 2s. 28, 30, 33-4 Mallarme, S., 160 Nye, R., 206-7, 209 Povey, K., xiii
Man, das, 38, SO-l predicament of predication, 27,
Jacobsen, J., 159 Man, P. de, 160, 176-9, 1S7, 197 obedience, 2S, 30, 274 30-2, 42
James, Book of, 1 4 Marcel, G., 181 obligation, vi, 53, 171 pre-ethical, 36-8, 276
]edeinigkeit, 32, 41-2 Marchand, A., 143 obsession, 21 pre-original, 32, 34
]emeinigkeil, 32, 42, 72-3, 80 Mark. Book of, 14 Old Testament, 5, 21, 36, 39 presence, 1 9
Jonah, 34 Markel, xiii, 112, 146 ontology, 1S-19, 25, 38, 108 Price, R., S-6, S, 15
Judaism, 25, 79 Markham, E., 35 Open, 148-50, 158 prophecy, 29, 35, 63, 88, I 13, 141.
judgement, 264 Marmontel, }.-F., 3 order, 29-30 225
justice, 3-4, 6-7, 35-S, 40-1, 44, master, 39, 42 original position, 192 production, lQ-11, 13
59-60 Matthew, Book of. 1 5 Other, 10-12, 22, 28, 34-41, 54, 75, proto-ethical, 4, 7, 9, 1S, 20, 22-3,
juvenescence, 23 Merleau-Ponty, M., 39 80, 182-3, 186-7, 194, 200, 40-1, 276
messianism, 111 203, 212 proto-logic, 30-1
Kant, I., ix, xii, 4, 20, 25, 29, 35-6, metaphysics, 4, 9-10, 1S, 38 Otto, R., 184, 1S6 Proust, M.. 101
3S, 53, Ch. 4 passim, 97, 102-6, metontology, 121 outside, 4, 35 proximity, 5, 12
170, 1S4, 206, 231, 239, 241 middle (medial) voice, ix-xii, 4S, SI, psychoanalysis, 9, 39
Kierkegaard, S., 11-13, 17-18, 21, 86-S, 100, 163, 209, 222, 225, paganism, 21 psychologism, 9, 69
46 227, 237-9, 242, 244, 252-3, panpsychism, 25S, 272
kilL 38-9, 41 262 Parmenides, 47, 85, 87, 92, lOS, questioning. 135-6
Klee, P., 243 Mill, J. S., Ch. I passim, 35-7, 40-2, Ill. 125, 142, 171, 183, 240
Krell D., xii, 125, 132, 171-3, 209 49, 58, 1S9, 192, 194, 216, participation, 100 Rand. R xii.•

Kripke, S., 174 249, 258 Pascal, B., 24, 46, 55, 272 Rawls, }. 35 .

Kunisch, H., 162 Mnemosyne, 32 passion, xi, 8-9 regard, 41

Moglicltkeit, 82-6 passivity, ix-xi, 7, 12, 23, 2S, 30, representation. 31
language, 64, 93, 142, 194, 231 monotheism, 41 39-40, 52-3, 83, 142, 20S-9, repression, xi
Larkin, P., 1S4 Moses, 14, 2S, 62, 1S6 212, 222. 230, 239, 241 respect, xii, 14, 38, 4.1-2, 70, 72,
law, 20, 38, 41-2 mouvance, xiii. 231, 23S, 241 Pater. W., 98 266
Lawrence, D.H., 65 Munier, R., 83 paternity, 23, 206, 219, 221 respiration, vi
letting be (Seinlassen), S7, 99-100, murder, 61-2, 245-51 Paul. 16, 1S5, 239 responsibility, 22-8, 3D-3, 36, 39,
123, 126, 129-30, 134, 223, mystery, 40 Peperzak, A., xi 40-1. 56, Ch. 4 passim, Ch. 6
261, 274-5 Pepper. T., xii passim, 270. 277
Leviticus, 7, 15, 20, 24-5, 27, 33 nature, 3-4, 8, 10, 52, 105, 116 personality, 68, 74, 77-8, 105 relournemmf, 2 9
Levy-Bruhl, L., 10Q-1 nausea, 18--19 Phedre, 22 revelation, 42
life, 65-7, SO, 154, 15S, 167 need, 79, 123, 125-6, !SS, 181, 241, phusis, 4 revenience, 29
Ungis, A., xi 256, 268 place (Ort), 24 Rickert. H., 73
love, 10, 27, 33, 3S, 55-6, S3, 217; neighbour, xii, 5-7. 14-16. 18, plants. 107, 148-50 rights. 255
agapeistic, 23; erotic, 21. 24, 20-1. 23, 25, 32-3, 38-9, 48, Plato, 36, 41. 46-7, 186, 191 Rilke, R. Ch. 7 passim, 191, 193,
.

56, 200-3; of neighbour, 7, Ch. 3 passim, 269 pleasure, 2,3 230, 256
15; rational, 16; of self, 7, 9, neighbourhood, 255, 270 plenitude, 19 Rodin, A., 159
14-16, 23-4, 27, 70 newness, 1 9 Plotinus, 54 Romans, Book of, 14
302 Index Index 303

Rosenzweig, F. xi, 55-6

. subjectivity, 1, 12-13, 28, 32, 35 witness. 22, 42 wonder (thaumauin), xiii, 22, 47,
Ross. W., 215 subUme, 104-5, 166, 184, 223, 2 7 1 Wittgenstein, L., 143, 194, 198, 232, 1 1 2, 182, 273
234 Wood, ·D., ix, 256
Rousseau, J.-J., 14 supplement, xi, 5, 10, 202
Wollstonecraft, M., 258 Wordsworth, W., 3, 116, 162, 200
Russell, B., 232 synthesis, 23. 29-30
Ryle, C., 217.
Talmud, 5 1 , 60, 62
sacred. viii, 113 Tao, 142, 239
sacrosanctity, viii Taylor, T., 263
said, 41-2 (see also dif, le) techne, 97, 144
Sallis, j., xi
i technology, 97, 243
salvation, 11-13 teleology, xii, 31, 35
Sant' Apollinare in Classe, viii, 109, theology, 18
Ill there is, 18-19, 22, 41, 47, 55, 58,
Sartre, J.-P., 11. 18-19, 2 1 2 117, 188, 221 (see also il y a)
Scalhas, T xiii
..
things, 1 1 9, 13 I, 162, 168, 266, 268
scepticism, 34-5, 43-6 tiers, le, 4 1
Scheler, M., 10, 192 Torah, 60
Schelling, F. W. J , 68, 1 16, 172
.
totalitarianism, 42
schematism, ix, xi-xii, 97, 231, 241 totalization, 1
Schiller, F., 47, 103-6, 184 trace, 47, 212
Schopenhauer, A., 100, 105 tragedy, 128-9
Scotl, C.. xii, 209-10 Trakl, C 1 79, 240-1
.•

Scotus, Duns, 192-3, 216, 257 transascendence, 104-5

Seinkiinnen, 74, 82, 98
self, ix, 27-9, 34
union, 2 1
self-consciousness, 29 universal. 5
Seneca. 8
utilitarianism, xii, 2, 5-6, 9, 20,
senescence, 23 35-7, 67
shawabti, 3 1
Shelley, P., 252
Sifra, 33 value, 248-9
vegetarianism, 50, 64
signification, 35, 46, 107, 177-8
Vermogen, 85-6
silence, 34, 41
Silesius, A., 13&-9 violence, 4
singularity, 41 voluptuosity, 201-3
sobriety, 18, 21, 61
song. 112, 143, 146, 157, 159, 162, Wahl. }., 11, 79, 104
177 welcome, 127, 179, 212-13, 219
Sophocles, 106, 176 weltarm, ISO, 155-7, 187, 193, 230
Spinoza, B 13, 35, 41
.. weltbildend. 96. 151. 156, 170, 172,
spirit, 25 193, 230
Sprigge, T., xiii, 260 Weltinnenraum, 158, 163, 165-6
Steele, A., xiii welflos, 155-7, 187, 230
stones, 157, 167, 259, 263, 266, will, 25, 39, 51, 58, 79, 208-19, 222,
269-70 225-6, 274