both Levinas and Kierkegaard emphasize,
neighbor love runs counter to our natural self-love.
and as such, taken seriously,
“the command to practice it is truly traumatic.
How at all, is it possible, even imperfectly?”
For Kierkegaard the natural loves of affection, friendship, and eros
have a built in self-love and he does explain how to overcome this.
So it can help if we see how Levinas and Kierkegaard compare.
II,3.6 Who Loves the Enemy in a Proximity
As Beals writes on page 83, Levinas says quite clearly:
Consciousness is born as the presence
of ‘the third’ party in the proximity
of the one to the other.
On the same page Beals explains:
This view is in contrast to theories of
original hostility, such as Hobbe’s,
which describe humans as naturally at war.
Levinas, on the other hand, describes an ego
naturally obligated to the other.
This obligation, which is one of Jewish justice, has to do with
my being a host and a hostage for every other even if his face
is not calling me because there is a nearness to every human
that obligates us to become our brother’s keeper and lover.
This is what the wisdom of love can teach me as it serves love.
This wisdom of love originates in the responsibility of one for the other.
This is what makes Levinas postmodern in that he goes beyond
the social contract theories that originate in a war of all against all.
The ethical relation is the beginning of political states and institutions.
As Levinas puts it on page 82 of Otherwise Than Being:
Proximity is not a state of repose
but, a restlessness outside the place of rest.
He explains that further on page 88.
In a sense nothing is more burdensome
than a neighbor. Is not this desired one
the undesirable itself.
When the face of the other calls me I should respond with caring love.
But when the third then appears looking at us I see that I am
responsible for him and all others as well and being a host for
any other makes me a hostage to all near me in proximity.
In my passivity I am persecuted as proximity becomes obsession.
II,3.7 That Lets Me Lovingly Substitute for Him
Throughout Otherwise Than Being Levinas has many sayings
that relate to substitution and on page 113 he begins a six-
page section on substitution in which he shows that
we are all responsible for everyone else and that the
material needs of my neighbor are my spiritual needs.
His idea of substitution clearly shows how ethics for him
is not a self-realization ethics such as Aristotle taught.
We do not practice virtue in order to be happy.
Rather, we should live in the best way possible in order to
help others to be happy; the face of the other
calls me to work hard to let that other be happy.
Whereas I used to work for my good I should now
substitute the other for myself and work for them.
Once we are looked at by the third and realize the brotherhood
of all men in newly felt proximity we see that we are the
suffering servant for all and a substitute taking on their needs.
The self as a suffering servant is an hostage and because of
our being the hostage there can be, as he says on page 117,
pity, compassion, pardon and proximity—
even the simple “After you, sir.”
All of this presupposes substitution (page 117):
the possibility of putting oneself
in place of the other.
so that his guilt and pain can become mine and not only his.
The wisdom of love shows us all of this so that we can come to
serve others in love as did the Suffering Servant of Second Isaiah.
Before that image was applied to Jesus the Jews saw themselves
as being persecuted by many people and they came to the wisdom
of love which let them offer their suffering even for their enemies.
That is a great wisdom that is at the heart of Levinas’ philosophy.
He explains it even further in terms of the glory of the sufferer.
II,3.8 With a Glory that Manifests the Unmanifest
On the next to last page of Otherwise Than Being as Levinas
is giving a summary of his book he writes, p. 184:
Signification, the-one-for-the-other, the relationship
with alterity, has been analyzed in the present work
as proximity, proximity as responsibility for the other,
and responsibility for the other as substitution: The subject
was shown to be an expiation for another, the condition
or unconditionality of being hostage.
