What changes when the object I face is another subject, and why does that encounter call me to responsibility?
31 claims from this lecture, in the order Marci Shore makes them, with the 15 terms it leans on and its 4 links to other lectures.
The Other wrenches me from my hypostatis, from the here, at the heart of being or the center of the world where, privileged, and in this sense primordial, I posit myself.
Emmanuel Levinas, "Philosophy and Awakening". The epigraph Shore gives this lecture.
By number of claims in this lecture.
Shore’s own judgments and connections
The 6 claims the lecture spends most time on.
Take a die on a table: from any single spot I see only some faces. Others standing elsewhere complete the picture, which is why knowledge, for Husserl, is intersubjective.
Stein's objection to the transcendental ego is that it has no body. A subject, she insists, cannot be conceived as bodiless pure consciousness; philosophy has to reckon with embodiment.
Put simply Edith Stein's objection to Husserl: you cannot picture a person as a pure, bodiless consciousness. Any account of the self has to reckon with our bodies.
For Stein, empathy underwrites realism: how the world appears depends on each consciousness, but the world that appears is the same for everyone and so independent of any mind.
Put simply Stein: we each see the world from our own angle, yet it is one world. Empathy confirms that others see it too, so it is real and not just in my head.
Being looked at makes me someone's object, and that very fact brings home that the looker is a subject. In Sartre's words, "I cannot be an object for an object."
Put simply Sartre: when someone looks at me, I become an object for them. Only a subject can make me an object, so that is how I discover the looker is a person, not a thing.
Where Husserl started from subject and object and Heidegger from Dasein in its world, Levinas grounds ontology, epistemology and ethics alike in the face-to-face relation between self and other.
Put simply Levinas starts philosophy somewhere new: not with a mind facing objects (Husserl) or a person in their world (Heidegger), but with one person meeting another face to face. Everything else grows from there.
What stops me from absorbing another person into my totality is not some weakness in me, Levinas argues, but the other's infinity: they are radically other and cannot be possessed.
Put simply Levinas: I can never fully take in or own another person, and that is not a failing on my part. They are simply, endlessly other than me.
Read down to follow the lecture. The time opens that minute on YouTube.
Shore frames intersubjectivity as a change of question: a long epistemological tradition worried about the gap between subject and object; now the issue is how one subject meets another.
Put simply Shore: for centuries philosophers asked how a mind can know the things around it. Here the question changes to how one person can truly meet another.
What Husserl's students share, in Shore's reading, is a discontent: his phenomenology seems to view other subjects as just variations of objects, and that came to feel impoverished.
Husserl's first route to other minds is epistemological: I grasp another ego by analogy with mine, and the result is a community of monads, each still self-contained.
Put simply Husserl's first answer to "how do I know other minds?": by analogy with my own. Each mind still stays sealed in itself, a separate unit (a "monad") among others.
Take a die on a table: from any single spot I see only some faces. Others standing elsewhere complete the picture, which is why knowledge, for Husserl, is intersubjective.
Could separate groups of monads, out of contact with one another, each constitute its own world? Husserl rejects the idea as "a pure absurdity": monads jointly constitute one world.
Put simply Could groups of minds that never meet each live in a world of their own? Husserl says no: however many minds there are, together they make one world.
I have no direct line into anyone else's primordial experience. So for Husserl, another person counts as an existing other only insofar as my consciousness constitutes them as such.
Put simply Husserl: I can never live through another person's experience from the inside. So, for me, someone else is another person only because my own consciousness makes sense of them as one.
Husserl's reduction brackets whatever may or may not exist, other egos included; only my transcendental ego stays unbracketed. What remains is the sphere of ownness: what is mine.
Put simply Husserl's reduction asks me to put aside every question about what exists, other people included. Only my own "I" stays. What remains is my "sphere of ownness": whatever is given to me as mine.
Nobody is thrown into an empty world. For Heidegger, other people belong to Dasein's situation from the outset, so existing in the world already means existing alongside others.
Put simply Heidegger: you never start out alone. From the moment you exist, other people are already part of your world.
On Shore's gloss, Heidegger's picture puts intersubjectivity, in some sense, ahead of subjectivity: there is never a Dasein that is not already among other people.
Put simply Shore's reading of Heidegger: in a sense, relating to others comes before having a self, since you are always already in a world shared with other people.
Shore thinks people reasonably ask whether Heidegger leaves room for authentic life among others: his authenticity demands the profound loneliness of facing one's own death.
Stein's objection to the transcendental ego is that it has no body. A subject, she insists, cannot be conceived as bodiless pure consciousness; philosophy has to reckon with embodiment.
Put simply Edith Stein's objection to Husserl: you cannot picture a person as a pure, bodiless consciousness. Any account of the self has to reckon with our bodies.
Shore insists you cannot make sense of Stein's sudden preoccupation with the body apart from her time in a wartime hospital among gruesomely wounded German soldiers.
Writing to Ingarden in 1917, Stein casts a people as a living, person-like whole, "a life beyond our own, although it includes ours," to which members may willingly submit.
Only one body, mine, is lived from inside; other bodies reach me as exteriors. Empathy, by analogy and pairing, lets me take those exteriors as living bodies someone else inhabits.
Put simply Stein: I feel only my own body from the inside; everyone else's I see from the outside. Empathy is what lets me see those bodies as people living in them, as I live in mine.
In the text In On the Problem of Empathy (1917), Stein rejects inference by analogy as an account of empathy; "pairing" is Husserl's term, from Cartesian Meditations §51.
Empathy does more than reveal others, Stein argues: it hands me my own self, teaching me that other subjects take me as their object, in body and psyche alike.
Put simply Stein: empathy doesn't only show me other people. It shows me myself too, because through it I learn that I am someone others look at, body and mind.
Someone watching me might catch me fishing for approval while I believe myself simply generous. Stein's point: imagining their view of me can correct my self-picture, so empathy enlarges self-knowledge.
For Stein, empathy underwrites realism: how the world appears depends on each consciousness, but the world that appears is the same for everyone and so independent of any mind.
Put simply Stein: we each see the world from our own angle, yet it is one world. Empathy confirms that others see it too, so it is real and not just in my head.
Shore's plug for Stein: much of what later made Sartre famous appears in her dissertation years earlier. She is not saying he stole it, and grants he writes more elegantly.
Sartre quickly spotted what was at stake, morally and existentially, in a thin conception of other people as mere objects of awareness; the other needed to be more than that.
Being looked at makes me someone's object, and that very fact brings home that the looker is a subject. In Sartre's words, "I cannot be an object for an object."
Put simply Sartre: when someone looks at me, I become an object for them. Only a subject can make me an object, so that is how I discover the looker is a person, not a thing.
Once I register another subject, Sartre says, the whole universe shifts: the world loses its center in me even as I go on trying to center it there.
Put simply Sartre: once I notice that someone else is a subject too, I stop being the center of the world, though I keep trying to put myself back there.
Sartre holds that genuine self-knowledge depends on being recognized by another subject; absent that acknowledgment, I cannot really know who I am.
Where Husserl started from subject and object and Heidegger from Dasein in its world, Levinas grounds ontology, epistemology and ethics alike in the face-to-face relation between self and other.
Put simply Levinas starts philosophy somewhere new: not with a mind facing objects (Husserl) or a person in their world (Heidegger), but with one person meeting another face to face. Everything else grows from there.
What stops me from absorbing another person into my totality is not some weakness in me, Levinas argues, but the other's infinity: they are radically other and cannot be possessed.
Put simply Levinas: I can never fully take in or own another person, and that is not a failing on my part. They are simply, endlessly other than me.
For Levinas, metaphysical desire does not aim at anything I could ever have: "desire is desire for the absolutely other," and the absolutely other is unpossessable by its very nature.
Put simply Levinas: the deepest kind of desire is not for anything I could get. It is a desire for someone wholly other, who by nature can never be possessed.
In Levinas's Philosophy and Awakening, the other tears me loose from the central place where I posit myself; I must then see myself from their side and answer for myself.
Put simply Levinas: meeting another person knocks me out of the center of my own world. I have to see myself as they see me, and answer for myself.
Shore lines up four versions of one shaking moment: Heidegger's being-toward-death, Shklovsky's estrangement, Husserl's reduction, Levinas's face-to-face. For Levinas the jolt comes from the other, not from death.
Put simply Shore lines up four shaking moments that reveal something fundamental: facing death (Heidegger), seeing the familiar as strange (Shklovsky), setting assumptions aside (Husserl), meeting someone face to face (Levinas). For Levinas, it comes from another person, not death.
Shore reads Levinas's Other as God secularized: beyond reach, beyond possession, always beckoning, and without that beckoning we could neither come into our own nor feel responsible.
Put simply Shore: Levinas's "Other" is like God in secular form: out of reach, never possessed, always calling. Without that call we could not become ourselves or feel responsible.
Levinas floats, as no more than a possibility, the thought that transcendence toward another human and transcendence toward God may not be so easily told apart; the distinction should not be rushed.
Levinas's Other calls to me where Sartre's looks at me, Shore observes: the call is a summons to responsibility, a demand that the I account for itself.
Put simply Shore: Sartre's other person looks at me; Levinas's other person calls on me, asking me to take responsibility and account for myself.
Shore traces an arc: Husserl poses the problem as epistemology, Heidegger as ontology, and Levinas folds both into a project that is, at bottom, ethical.
Put simply Shore's arc for the lecture: Husserl asks how we know other minds, Heidegger what it is to exist among others, and Levinas folds both into a question that is, at bottom, ethical: what we owe each other.
9 of these 15 first come up in this lecture. Definitions are our paraphrase.
Where a claim here answers an earlier lecture, and where a later lecture answers a claim here. “Our inference” marks a link Shore does not state outright.
HegelOn one reading, a master is master only through a slave's acknowledgment, yet only subjects can recognize, and he has made the slave a thing; hence his permanent dissatisfaction. L4 · 43:04
SartreBeing looked at makes me someone's object, and that very fact brings home that the looker is a subject. In Sartre's words, "I cannot be an object for an object." L17 · 32:07
Only a subject can objectify me; like Hegel's master, the gaze needs the other as subject.Our inference
HegelNobody in the Phenomenology gets to be simply identical with themselves: identity is always mediated, handed to you through another's gaze, so no self stands on its own. L4 · 45:29
SartreSartre holds that genuine self-knowledge depends on being recognized by another subject; absent that acknowledgment, I cannot really know who I am. L17 · 34:17
No self-knowledge without recognition by another subject
HusserlWhere Freud locates the essential self in what is most hidden, the transcendental ego is pure light: nothing in it stays concealed, and knowing is a matter of clear seeing. L11 · 45:42
SteinStein's objection to the transcendental ego is that it has no body. A subject, she insists, cannot be conceived as bodiless pure consciousness; philosophy has to reckon with embodiment. L17 · 22:15
Pure, bodiless, transparent consciousness is inadequate; the lived body must enter philosophy
HeideggerConfronting one's own death alone, shaken by Angst, can produce resoluteness: taking hold of oneself and owning one's choices. That is authenticity's slightly empowering side, which Heidegger wants felt. L12 · 44:18
LevinasIn Levinas's Philosophy and Awakening, the other tears me loose from the central place where I posit myself; I must then see myself from their side and answer for myself. L17 · 43:37
Shore likens Levinas's face-to-face to Heidegger's being-toward-death as the moment of shakenness, which for Levinas comes from the other, not from death.
Throughlines that pass through this lecture.
As they come up in the lecture.
Levinas born in Kaunas, then in the Russian Empire, now Lithuania.
Stein goes to Göttingen to study with Husserl and joins his close-knit circle of students.
After the outbreak of the First World War Stein trains as a volunteer Red Cross nurse, and in 1915 serves at a military hospital in Mährisch-Weißkirchen, Austrian Moravia.
Husserl leaves Göttingen for a chair in Freiburg, with almost no students left because they had gone to war.
Ingarden, turned down for Piłsudski's Polish Legions because of a heart condition, and Stein both end up studying with Husserl in Freiburg.
On the Problem of Empathy Zum Problem der Einfühlung
Stein's dissertation On the Problem of Empathy, written under Husserl (defended summa cum laude in 1916, published 1917); she then serves as his assistant.
Stein writes to Ingarden on Germanness, the Polish soul and the relation of individuals to nations.
Stein, having stepped down as Husserl's assistant while contemplating conversion, meets "Little Heidegger" at Husserl's door; Heidegger takes over her post.
Stein is turned away from habilitation; Husserl's recommendation says he would back her warmly if university careers were open to women.
Stein converts to Catholicism in the aftermath of the First World War.
Levinas goes to study in France, after a family move to Kharkiv in 1914 and a return to Lithuania.
Being and Time Sein und Zeit
Levinas studies with Husserl in Freiburg and attends Heidegger's seminar as Heidegger succeeds Husserl in the chair.
Cartesian Meditations Méditations cartésiennes
Stein enters a Carmelite convent shortly after the Nazis take power.
Levinas, a naturalized French citizen, is mobilized in 1939 and captured in 1940; held with other Jewish prisoners in a camp near Hanover, he survives because his status as a French prisoner of war protects him.
Being and Nothingness L'être et le néant
Totality and Infinity Totalité et infini
Philosophy and Awakening Philosophie et éveil