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From: heidegger
To: heidegger
Subject: Re: The Q of V
Date: Wednesday, July 31, 1996 2:33PM
Dear Tom B.
maybe you are identifying the question of violence with the question of
evil.
Levinas is indeed approaching the question of violence metaphysically and he
is doing this by a kind of sacralization of the Other (as the place where
the Infinite-Other appears...). The question is, for me, if there is any non
metaphysical reason (well, this is an oxymoron!) why we should (!) not be
violent or, in other terms, whether there is a non-metaphysical ethics.
Heidegger was asking for this in his question about the relation between
ethos and physis. Ethos (with Epsilon) leads, according to Aristotle to
Eethos (with Etha). The last one is understood (by H.) as dwelling, as the
way we "are", we "dwell". I think Levinas turns this relationship the other
way around, founding Eethos on Ethos (character or mood).
Cheers
Rafael
On Wed, 31 Jul 1996, CHRISTOPHER DOSS wrote:
>
> Approaching the violence question from within the framework of _SZ_,
> wouldn't it tie into the flight away from death, the attempted
> suppression on the part of Dasein from what kills it (and simultaneously
> makes it possible)? Isn't violence the attempt to suppress a perceived
> evil, something seen as dangerous to the integrity of Dasein's projects?
I think violence *constitutes* the evil (which seems to be implied by
your emphasis on perception). Violence is never just "the deed", but the
mis en scene within which the deed occurs. What violence seeks to supress
perhaps most, that which is even outside of violence's understanding, is
the *opening* itself within which violence "proper" takes place. Dasein
*sets up* its "evils".
>
> Levinas (whom I frankly haven't read very much of) seems to equate
> the suppression of the Other -- here seen as another person -- with
> evil.
Which, by my reading, would make Levinas' approach violent. I'm not sure
I want to say that, and my view in this regard is tentative. Still,
perhaps for all of that, we still need to listen to Nietzsche along the
way, and consider going "beyond [mere] good and evil" as a simple
"founding" dichotomy.
In a way, isn't the reverse the case, that evil is unintelligibility
> is meaninglessness is otherness, and that the attempted eradication
> of otherness is -- from the point of view of the eradicating subject
> (to use s-o terminology for the time being) -- the attempted eradication
> of evil?
The constitution of *otherness*/alternativity *as evil* is what violence
does, or what is required for violence. The *particular* violence (which
is not evil, in this thinking; there may in fact be no evil in this
thinking, or else, the constitution of evil is, to the thinking or path of
nonviolence, precisely the *falling* of nonviolence, and may in fact be
the result of a violence done *to nonviolence*) of the *totalization of
otherness as such* is not the only possibile violence. On the other hand,
totalization and violence go together in special ways, it would seem. But,
it is a gross mistake to say that totality is evil itself. The movement to
totality of Western metaphysics has its positive moments. It is the
*forgetting of violence* that enables that totality to take on its violent
forms. For Levinas, injustice is violence. It is the forgetting of
justice, then, that enables totality to totalize violently.
The drama you point to, which you point to in dramatic terms, is
deceptive. Otherness is also: "mystery", "awe", etc., in precisely those
mentalities which we already know to be violent. So we are not getting at
the essence of violence if we take it in this way.
>
> Which would imply that authentic Dasein must accept the otherness
> pervading it, ultimately death.
If your premises are wrong, this conclusion doesn't follow. We might take
this formulation as, rather, a kind of "polemical" orientation to
Dasein's death, relation to its ownmost possibility of death (which is
not Dasein's *only* ownmost possibility). From here, though, this
"flight" brings in an element of courage. But, and I really think this is
probably the case, what may be happening is that death is in fact simply
operating as a cheap organizing principle: all constitution of evil, as
you've said, in fact is a function of Dasein's flight from death. I think
that's quite reductive. But, this reduction inheres or insists *in the
framework of SZ*. It may, in fact, be part of SZ's violence.
Tom B.
>
> Christopher Doss
> Just a lowly graduate student
>
>
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