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How to think peace? Thought capably and unhesitatingly plunges into whichever realm it turns its attention towards, immodestly and unquestioningly assuming the propriety of its approach and unconcerned with boundaries since in conquest the very accessibility of the subsumed object de facto affirms the right of the occupier. I could present a standard theory or analysis of peace. But I would feel hypocritical doing so. It is easy, dangerously easy and in fact all too commonplace, to intellectualize one’s way out of, around, and all over an issue without experiencing it, without facing it honestly, without receiving its challenge, difficulty, my discomfort and inability in the face of its superiority over me, of its exceeding my capability to respond adequately, to provide the closure of an conclusive answer. I could say “if we do this or that, then we will attain peace,” but in truth I don’t know, and I can’t claim to be an exceptional doer either.
Peace is exceedingly difficult to think. It is beyond me, in fact. Its loftiness and absolute goodness are too brilliant, my gaze pulls back from attempting to penetrate its secrets; it is deflected back towards the now, here, me - and the imperfection, the powerlessness, the uncertainty inherent therein. And it is from this position alone, I feel, this particular, unique situation of naked, unabstracted singularity which remains after superficial pretensions have been stripped away, that the question of peace can be approached responsibly: not as an object of ontological speculation but, on the contrary, as the infinite exigency and promise of the future which, for all that it transcends present limitations, is nonetheless always already in relationship with each and everyone.
Peace (Shalom), a term which etymologically bears in Hebrew the semantic matrix of perfection, wholeness, as well as physical and moral goodness, is marked by its futurity. As such, in Totality and Infinity [1] Emmanuel Levinas understands peace through the lens “prophetic eschatology” (TI 22), as proceeding from a unique vision of a radical future that is exterior to history. Of a different order from the “synoptic and totalizing objectifying virtues of vision” (TI 23) which reduces its object to the presentness of conscious through appropriating and synthesizing, it is the inspired prophetic vision that authentically glimpses the future as peace. “Eschatology institutes a relation with being beyond the totality or beyond history... a relationship with a surplus always exterior to the totality” (TI 22): this transcendence of the future in relation to the present is understood as the relationship of infinity, which is intrinsically transcendent, to totality, i.e. essential immanence. “Totality,” in Levinas, represents the Western philosophical system which reaches its apex with Hegel; it describes the process of ontological totalization or unification of Being/Spirit through the simultaneous assimilation and repression of all that is other, outside the system.
Totality constitutes and maintains itself through conquest, the subjugation of alterity, otherness, difference - it is tantamount to war. “Being reveals itself as war,” Levinas asserts, and “The state of war suspends morality.” In the anonymous flow of Hegelian history, individuals are defaced, depersonalized, “reduced to being bearers of forces that command them unbeknown to themselves... The unicity of each present is incessantly sacrificed to a future appealed to bring forth its objective meaning. For ultimate meaning alone counts” (TI 21). However, Levinas writes, “Morality will oppose politics in history and will... proclaim itself unconditional and universal when the eschatology of messianic peace will have come to superpose itself upon the ontology of war” (TI 22)
In contrast to totalitarian immanence which conflates the future with the present, dissolving present specificity into abstracted universality, the cornerstone of Levinas’s ethics is alterity, otherness, separation. “Alterity is possible only starting from me” (TI 40). To recognize radical, unassimilated difference outside me, I must first acknowledge my own limitations, my boundaries, the particularity and uniqueness of myself. Speech, constitutive of the ethical, wherein one assumes responsibility in the face of the other, presupposes an affirmation of subjectivity, of “existents that can speak rather than lending their lips to an anonymous utterance of history. Peace is produced as this aptitude for speech. The eschatological vision breaks with the totality of wars and empires in which one does not speak” (TI 23).
Speech is fundamentally expression, the coming-out-of self in response to the other, wherein the individual “turns toward the exterior to extra-vert.... the essence of language is goodness, or again, that the essence of language is friendship and hospitality” (TI 305). Through speech relationship is established. However, precisely because it is relationship, the integrity of both self and other is maintained. That is to say, difference and separation are entirely preserved. “Conversation, from the very fact that it maintains the distance between me and the Other, the radical separation asserted in transcendence which prevents the reconstitution of totality, cannot renounce the egoism of its existence,” Levinas maintains, “but the very fact of being in a conversation consists in recognizing in the Other a right over this egoism, and hence in justifying oneself” (TI 40).
Against the Hedeggerian “being-towards-one’s-ownmost-self,” Levinas counterposes “being for the Other.” In Otherwise than Being [2], responsibility is understood to be “one-for-the-other” even to the point of “substitution” (OB 161). I am brought back from every and all forms of depersonalization (even that consisting in ego-identity and -consciousness, which are still superficial) to my most basic level of existence, my very physicality, my capacity to suffer, my existential irreplaceability.
"Responsibility for the other, in its antecedence to my freedom, its antecedence to the present and to representation, is a passivity more passive than all passivity, an exposure to the other without this exposure being assumed, and exposure without holding back, exposure of exposedness, expression, saying. This exposure is the frankness, sincerity, veracity of saying. Not saying dissimulating itself and protecting itself in the said, just giving out words in the face of the other, but saying uncovering itself, that is, denuding itself of its skin, sensibility on the surface of skin, at the edge of the nerves, offering itself even in suffering - and thus wholly sign, signifying itself." (OB 15)
The “said” reduces signification to mere information ready to evaluate, systematize, and totalize. On the other hand, “saying” marks the movement of transcendence, of a self which has renounced its empires and conquests, its egocentrism, and has opened up to a vulnerable relationship of communication with the other.
This moment of transcendent “saying” is termed “proximity.” According to Levinas, “proximity is a difference, a non-coinciding, an arrhythmia in time, a diachrony refractory to thematization, refractory to the reminiscence that synchronizes the phases of a past... [it is] unconvertible into a history.” Which is to say, the cognitive faculties of ego-consciousness have been transcended; proximity is a state always already constitutive of each individual even before the development of rationalistic ego-identity. Writes Levinas: “Proximity thus signifies a reason before the thematization of signification by a thinking subject, before the assembling of terms in a present, a pre-original reason that does not proceed from any initiative of the subject, an anarchic reason.” With terms such as “pre-original” and “anarchic” Levinas transports the frame of reference to a transcendent state more primordial than instrumental reason, preceding the development of the cogito in which ego-centric identity coalesces and initiates its project of assimilating, appropriating, and repressing all that is external to it. “It is a reason before the beginning, before any present, for my responsibility for the other commands me before any decision, any deliberation. Proximity is communication, agreement, understanding, or peace. Peace is incumbent upon me in proximity, the neighbor cannot relieve me of it. Peace is then my responsibility” (OB 166).
It might appear that Levinas’s emphatic affirmation of the unique and separate subject, its fundamental place in relationship with the other, is belied by what could be perceived of as the call for a martyr-like renunciation of self toward the achievement of egoless being-for-the-other. However, “‘being for the Other’ is not the negation of the I, engulfed in the universal” (TI 304); “proximity,” “substitution,” and the like must be absolutely distinguished from a telos which can be deliberately and intentionally achieved, and thus intentional self-abnegation is obviated. Again, “prophetic eschatology... does not introduce a teleological system into the totality; it does not consist in teaching the orientation of history. Eschatology institutes a relation with being beyond the totality or beyond history” (TI 22). Outside the powers of will and consciousness is the “weakness” and “passivity,” the “exposure” of self to other in expression, saying, communication: one cannot deliberately fulfill this as a role, as one would adopt character traits and behavioral patterns. Voluntary enactment of being for the other is impossible: rather, being for the other is understood to be a fact which always already structures the existential constitution of each and every individual. Levinas brings terms such as “chosenness,” “commandedness,” “election,” and “obsession” to bear on this situation to emphasize the pre-original passivity of the subject’s position. Levinasian ethics are not necessarily reflective of the individual’s proclivity towards good or bad behavior: “the Good cannot become present or enter into a representation. The present is the beginning of my freedom, whereas the Good is not presented to freedom; it has chosen me before I have chosen it. No one is good voluntarily” (OB 11). Levinas reiterates: “the non-indifference to the other as other and as neighbor in which I exist is something beyond any commitment in the voluntary sense of the term, for it extends into my very bearing as an entity, to the point of substitution.”
However, he immediately reasserts that “Responsibility, the signification which is non-indifference, goes one way, from me to the other. In the saying of responsibility, which is an exposure to an obligation for which no one could replace me, I am unique. Peace with the other is first of all my business” (OB 138-9). Just because the ethical relationship precedes or exceeds the scope of volition and initiative, in no way is there a suggestion that one is free to disregard the exigency it places upon one’s freedom, as if ethics were inaccessibly beyond, removed from the realm of practical concerns and duties. In fact, only I am obligated in responsibility, the I which is absolutely unique and irreplaceable. Again, relationship with the other’s radical alterity is predicated on the specificity and separateness, the “unicity” of individuality. Only proceeding from the subject’s fundamental differentiation from all others is responsibility possible: I have to assume a greater degree of responsibility, since only I can answer the other’s call with “Here I am.” In assuming responsibility my autonomy is replaced by the heteronomous relationship, an openness described as speech, but also as “suffering, woundedness, weakness, destitution, and patience.” Heteronomy is structured asymmetrically, which is to say, the other and I are not totalizeable: the other obligates from on high or from beneath me - as the master, the poor, the orphan or widow. I am called from outside my plane of reality to this radically different paradigm, exposed in the face of the other, obligated. Responsibility is predicated on radical inequality, given that in the asymmetry of relationship with the other only I am held answerable: “one has to be patient oneself without asking patience of others - and for that one has to admit a difference between oneself and the others” (OB 177).
At this point the concept of justice emerges as a transition from the vertical inequality of transcendent being-for-the-unique-other, the neighbor, back to horizontal equality of all others. Justice becomes manifest in terms of society, law, institutions, politics. “The equality of all is borne by my inequality, the surplus of my duties over my rights. The forgetting of self moves justice,” writes Levinas. “My relationship with the other as neighbor gives meaning to my relations with all the others” (OB 159). Responsibility in the face of the neighbor, the proximate other, becomes the precondition for an ethics with regard to the “third person” who represents humanity at large, i.e. those who do not enter into the immediacy of intimate and proximate relationship. Justice establishes equality for all. But if not based upon the prior asymmetrical relationship of my inequality vis-a-vis the other - the transcending detour which pulls me out of myself toward the other, justice would then be corrupt, perverted, inauthentic, a system determined by power rather than ethical considerations. Temporally speaking, the equality of justice is comtemporaneity and the inequality of responsibility is radical difference in times, i.e. diachrony. Levinas continues: “the contemporaneousness of the multiple is tied about the diachrony of the two: justice remains justice only in a society where there is no distinction between those close and those far off, but in which there also remains the impossibility of passing by the closest” (ibid.).
Justice proceeds from responsibility. Egocentric instrumental reason is transformed through responsibility into the “disinterested” reason of justice. In Levinas’s words, “Reason, to which the virtue of arresting violence is ascribed, issuing in the order of peace, presupposes disinterestedness, passivity or patience. In this disinterestedness, when, as a responsibility for the other, it is also a responsibility for the third party, the justice that compares, assembles and conceives, the synchrony of being and peace, take form” (OB 16). Given that being is war, a “multiplicity of allergic egoisms which are at war with one another,” it is through reason, which “suspends the immediate clash of beings,” that “Beings become patient, and renounce the allergic intolerance of their persistence in being.”
The infinition of responsibility as the absolutely excessive, an experience entirely irreducible to systemization, quantification, or conceptual/cognitive comprehension (which would pretend to grasp infinity), is succeeded by a return to rationality in justice, in that justice entails measurement, comparison, the ascertaining of truth. Responsibility: “The pre-original, anarchic saying is proximity, contact, duty without end, a saying still indifferent to the said and the saying itself without giving the said, the-one-for-the-other, a substitution.” However, responsibility is not sufficient unto itself, life in the world must continue apart from or in spite of the disruption of transcendence, and thus it “requires the signification of the thematizable, states the idealized said, weighs and judges in justice. Judgments and propositions are born in justice” (OB 161). The introduction of the “third person” challenges the intimacy of proximity, creating an ethical dilemma: who has greater claim to me, who deserves or needs me more? “Outside the one who is near, of before him, he who is far off compels recognition. Outside the other there is the third party. He is also an other, also a neighbor. But which is the closest proximity? Is it not always exclusive? Who then is the first one to whom I must respond, the first to be loved?” asks Levinas. “There must be knowledge of such things! It is the moment of justice, inquiry, and knowledge. It is the moment of objectivity motivated by justice.” Against the infinite giving of self in responsible being-for-the-other, which is a transcendent existential category preexisting the order of volition, intentionality, capability, and decision, there is an exigency to concretize ethics in behavior, action, policy and norms that establish and regulate objective equality: “Thus we need laws, and--yes--courts of law, institutions and the state, to render justice.” [3]
Justice constitutes the transition from a private relationship of proximity (which is nevertheless an opening up of egocentrism unto the other) to an even greater openness: an ethics fully concerned for all others, fully public. “Transcendence or goodness is produced as pluralism... Pluralism is accomplished in goodness proceeding from me to the other...The unity of plurality is peace, and not the coherence of the elements that constitute plurality.” That is to say, pluralism is not a totalization which subsumes the specificity and identity of individuals into an impersonal, universal regime. Because the essential uniqueness, difference, and separateness of the subject is maintained, therefore, in relation to each individual, the other remains authentically other, unassimilated, unappropriated by totalization. “Peace therefore cannot be identified with the end of combats that cease for want of combatants, by the defeat of some and the victory of others, that is, with cemeteries or future empires. Peace must be my peace, in a relation that starts from an I assured of the convergence of morality and reality” (TI 305). Peace presupposes responsibility proceeding from me towards the other. It is not the result of victory in conquest and the obliteration of an opponent: peace requires the other’s presence - it is about relationship with the Singular Other as well as the multiplicity of all others.
Thinking about peace accomplishes nothing. It is not to be theorized about. Responsibility takes place prior to rationalistic ego-consciousness, in spite of it even, as the rupture or interruption thereof. Responsibility counterposes the obligation of heteronomy (being-for-the-other) against the freedom of autonomy; weakness, passivity, patience, suffering characterize the former, in contrast to the latter’s domination, power, ability... Peace presupposes a movement of expression, a communication with the other that pulls me out of my self-limitations: “The desire for a peace that is no longer the repose of a self within itself, no longer mere autonomous self-sufficiency. It is not the internal speech of the well-known dialogue of the soul with itself, doors and windows closed. It is an anxious peace, or love of one's fellow man” (NATIONS 1-2).
I have tried to remain faithful to Levinas’s teaching, without intellectualizing and reducing it to a merely academic exercise, by allowing his voice to pass through mine in as unmediated a way as possible. But to leave it at that would be tantamount to producing a closure of Levinas’s thought: the thinker would have been isolated with his thought, self-referentially. To allow the text to be a teaching, a living text, I must encounter it, enter into relationship with it; I have to experience it; I have to open it up and open myself up to it through reading and interpreting. I must express myself - honestly.
I feel inadequate to the exigency Levinas exposes me to: ethical being-for-the-other (to the point of substitution!) is too difficult to fulfill, it exceeds my capacity to perform, and so I am guilty. Peace, if measured by my capabilities to reach it or bring it, appears impossible to achieve, infinitely distant from me. Faced with the transcendence of peace, its excess over any ideal which I could realize, my powers of consciousness and ego are revealed to be inadequate, limited, unequal to the exigency of infinity: my egocentric self-sufficiency is disrupted, altered, transcended, and I remain in a state of paradoxical groundlessness and uncertainty. I am apologetic for my inabiIity. But this experience bears traces of an authentic relationship with the other. Apology admits lack and weakness, the passivity of substitutive being-for-the-other, yet simultaneously affirms the self in owning the weakness and taking responsibility. As Levinas says, “Apology, in which the I at the same time asserts itself and inclines before the transcendent, belongs to the essence of conversation.” The other and I, the ideal and reality, futural peace and present violence or present weakness - they are in relation to each other. The two are not totalized into a unity in which one prevails over the other. To reiterate, “Conversation, from the very fact that it maintains the distance between me and the Other, the radical separation asserted in transcendence which prevents the reconstitution of totality, cannot renounce the egoism of its existence” (OB 40). It is precisely because their difference is maintained that they are in relation. And only in relation are the limitations of myself and of the present exposed. The very fact that I am able to perceive and judge present imperfection, lack, and to acknowledge my present inadequacy, the limitations of ego-power, means that I am already in relation with a futural perfection, wholeness, peace: I may not be able to intentionally accomplish peacefulness as a project, but paradoxically, in the renunciation of my self-perceived power to manipulate that which is beyond my control, in facing the other without pretensions, my ego is disarmed, transcended, and I am opened unto an authentic experience of peace. Dissatisfaction, the awareness of fault and lack, is already a transcendence beyond the ease and comfort of being content, the complacency and groundedness of self-interested egocentrism rooted in the war of being.
While judgment and critique expose a situation to its other, they are often taken to excess, such that the situation is effectively negated of any positivity or goodness. Negation, or radical denial, attempts to accomplish an extreme form of being-for-the-other through sacrifice or annihilation. It frequently manifests as martyrdom, over-givingness, nihilism, suicide - self-sacrifice... Being-for-the-other is completely prioritized - over the existence of self.
It can’t be overemphasized that Levinas asserts the relationship of self and other: which means that neither excludes or obliterates the other. The transcendence of egoless responsibility, love of the proximate neighbor, must be grounded in practical justice, love of the distant third person: either without the other is unethical. Levinas’s entire thought is based upon the commandment “love your neighbor like yourself.” Not “love yourself” and not “love the other,” since these taken in isolation negate either self or other. Rather, to love the other like self, a relationship is established which simultaneously affirms both, in their separateness, uniqueness, and difference, and transcends the limitations of each through communication. This is peace, pluralistic peace, which surmounts the “allergy” of being-in-war: peace where I and other are united without dissolving into a totalized unity which would reduce difference to homogeneous sameness. Peace demands that I be constantly aware of the infinite specialness of both myself and the other.
[1] Totality and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas. Translated by Alfonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press (1969).
[2] Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence , Emmanuel Levinas. Translated by Alfonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers (1991).
[3] In the Time of the Nations. Emmanuel Levinas. Translated by Michael B. Smith; Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press (1994); p. 174.
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