each other, and with that in mind Levinas moves from the image
of widows, orphans, and aliens to that of the suffering servant
who reveals the glory of God by suffering for others with love.
II,1.3 By Letting my Totality Welcome your Infinity
In Section One of Totality and Infinity Levinas discusses
the same and the other and the totality of the same has to do
with everything in my world making it up in the same way.
I can enjoy each thing within my world and the peace
of this enjoyment is the first form of my egoism, which is
a movement by which my self-centered life is a being for-itself.
But then the face of the other can look at me and make
a demand upon me and I can become responsible to the other.
If I in my totality welcome the other I discover that they can
make infinite demands upon me and thus infinity invades
my world by making more claims than I can imagine.
In my world I can enjoy others but if I respond to the call
of the other and become responsible to him or her my responsibility
is not a pleasure but a pain and an affliction in which I
welcome my neighbor so that he is more important than myself.
Welcoming the other’s infinite demands becomes
more important to me than the totality of my own world.
On page 75 of Totality and Infinity Levinas gives a good description
of what it is like for my totality to welcome your infinity.
The nakedness of the face is destituteness.
To recognize the Other is to give.
But it is to give to the master, to the lord,
to him whom one approaches as “you”
in a dimension of height.
In a footnote he says that the “you” is the “you” of majesty
in contrast to the “thou” of intimacy so that widows, orphans,
aliens, and any one whose face pleads with need is my lord
and master and thus they have a special height and majesty.
The welcoming of Levinas sees the great worth and dignity
that is equal in every person and takes responsibility for that person.
II,1.4 With a “me voici” beyond Buber’s “I and Thou”
Martin Buber’s I and Thou beautifully expresses how the
Jewish religious ethic works as it poetically shows how
love is the responsibility of an I for a thou, which is
an attitude that is given me by grace and which I then will.
This attitude that I can have toward nature, humans,
and spiritual beings is contrasted with the I-it attitude
in that the I-thou is exclusive, direct, present, and
mutual while the I-it does not relate to the other as unique
and mediates the relation with knowledge and relates to it
in the past and the it does not relate mutually to me.
Buber shows how it is the exalted melancholy of our fate
that every thou in our world must become an it, but
with grace and will they can once again become our thou.
Also, in every I-thou relation we do meet the eternal thou.
On pages 68 and 69 of Totality and Infinity Levinas says that he
does not have the ridiculous pretension of “correcting” Buber, but
he is critical of the mutuality of the I-Thou relation and thereby
thinks of our responsibility called forth by the face of the other as
a “me voici” relation rather than an “I-Thou” relation in order
to give the other that height of being more important than myself.
For Levinas the I is the subject of my totality that is nourished
by enjoyment and will kill for a crust of bread in preferring self.
The me of the “me voici,” the “here is me” at your service, is
the me of the accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, vocative,
responsible self who will give the bread out of my mouth to the other
so that it is given to me to give by the call of the other who is
to be served by me with a duty that is mine before the other I.
Levinas builds upon the notion of love as responsibility of an I
for a thou by seeing love as coming from the lowly humble me
who can serve the noble other as the I who makes demands on me.
II,1.5 And a Transcendence beyond Plato’s Divine Madness
Plato’s philosophy explains this world of Heraclitean physical
becoming in terms of the Parmenidean metaphysical realm of Being.
This realm of Being is central to Heidegger’s ontology and is not
all that helpful when it comes to formulating a sensitive ethics.
But Levinas sees in Plato’s metaphysics a Good beyond Being
that the Platonic philosophy of love in both The Symposium
and in The Phaedrus gets in touch with as the Beautiful Good.
On page 43 of Totality and Infinity, Levinas writes:
Western philosophy has most often been an ontology:
a reduction of the other to the same
by interposition of a middle and neutral term
that ensures the comprehension of being.
Just above that on the same page he writes:
A calling into question of the same
which cannot occur within the egoist
spontaneity of the same
is brought about by the other.
We name this calling into question
of my spontaneity
by the presence of the Other ethics.
On page 48 Levinas begins to discuss “Transcendence as the Idea
of Infinity” and he shows how the metaphysics of Plato and
Descartes discovers a divine infinity that is transcendent.
To think the infinite, the transcendent, is not to think an object.
On page 49 he writes:
The “intentionality” of transcendence
is unique in its kind;
the difference between objectivity and transcendence
will serve as a general guideline
for all the analyses of this work.
He