Introduction: Totality and Infinity

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), a pivotal figure in 20th century philosophy, offers a a profound exploration of the concept of the “Other,” fundamentally reshaping ethical thought and our understanding of intersubjectivity. His work diverges from traditional phenomenology as developed by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), which seeks to describe and understand consciousness and experience from a subjective point of view. Instead, Levinas emphasizes the ethical primacy of the Other, asserting that our experiences and existence as such are profoundly defined by our relationships with others. In doing so, he critiques the tendency of Western philosophy to prioritize the self, advocating for a radical reorientation toward the Other. Levinas accuses the entire history of philosophy of engaging only with the “I,” or the ego. A rather substantial accusation, of course, but Levinas tries to accentuate the fact that the otherness of the Other has never been thought throughout history.
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Totality and Infinity, published in 1961, represents a seminal work in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, wherein he articulates a radical critique of traditional Western metaphysics and ethics. Central to Levinas’s thought is the distinction between totality and infinity, which serves as the framework for his exploration of subjectivity, alterity, and the inherent ethical dimensions of intersubjectivity.

Levinas begins by challenging the dominant philosophical paradigm that prioritizes totality, which can be defined as the totalizing systems of thought that seek to subsume the Other within a unified framework. The branch of philosophy named metaphysics, which is concerned with reality and truth, belongs to a tradition which tries to establish totality through an overarching concept such as nature, humanity, or Being. Levinas argues that such totalizing approaches reduce the richness of human experience and diminish the ethical imperative that arises from encountering the Other. In contrast, infinity represents the idea of the Other as irreducible and transcendent. The Other is always something that cannot be totalized and is therefore experienced as infinite.

Levinas reverses the common philosophical notion of the self. While many phenomenologists have argued that it is the subject or the ego that experiences, through consciousness, other individuals, Levinas posits that the encounter with the Other is more primordial than any sense of subjectivity. In fact, it is through this encounter with the Other that the self is constituted at all. This relationship is characterized by an asymmetrical dynamic, in which the Other holds a position of primacy. The ethical call of the other demands a response that transcends mere obligation or duty; it is an appeal to the self to acknowledge the Other’s vulnerability, difference and singularity. Thus, ethics, for Levinas, is not merely a set of moral principles but a radical openness to the Other that prioritizes their existence and dignity. This openness towards the Other and the recognition of the Other’s vulnerability, which is conceptualized through the phrase “Thou shall not kill,” is what Levinas calls justice.

Levinas employs the notion of the face-to-face encounter to illustrate this ethical relationship. The face of the Other signifies not only the physical presence but also the expression of an inner world of sentiments and recognition. In the encounter with the Other, the self is confronted with the Other’s absolute Otherness, which resists totalization because of its infinite characterization. The face of the Other is infinite because it ceases to be totalized in any sense; human beings always bare something in their expression that is volatile and cannot be fully grasped. The face therefore becomes the site of ethical obligation, invoking a response beyond any rational construct.

Furthermore, Levinas critiques the totalizing tendencies inherent in various philosophical systems, including existentialism and phenomenology. Even in these frameworks that emphasize human experience, the tendency to reduce the Other to the same/selfhood ultimately undermines the ethical relationship. By prioritizing the experience of the self, these philosophies neglect the inherent asymmetry and richness of the encounter with the Other.

Levinas’s Phenomenological Tool: An Ethics of Difference and Singularity

Throughout his works, Levinas uses a philosophical method and tool that can be best described through two concepts: difference and singularity. These two common threads in Levinas’s philosophical oeuvre can best be elaborated on through the explication of some key elements of his work:

1. Levinas’s ethics is grounded in a phenomenological method. He approaches ethics through a description of the experience of and the relation with the Other. His ethical framework is not dependent on moral principles that have been abstracted from these experiences or relations.
2. Ethics is asymmetrical. According to Levinas’s phenomenology of moral consciousness, I encounter the Other as transcendence. The Other transcends my world from a height and, as such, takes on a more primordial or superior role in the relation between the self and the other. This form of ethics is not grounded in a reciprocal relation of equals. Instead, in moral consciousness I make no demands on the Other and find myself subject to the demands of the Other.
3. Moral responsibility is not grounded in intention and causality. According to Levinas, Western philosophy adheres to a form of thought that perceives the individual as an agent responsible for the acts that they choose, especially when the agent is aware of the consequences of the well-considered choices. Causal responsibility is generally understood to be a necessary condition for moral responsibility. However, for Levinas, “ethical consciousness is precisely the sense of an infinite responsibility for the Other, even when I myself have done nothing to harm her/him” (Miller, 2020, p.244).
4. The ethical relationship with the other is what singularizes the subject. It is not the self that is autonomous and free, who then encounters the Other who is also there. Rather, it is in my receptiveness to being affected by the Other that my own “here and now,” i.e., existence, arises. Ethics, for Levinas, is heteronomous: my responsibility for the Other precedes my own freedom to choose whether or not I want to be subject to morality.
5. For Levinas, ethics is first philosophy. Before inquiring into questions of metaphysics, epistemology, and ontology, we are already in a social context, and therefore already in an ethical interrelation. When Levinas states that “[t]he philosophy is an egology” (Levinas, 1985, p.38), this marks the fact that Western philosophers throughout history have always based their ethical ideals upon the ontological proof of the self. It is the foundation of the existence of the ego, which makes ethics possible. But for Levinas it is precisely the other way around. First ethical questions need to be asked and explored before we can philosophize about the nature of reality or how to acquire knowledge.
6. The interpretive phenomenological ethics offer no universal moral principles or formulas. Levinas understands his own project as describing the very moral consciousness that precedes and motivates all moral thinking and action. He does not seek to answer the questions that inspired other ethical traditions, such as: “What is the best human life?”; “How should we live?”; or “How ought one to act?” Levinas’s thought is not in tension with virtue ethics, deontology or utilitarianism, because his theory is working, one might say, at a prior level. Levinas insists that he is not “constructing ethics”; his goal instead is “to find its meaning” (Levinas, 1985, p.90).
7. Even as Levinas makes no prescriptions, he argues that the ethical relation grounds the universality of justice. The ethical relation is not something you sometimes find yourself to be in. Rather, it is always already present: “The others concern me from the first” (Levinas, 1998, p.157). This means that the face-to-face relation never originates somehow separated from our embeddedness in a social network. The face-to-face relation, i.e., the ethical relation, exists prior to and conditions every social interaction. Justice, for Levinas, is not the agreement of self-interested individuals, who try to preserve their freedom and property. Instead, it is the face-to-face relation that makes this idea of justice possible at all. Making utilitarian calculations regarding the necessities of life (humanitarian goals) might be necessary, but these calculations are only demanded by the face-to-face encounter.

These seven elements form the core of Levinas’s ethical framework. It is through the usage of these elements and their application to a certain text or theory that Levinas’s philosophical tool is illuminated. This tool always depicts the Other as something utterly singular and never tries to subjugate the self and the Other under one principle, it always conserves the difference that is innate to the Other in its otherness.

Climate Change and Levinasian Moral responsibility

Some scholars (Jamieson, 2007, p.110-115) have argued that what makes climate change as a collective problem so significant, is the fact that it poses a challenge to our traditional conception of moral responsibility, which looks something like this: “Individually my actions may be inconsequential and negligible. Furthermore, I intend no harm and there is no immediate victim of my actions, according to this normalized account of responsibility.” This normalized account of moral responsibility, I will call the individualistic account from now on. This view on moral responsibility atomizes human beings. Responsibility has nothing to do with collective problems or the relation between human beings, but rather with the individual and their actions, according to this widely accepted view on moral responsibility. As such, the problem of climate change is not a problem caused by anyone but a problem for everyone. The individualist account of moral responsibility incites a passive acceptance of our faith, and does not problematize the fact that we must be responsible for the Other and the world.

Through the usage of Levinasian ethics of difference and singularity it is possible to provide this standardized view with an alternative view. Levinasian moral responsibility can be applied to the climate change case on three different levels. In the following section, individual responsibility and climate change will be related to each other. Then a more global responsibility for future generations and future uncertainty can be formulated through the use of Levinas’s ethics. Lastly, an application of his ethics to concrete action will be constructed. Throughout these three degrees of responsibility a new answer can be given to the problem of climate change, without falling into standard and mundane solutions to this problem, as many of those proposed by the individualistic stance are.

Individual responsibility and climate change

For Levinas, our responsibility always exceeds our capacity to act and we are responsible even beyond what we choose. This notion of individual responsibility departs from the individualistic concept of responsibility. This individualistic concept, as discussed above, states that we are responsible for what we undertook voluntarily. Levinas inverts the individualistic account of responsibility, which means that I am responsible for the Other regardless of how consequential my actions might be (elements 2 and 3). Levinasian individual responsibility is not grounded in my intentions, or immediate causal connections between my deeds and the pains of others. Rather, his form of responsibility arises with an attention to the vulnerability and suffering of others, a suffering that disrupts and reverses all justifications for inaction. The suffering of the Other is the primordial opening of the ethical perspective (element 2).

This deviating notion of individual moral responsibility gives new insights regarding the problem of climate change. Levinas would argue that, if I am attentive to the suffering that emerges from catastrophes caused by climate change, then, regardless of whether my actions have any consequences, I should be aware of my responsibility. This is even the case for resources that I possess or take in. The more attentive I am, the more I should recognize that the nourishment of my body requires that I take resources from the Other. In saturating my daily needs, I already inflict violence on the Other. For Levinas this indeed forms one of his driving motives: “[T]he important question of the meaning of being is … do I not kill by being?” (Levinas, 1985, p.10). The strength of Levinasian moral responsibility lies in the fact that even when I might cultivate many of the green virtues, I still am complicit in contributing to suffering on a vast scale. As such, Levinas creates an ethical call for an amplification of attentiveness that reverberates in every individual. This call ensures a magnification of the feeling of responsibility for the Other, which might be inconsequential but is necessary for a collective problem such as climate change.

Responsibility for future generations

One of the greater difficulties concerning moral responsibility is the lack of spatial and temporal proximity between agents and victims. Even though one might expect this to be a problem for Levinasian ethics, since his accounts of responsibility mostly include descriptions of a face-to-face encounter and the proximity of the Other, this is not the case. For Levinas, the ethical is precisely “that which is nonreciprocal, a departure without return, a one-way movement” (Miller, 2020, p. 250). The ethical can be characterized as a work for the distant and as a horizon that exceeds my own time par excellence (element 2 and 5). The ethical relation is a relation for the future, it is an orientation beyond myself, which Levinas describes as a future without me.

Levinasian approaches to climate change would be directly in opposition to the economic analyses based on preferred future costs over present costs. In contrast to economic thinking, which always privileges the beneficial present, moral consciousness and responsibility, according to Levinas, privilege a future in which I cannot reap the benefit of my deeds. This way of perceiving moral consciousness lends itself to an account of responsibility, which prioritizes future generations and spatially distant others. One finds oneself responsible for another prior to any reasonableness, and it is this principal insight which helps to act morally without knowing the uncertain future.

Concrete Action and Collective Agreements

Levinasian ethics is often dismissed as an ethical theory that does not respond to concrete problems or action (Jamieson 2007, p.120). His theory does not tell people what they ought to do in any concrete situation. Rather, Levinasian morality is recognized as an ontology of ethics and therefore demarcates the difference between practical philosophy and metaphysical philosophy. As mentioned, Levinas does not offer an account of responsibility that prescribes universal moral principles (element 6); his proclamation for the response to the Other’s call has no normative force. But, this generality of a moral theory is exactly what is needed in the climate change debate. A Levinasian approach to concrete action for climate change necessitates a pluralistic way of ethical thinking (element 7). It is this pluralistic character of finding ourselves indebted or responsible towards the Other that grants Levinas’s ethics their forcefulness. Levinasian ethics, on a more concrete scale, might involve the cultivation of green virtues, while also at times the application of deontological or utilitarian principles. But no universal moral rule will function as the foundation of the responsibility towards the Other’s suffering. Instead of pretending to know which moral principles are necessary for solving the problem of climate change, Levinasian theory of moral responsibility demands an attention to those who are vulnerable and makes it an ethical obligation to respond to their suffering through multiple concrete actions.

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Conclusion

As such, Levinasian ethics of difference and singularity form an exquisite alternative answer to how we perceive moral responsibility nowadays. This individualistic stance needs to be overthrown by a Levinasian conception of moral responsibility, in which the suffering of the Other forms the first foundation of any ethical way of acting, in which moral responsibility bridges the spatiotemporal absence of the Other and focuses on future generations, and in which the generality of his ethical theory is seen as a positive aspect for an answer to this global dilemma. Climate change is a collective problem to which we must respond not in an egoistic way, but by prioritizing the Other.

Bibliography

Jamieson, Dale W. 2007, The Moral and Political Challenges of Climate Change, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Levinas, Emmanuel, 1985, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Translated by Richard Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

Levinas, Emmanuel, 1986, The Trace of the Other, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Levinas, Emmanuel, 1998, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

Miller, Dale E. 2020, Moral Theory and Climate Change Ethical Perspectives on a Warming Planet, Oxfordshire: Routledge.