Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Responding to Atrocity in the Twentieth Century
- 2 How to Read Levinas: Normativity and Transcendental Philosophy
- 3 The Ethical Content of the Face-to-Face
- 4 Philosophy, Totality, and the Everyday
- 5 Subjectivity and the Self: Passivity and Freedom
- 6 God, Philosophy, and the Ground of the Ethical
- 7 Time, History, and Messianism
- 8 Greek and Hebrew: Religion, Ethics, and Judaism
- Conclusions, Puzzles, Problems
- Recommended Readings
- Index
5 - Subjectivity and the Self: Passivity and Freedom
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Responding to Atrocity in the Twentieth Century
- 2 How to Read Levinas: Normativity and Transcendental Philosophy
- 3 The Ethical Content of the Face-to-Face
- 4 Philosophy, Totality, and the Everyday
- 5 Subjectivity and the Self: Passivity and Freedom
- 6 God, Philosophy, and the Ground of the Ethical
- 7 Time, History, and Messianism
- 8 Greek and Hebrew: Religion, Ethics, and Judaism
- Conclusions, Puzzles, Problems
- Recommended Readings
- Index
Summary
One of the most bewildering and puzzling points that Levinas makes concerns subjectivity and the self. He says that primordially or originally the self or person is passive because it is responsible before anything else. First and foremost, I am summoned and called into question. In Kantian terminology, the self is heteronomous (determined by something other) before it is autonomous (self-determined). It is passive before it is active. Subjectivity is accusation, hostage, obsession, and the like. These features may seem so strange that one can hardly grasp what they mean or even what they might mean. This chapter is our opportunity to discuss them and to show that they are extreme and provocative but not at all as bizarre and unintelligible as they first appear.
Shortly we shall have to consider the story of how modern culture, at least from the seventeenth century, has come to enshrine the subject, the individual, the autonomous, free, rational self, as the fountainhead of knowledge, morality, politics, culture, and even religion. Levinas does not ignore or denigrate this self or this conception of the self as the autonomous, rational individual, but he does reconsider its most fundamental dimension, its essential character, and how that dimension reverberates throughout its existential and historical career. To be sure, he believes that this new understanding of the unique individual person as passive and responsible echoes from the ancient past, but in the modern world, it is preempted by another view, modern, individualist, and powerful.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas , pp. 114 - 135Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011