Richard Cohen

Levinas on the possibility and need for humanist ethics In Humanism of the Other, Emmanuel Levinas argues that it is not only possible but of the highest exigency to understand one's humanity through the humanity of others. In paperback for the first time, Levinas's work here is based in a new appreciation for ethics and takes new distances from phenomenology, idealism, and skepticism to rehabilitate humanism and restore its promises. Painfully aware of the long history of dehumanization that reached its apotheosis in Hitler and Nazism, Levinas does not underestimate the difficulty of reconciling oneself with another. The humanity of the human, Levinas argues, is not discoverable through mathematics, rational metaphysics, or introspection. Rather, it is found in the recognition that the other person comes first, that the suffering and mortality of others are the obligations and morality of the self.

Is cybernetics good, bad, or indifferent? SherryTurkle enlists deconstructive theory to celebrate thecomputer age as the embodiment of difference. Nolonger just a theory, one can now live a virtual life. Within a differential but ontologically detachedfield of signifiers, one can construct and reconstructegos and environments from the bottom up andendlessly. Lucas Introna, in contrast, enlists theethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to condemn thesame computer age for increasing the distance betweenflesh and blood people. Mediating the face-to-facerelation between real people, allowing and encouragingcommunication at a distance, information technologywould alienate individuals from the social immediacyproductive of moral obligations and responsibilities. In this paper I argue against both of thesepositions, and for similar reasons. Turkle''scelebration and Introna''s condemnation of informationtechnology both depend, so I will argue, on the samemistaken meta-interpretation of it. Like Introna,however, but to achieve a different end, I will enlistLevinas''s ethical philosophy to make this case.

Chapter 7 of my book, Ethics, Exegesis, and Philosophy: Interpretation after Levinas, entitled “Humanism and the Rights of Exegesis,” was devoted to elaboratingthe notion of “ethical exegesis.” The notion of ethical exegesis is not only inspired by Levinas’s thought, but expresses the essential character of it, its “method,” as it were, the “saying” of its “said.” Accordingly, here I will begin by reviewing some of what I have already said about ethical exegesis, and then I will develop this notion further in relation to Plato and to the question of moralizing.

In many ways the whole of contemporary thought reduces to the search for new middle terms, such as 'desire', 'will to power', 'language', and "difference', to mediate, displace, or evade the classical philosophical dualisms, such as being and nonbeing, ideality and reality, mind and matter, is and ought. These dualisms--set up by the ancients, pursued by the moderns, and bequeathed to us contemporaries by their failures--are Kearney's target. His aim is to overcome them through the notion of figuration. This term--as well as the book's title--suggests an aesthetic orientation, but it is quite deliberately conceived as no mere substitute for the term 'imagination'. While Kearney does argue that the distinction between the imaginary and the real is a distinction ultimately of greater significance than the distinction between being and nonbeing, he also shows that the imaginary, classically conceived, has always taken second place to the real, and thus has always reproduced rather than overcome the insupportable difficulties of classical metaphysics. Figuration, by contrast, is not to be conceived in opposition to the real, but as a "comprehensive creativity," determining all fields of signification, such as the aesthetic, practical, ontological and ethical. It must be understood functionally, as the activity of an "always new ludic metamorphosis," the reciprocal play of new and old. Thus, like Merleau-Ponty's notion of "the flesh," it has great plasticity and at the same time yields specific insights.