Alphonso Lingis

Microorganisms luxuriate in, plants push through, the humus, that is, the corpses of plants, insects, birds and mammals. Insects, fish, birds, and mammals nourish themselves with the flesh of plants on hand, and also with that of insects, fish, birds, and mammals. In the natural world, everything assimilates and is assimilated. Every animal, from amoebas to the blue whales, feels moments of fear, for they know they are vulnerable and mortal. As they eat what is at hand they sense that what will eat them is already at hand.

For Emmanuel Levinas objectivity is intersubjectively constituted. But this intersubjectivity is not, as in Merleau-Ponty, the intercorporeality of perceivers nor, as in Heidegger, the active correlation of practical agents. It has an ethical structure; it is the presence, to each cognitive subject, of others who contest and judge him. But does not the exposure of each cognitive subject to the wants and needs of others result in the constitution of a common practical field, which is not yet the objective world of scientific cognition? For Levinas, the constitution of a world common to all is governed by the practice of justice. Justice begins when above the elf and the other there intervenes a third party, who contests and judges both. But whether this third party is a representative of humanity, or a figure of God, would not his justice be but the name of a higher egoism?

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 30.3 (2000) 106-113 [Access article in PDF] To Die With Others Alphonso Lingis One dies as one dies—as anyone, everyone dies, as all that lives dies. Do we not know that when we lie dying—when, bedridden, hospitalized, removed from our home and workplace, we no longer exercise our skills, launch initiatives, are depersonalized, and can do nothing but wait for the end in increasing passivity and prostration? Did we not learn something of the death that will be our death from every death we witnessed or noticed about us? And when someone with whom we shared our life dies, do we not feel that something of ourselves has died too? In several senses of the word, we die with others. My Own Death It is strange then to see that in philosophy one's own death and the death of others have been separated. Socrates makes learning how to die the subject matter of philosophy and makes philosophy the daily practice of dying. He speaks of the relief he will feel when the opacity of his body will be broken. His last words—Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius—say that life is the sickness for which death is the cure. Did not Socrates here in fact claim to know two things that he did not know—what death is, that is, that death is a relief; and what life is, that is, that life is sickness?Socrates had seen men die; he had committed himself to defend Athens in war, he had killed men in battle. He does not speak of how they died, nor of the relief he felt when they died.Socrates died the way he did in order to demonstrate his belief that the soul is of its own nature immortal. Heidegger, proclaiming the end of the metaphysics launched by the Platonic Socrates, makes one's own death again the central topic it had been for Socrates. Heidegger is convinced that death is not an accident that befalls a life that of its own nature would endure like inanimate things endure. He sets out to show that we die of our own nature, that our life casts itself with all its forces unto its end.Death and Nothingness Heidegger also claims to know what death is: that death is nothingness. He identifies it—it is this one thing, nothingness. Yet he also insists that my death is utterly my own. From the opening pages of Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych, Heidegger draws the affirmation that witnessing the death of others is not the source of my sense of my own mortality. At the wake, I have only seen the body of another immobilized, tranquilized, but still fully, completely, there. I have not seen annihilation. But annihilation is what my death will be for me. This I sense in anxiety, that sense of being cast adrift, the environment no longer supporting me, sustaining me—and which is a premonition of being cast into nothingness.Death is ungraspable, unconfrontable; it has no front lines. Is it not too much to say that I know it is nothingness? Must we not rather say that death is the unknown? [End Page 106]I cannot say, strictly speaking, that I die, since—dying a violent death or not—I am conscious of only part of the event. And a great share of the terror I experience at the idea of death derives perhaps from this: bewilderment at remaining suspended in the middle of a seizure whose outcome I can never know because of my unconsciousness. This kind of unreality, this absurdity of death, is (without taking into account the physical suffering by which it might be accompanied) its radically terrible element, and not, as some may think ("Après moi le déluge!" "Since there's nothing after death, why are you afraid?" "What's the difference to you, since you won't be here any more?" etc....), what might make it acceptable. [Leiris 50] We do not know that death is nothingness—nothingness is not some thing one knows. But nothingness is...

The intentional analysis devised by phenomenology was first used to explain the meaningfulness of expressions; it aimed at exhibiting the original primary substrates that expressions refer to, and at exhibiting the subjective acts that make signs expressive. The explanation of predicative expressions was then extended to the antecedent layer of prepredicative, perceptual experiences, explaining these by locating, with peculiar kinds of immanent intuitions, the original sensile data which evidence the bodily presence of the real - and by reactivating the informin- formulating, interpreting and the informing-forming subjective acts that make of the sensile data, or material, perceived things. Intentional analysis explains by decomposing the derivate references back to the original references, and by leading the mind's intentions back to the givens they refer to. Can this kind of explanation be extended? The investigations of this book have taken this question in different directions. Can phenomenological explanation be extended to exhibit not only the act-character of the mind, but its substance, its affective materiality, its locomotion, its impressed haecceity, in short, its corporeality (Chapter I)? Shall not the explanation explain that if the terra firma of being, in the maximum proximity where distance no longer introduces indeterminability, is never reached, this is not because of the defects and the finitude of our mind, but because being itself is not there as the answer, positive and affirmative - being itself is in the interrogative mood (Chapter II)? If the given being itself is in the x Preface