Kevin Houser

Emmanuel Levinas objects to traditional theodicy. But his objection to theodicy is so untraditional that God’s existence is incidental to it. The primary problem with theodicy, he argues, is not evidential but ethical. The primary problem with theodicy is not that its claims are false, but that its claims are offensive. In laying out Levinas's unusual view, I first sketch out the specifically ethical nature of theodicy’s offense: failing to acknowledge suffering. Next I discuss Levinas unusual account of this suffering, which theodicy fails to acknowledge. I then show how Levinas’ accusation against traditional theodicy does not hinge upon positive claims for the existence of God. I show how Levinas’ ethical objection to theodicy serves equally well as an objection to the negative existence claims of atheism. For atheism, too, has an overlooked “atheodicy” which fails to acknowledge suffering, and so may similarly offend. I then shift from the theoretical to the practical. I treat the insights gained regarding theodicy and its offenses not as ideas considered but as a strategy lived. I offer a profile of the biblical figure of Esau, whose remarkable reaction to God’s malicious absence involved no consolation, sense of grievance, or resentment of his brother Jacob, God’s beloved. I conclude that the brothers’ eventual rapprochement demonstrates a deep spiritual affinity between atheist and theist. Both live out their lives under "a gospel not to be preached". And the end of such preaching suggests a way forward in our own God-centered disputes.

Many suppose some form of free will is required to make moral responsibility possible. Levinas thinks this is backwards. Freedom does not make moral responsibility possible. Moral responsibility makes freedom possible. Free will is not a condition for morality. Free will is an aspect and expression of our moral condition. Key to Levinas’s argument is his rejection of free-will-individualism: the idea that free will is a power a single being could possess. A “contradiction” extracted from standard accounts, and related troubles with autonomy as found in Kant and Korsgaard, motivate Levinas’s counter-claim: Freedom cannot be by nature mine. For my own nature is something I am free to change. Hence my own nature is something from which I am somehow free. Traditional freedom over one’s self thus presupposes a prior liberating ‘inner distance’ from one’s self. And this initial detachment or un-self-centering is an ethical distancing which only another person can effect. Free will individualism is mistaken, because other persons play an indispensable role in making us free. The chapter concludes that free will is best thought of as Levinas suggests: not as an individual power, but as a social process like love: an ongoing second-personal responsiveness wherein we face and free one another.

Analytic philosophers often appeal to Reason and reasons to explain ethical relations. By Levinasian lights, this is backwards. It is not because we are already open to Reason that we are ethically open to others. It is through “the welcoming of [others] that the will opens to Reason.” We do not respond to others’ needs because we are reasonable; being reasonable is itself “a response to . . . a face, [who already] speaks.” The structure of reason, theoretical or practical, does not produce ethical obligation. On the contrary, “the . . . ethical [is] the . . . irreducible structure upon which all other structures rest”. While the implications of Levinas’s ethics-first claim are, for Reason-centered philosophy, nothing short of Copernican, the actual impact of Levinas's contentions has been negligible. I argue that this absence of impact results from a remarkable absence in the secondary literature to explain what the face 'is' and how it has the reason-prompting effect Levinas clearly says it has. Using a key contrast between Levinasian responsibility and Kantian respect, I offer a reconstruction of Levinas's often-obscure arguments about what the face 'is'--a persisting imperative to respond to the physical vulnerability of others-- and consider how facing this vulnerability could have this extraordinary reason-inaugurating power.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Facing the Space of ReasonsKevin Houser (bio)The Face and ExplanationAnalytic philosophers often appeal to reason and reasons to explain ethics. By Levinasian lights, this is backward. It is not because we are already open to reason that we are ethically open to others. It is through “the welcoming of [others] that the will opens to reason.” We do not respond to others’ needs because we are reasonable; being reasonable is itself “a response to... a face, [who already] speaks.” The structure of reason, theoretical or practical, does not produce ethical obligation. On the contrary, “the... ethical [is] the... irreducible structure upon which all other structures rest” (TI 79).The implications of Levinas’s project are, for reason-centered philosophy, nothing short of Copernican. For a tradition that chiefly speaks of reasons to be for the other and of being for the other because of reason, there is no more radical critique than the counter-claims that our encounter with the Other is what makes us reason-able and that the-one-for-the-other is reason. Yet after over nearly four decades in English, the impact of Levinas’s project on reason-centered philosophy has been decidedly less than Copernican. Why? [End Page 121]A large part of the answer is this: when these philosophers ask how a claim of reason could result from the claim of ethics, they are quite properly referred to the face — only to be told the face itself is inexplicable. To the follow-up queries “But what is it? And why does it have this effect rather than another?” the questioners are referred to Levinas’s comments on what the face “is” — namely, “other-ness,” “alterity,” “vulnerability,” and “exposure to wounds and outrage.” But these references strike earnest investigators as rhapsodies or Continental catechisms: poetically rich and propositionally poor. Worse, they fail to address — much less answer — the second question. To say that the face, qua otherness, commands us is not to show how it has this effect. The former without the latter gives the perplexed no reason to suppose the vulnerability, otherness, or alterity of others produces responsibility rather than something else entirely — say, subconscious rivalry or prereflective resentment. Finally, though it is common for Levinasians to deny that any further account of the face can be given, the absence of an explanatory link between the face and its responsibility-inducing function has a formidably high cost.1 For without an account of how the face generates obligation there can be no account of how we are opened to reason by it. If we do not say how the face provokes an original ethical imperative, we cannot say how reason is ethically provoked. This means treating the face as an unsplitable explanatory atom is unacceptable by Levinas’s own lights. For that “the first rationality gleams forth in... the face to face” is not merely an explanatory aspiration at which Levinas gestures. It is something that, by the end of Otherwise than Being, he thinks he has shown.But this halt to Levinas’s Copernicanism about reason is unnecessary. We can explain what the face is and how the face does what it does. We can do so within the explanatory strictures Levinas sets out, using resources Levinas himself provides. With Kantian reason and respect as a foil and orienting point, I will describe the nature of the face’s alterity and show how this alterity “becomes [ethical] proximity... understood as responsibility.” And I will show how responsibility — a prereflective [End Page 122] obligation to one another we accept without a reason to do so — is a responsibility to which Kantian reason is itself a perpetual response.A quick note on method: Levinas has a vexed relationship with explanation that, in the language of the following, I have simplified. Granted: reperforming Levinas’s endless and eloquent struggles — to both say and unsay, to speak in the present about what was never present, to at once assert and evoke — is required for a full understanding of him. But my humbler goal here — or humbler meta-goal — is to defend Levinas as explainer, without ignoring these other registers in and...

Gabriela Basterra, The Subject of Freedom: Kant, Levinas, Fordham University Press, 2015, 197pp., $29.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780823265152. Reviewed by Kevin Houser, Case Western Reserve University "What is a subject?" "In what sense is it free?" If we ask Kant and Levinas these questions we expect incompatible answers -- an expectation encouraged by Levinas, who often deploys Kant as a foil for his own views about reason, morality, and freedom. The flash points are by now familiar. Kant supposes morality arises from practical reason's structure. Levinas, by contrast, insists it is the face of the other that structures rationality and "opens the will to reason." Kant thinks the moral relationship arises from being subject to a common law. Levinas holds that the law is an artifact of a normatively prior ethical relation based on alterity -- precisely what we can never have in common. Kant supposes the morally legitimate law must be self-imposed. Levinas holds that moral subjectivity is "persecution" -- a primordial being-imposed upon. And so on. Both do hold to a close relation between subjectivity, morality and freedom. But there seems at the core of these differences an intractable disagreement about the subject -- specifically, about whether it is autonomy or heteronomy that makes the subject moral and sets the subject free. Opposing this expectation of contrast is Gabriela Basterra's insightful and difficult book. In it, she insists we replace the narrative of Kant-Levinas conflict or inversion with one of extension and mutual clarification. Levinas critiques but clarifies Kant, "follow[ing] . . . Kant's thinking . . . to its most promising consequences." (4) Kant's notion of the unconditioned, as it appears in the first and third antinomies, "help[s] us appreciate the implications of . . . 'substitution,'" Levinas' term for the pre-reflective ethical sociality through which subjectivity must be understood. (17) Basterra's task, in sum, is to show how Kant's notion of autonomy is better read through Levinas' notion of substitution and how these concepts together provide a fuller picture of a subject that is ethical, rational, and free. The book has five chapters. The first....

Recent analytic philosophy often explains our responsibility to one another in terms of normative reasons. Emmanuel Levinas thinks this is backwards. We are not responsible to one another because we have reasons to be. For reasons are themselves something we are responsible to one another to have; and it is only because we are responsible to one another for them that we are able to have our own reasons. Put broadly: Reasons-responsiveness is a form of responsiveness to persons. Standard reasons-first explanations of interpersonal responsiveness miss this point, marginalizing the very relationship our reasonings enact or express. And the steady failure to recognize this yields a picture of reasoning, reasons, and reason itself that is abstract, impersonal, "de-faced". This essay reconstructs Levinas’s reorientation of reasons and responsibility, and motivates Levinas's "re-facing" of reasoning, reason, and reasons. The result is an “ethical metaphysics” of reasons that responds well to familiar analytic problems with how reasons exist. Reasons do not, like objects, exist and then happen to be something for which we are responsible. Rather, reasons exist like assurances or promises—as exchangeable expressions of ongoing relations of responsibility.