243. Heidegger, Levinas, and more[i]

             
Heidegger and Levinas share the postmodern opposition to Enlightenment views of the rational, autonomous, disembodied subject, separated from the object, the world. The view here is that mind and spirit are embodied, and hence finite, in death. The subject is constituted by action in the world. Abstractions, concepts, are preceded and trumped by largely tacit, unconscious hunches and heuristics that are partly instinctive and partly cobbled on the fly.[ii]

Concerng embodiment and identity, I recall a thesis offered in several items in this blog (e.g. 24). I employed the work of Antonio Damasio[iii], according to whom in our brain we build different levels of representations in the form of neural connectivity, first of bodily processes, then of the world we act in, and then representations of representations that may constitute consciousness. I argued that what these levels of representation have in common is the body, in which they arise and connect. The body as a nexus of those representations is what gives some coherence in the form of identity, though it remains multiple, not fully coherent, even conflicting, and subject to shift, as mental construction and destruction proceeds.

Now, if there is no transcendence of God or Platonic ideas, is there any other pass beyond the finality of death?

According to Heidegger. In ‘being thrown into the world’, we live  ‘unto death’, that is, death wakes us to live life authentically, seeking expression, creation, ecstasy.  However, these are momentary, they come and go, and ultimately we crash into the blind wall of death, with no aperture to any beyond.

Here, one is reminded of Schopenhauer’s view of the Will to exist, with desires that are never fully fulfilled, and if they were this would evoke an unbearable boredom.

In both Schopenhauer and Heidegger, ethics becomes aesthetics: seek art to escape the boredom of fulfilled desires or the itch of unfulfilled ones or grasps for authenticity.

Levinas does not accept this. According to him[iv] there is a form of continuity in discontinuity of the self, in fecundity, in having a child. The child continues one's identity without being identical.

 

I don't go along with this [v].  I grant that it may be part of a sense of continuity after death, but there is much more. There is also, and perhaps more importanly, cultural posterity. That may lie in medical care you gave to people, or in education or teaching, or in producing art, or laws, or in offering security. And so on.

This is quite simple and does not require philosophical contortionism.  

 

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[i] This item has been inspired and informed, in part, by Simon Critchley, The problem with Levinas, 2015, Oxford U. Press.

[ii] For example, I am thinking here of the decision heuristics presented in social psychology, e.g. in the work of Kahneman.

[iii] In his Self comes to mind.

[iv] In his Totality and infinity.

[v] Apart from the fact that Levinas talks only about father and son, leaving out  mothers and girls. And what about childless people? Is there no hope for them?