The Core of my Opposition to Levinas: A Clarification for Richard Rorty  

Oleh:

Visker, Rudi

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Ethical Perspectives: Journal of the European Ethics Network vol. 4 no. 3 (Oct. 1997), page 154-170.
Topik: Distress; Levinas; Visker
Fulltext: Rudi Visker.PDF (149.14KB)

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Perpustakaan Pusat (Semanggi) Nomor Panggil: EE45.2 Non-tandon: 1 (dapat dipinjam: 0) Tandon: tidak ada

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I should like to thank Professor Rorty for the care that he took in replying to my question and for kindly remembering that we had a similar discussion before. Although I do not recall all the details of that exchange1, I remember leaving him as puzzled as I am now by his renewed impression that my resistance to part of his work has a Levinasian provenance. Hence I could only welcome the invitation by the editors of Ethical Perspectives to include in this issue an English translation of a recent piece in which I tried to clarify my resistance to Levinas. Oddly enough, as will become clear in the course of the following pages, at least part of my opposition to Levinas seems to be motivated by an attempt to do justice to what I consider to be Rorty’s major point in his Contingency, Irony and Solidarity: the idea that people are dependent on what he there aptly calls ‘final vocabularies’ — the set of words to which they have recourse when trying to justify their actions or their beliefs or even the meaning of their lives. Such vocabularies, I take it, were not meant to be ‘final’ in the sense that they could never change, but “in the sense that if doubt is cast on the worth of these words, their user has no non-circular argumentative recourse”. Hence Rorty’s idea that, as he puts it in the present paper, the West in approaching the non-West should “get rid of rationalistic rhetoric” and rather think of itself as “someone with an instructive story to tell.” The West, that is, should not give up what Rorty believes to be of prime importance in its own story (Enlightenment liberalism), but merely detach from it that part which Rorty thinks it doesn’t need in order to remain in touch with that story (Enlightenment rationalism) and which can only cause embarrassment to those who find themselves in other stories. The story of the West is for Rorty but another final vocabulary — and thus, as they all are, a “product of time and chance” (CIS 22) — but the realization of this contingency should not lead to the ironist’s conclusion that what is contingent is not worth living for. Since Rorty thinks that contingency does not exclude commitment, he finds himself at odds both with the ironist’s despair that there is nothing which is not contingent, and with the ‘metaphysician’s’ hope that we could still get in touch with something ‘bigger than us’.

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