In “The Ego and the Totality,” Emmanuel Levinas believes that an individual being can understand itself to be a total being, “only if it is thoughtless” (25). This is conceived through the freedom or violence of human beings. When people want to understand the expression of violence, Levinas states that this can be done through viewing being that has life in the totality that exists as a totality (25). The thinking being integrates into this totality, its needs and enjoyments. The totality becomes both the immediate element and the medium, where the living being is transformed to a concrete man (25). Furthermore, Levinas argues that every human experience can be described through phenomenological description; every human experience is from the beginning meaningful and can be understood through the process of intentionality. However, Levinas stresses that the embodied (sentient) self has a need to escape from the intentional ego. The escape from this being can be approached from a phenomenological description. This paper contents that Levinas asserts that escape from being is possible by breaking that most radical and steadfastly binding of chains that link I to oneself until autonomy is finally attained.
Levinas is heavily influenced by Husserl's phenomenological method, which revolved around the centrality of the “transcendental ego.” Husserl’s approach to essence, however, is too intellectual for Levinas and he moves away from this approach to being and transcendence to create his own counter-ontology. Levinas redefines transcendence as a need for escape. This escape involves the living being that is not absence of consciousness (Levinas 26). But this consciousness has problems; it has a “purely inner world whose center in occupies” (Levinas 26). It is a consciousness that is not involved in placing itself relative to an exteriority, does not understand itself as a part of the whole, and it also lacks the consciousness to which the unconscious corresponds (Levinas 26). In addition this living consciousness is completely inward, wherein if the exteriority strikes it, it will be killed; hence, it is rather free or dead (Levinas 26). This centrality makes it difficult to escape the being, when it is inward looking and does not correspond to something exterior to it. In a sense, the being possesses a certain power over its power over the self. Breaking apart will not be immediate for it can be fatal to the consciousness of the being (Levinas 27). The possibility of creating a thought of freedom is considered a “miracle” (Levinas 28). This miracle divides the biological consciousness and becomes the intermediate between the “the lived and the thought” (Levinas 28). The miracle, however, does not suffice for the commencement of the thought (Levinas 28). The thinking individual should still be able to posit the self to the totality, and in relation to it, which, as a result, defines the self with respect to the parts (Levinas 28).
Levinas approaches being differently, through the being for which the principal experiences of being are of its embodied, but not physiological, existence. Levinas differs from Heidegger’s approach, because the former provides primary priority to embodiment and its lived “moods” and also to the humans' unsuccessful attempts to escape the being that people belong to. Levinas believes that a human being experiences itself as if thrown into its world, without control over its commencement and ending. His approach to transcendence can be viewed in the humans’ constant urge to over the limits of their physical and social circumstances. His transcendence is not concerned of transcendence-in-the-world, but more focused on the transcendence through and because of awareness. This viewpoint of transcendence opens the question of mortality the finiteness of being. For transcendence, Levinas stresses: “Transcendence is what faces us…the essence condition for propositional truth is not in the disclosure of a being, or of the being of beings, but the expression of an interlocutor to whom I tell both the being he is and the being of his being” (Levinas 43). One confronts the identical in the being and escape cannot be easily attained, until the individuality of the “me” is apparent and accepted. Levinas states: “The individuality of the ego is distinguished from every given individuality by the fact that its identity is not constituted by what distinguishes it from others, but by its self-reference” (Levinas 43).
Recognition of the being is important. When one says “I think,” it means that there is an opposition to being. Levinas stresses, however: “But if this recognition were a submission to him, the submission would take all its worth away from my recognition” (Levinas 43). The face of being affirms the existence of one self, but the negation of being cannot be done in a face-to-face manner says Levinas (43). Levinas introduces the importance of speech: “Speech is thus a relationship between freedoms which neither limit nor negate, but affirms one another. They are transcendent with respect to each other” (Levinas 43). The speech between these beings beholds a more radical phenomenological analysis.
Levinas argues that to escape, one must get out of oneself and break the most radical and steadfastly binding of chains that link I to oneself until autonomy is finally attained. The human life has to cross from the intentional to the experience of totality of one’s consciousness that is outside the being. Levinas puts being in a cultural and historical context and to ask about the meaning of the finite and the infinite. People are admittedly finite, as they contemplate the being as finite. Levinas says: “The idea of infinity is then not only one that teachers what we are ignorant of. It has been put into us…it is experience in the sole radical sense of the term: a relationship with the exterior, with the other, without this exteriority being able to integrated into the same” (Levinas 54). People can escape this being through contemplating on the self and the being, and the relationships that must be withdrawn to identify the self. With the self identified in relation to its parts and the consciousness that it is part of, the self can be projected to escape from the being.
Levinas also indicates the escape from the being itself and the beings that people are. He proceeds that the “the thinker who has the idea of infinity is more than himself, and this inflating, this surplus, does not come from within, as in the celebrated project of modern philosophers, in which the subject surpasses himself by creating” (Levinas 54). The escape comes from the escape from participation into this existence of infinite thinking. From the beginning, the “fact of existing” pertains to that of concrete human existence. In saying that existence is firstly human, Levinas underscores Heidegger's Being, or the “being of that which is,” provides an answer to the formal ontological question, to which determinations like finiteness and infinity, not to declare escape and transcendence, apply only indistinctly. He believes that the being extracts itself from this finiteness. Levinas's prolonged insistence that being is incessant presence, not, as Heidegger insisted, an occurrence of disclosure and departure.
Escape symbolizes a positive, dynamic need. But needs are not correspondent to suffering. Within numerous needs is the expectation of their fulfillment. Levinas pushes people to reconceptualize human need through discussing fullness rather than privation. He provides another definition of existence itself. He asserts that need is the ground of our existence. That means that transcendence, in Levinas' understanding of it, is continually directed toward something that is outside and more than the self. The great motivation is to escape from this material situation and embodiment. Levinas's counter-ontology redefines Heidegger's Being toward the amalgamated duality of sentient self and intentional ‘I’, here and now, not anticipated toward its ultimate departure in death
Autonomy is also a process that can be used to escape from being. Freedom through escape can succeed through “the soul’s monologue” that has attained “universality” (Levinas 49). The self will have to encompass first the totality of being until the dialectic of the soul conversing to itself realizes the dialogue (Levinas 49). Levinas says: “It is doubtless than for this reason that Descartes will say that the soul might be the origin of the ideas that relate to exterior things, and thus account for the real” (Levinas 49). The universality exists and the definition of the monologue proceeds exterior to the self. As a result, the being can withdraw from the monologue and exist outside of its being and its consciousness.
Levinas believes that every human experience can be described through phenomenological description; every human experience is from the beginning consequential and can be understood through the process of intentionality. However, Levinas stresses that the embodied (sentient) self has a need to escape from the intentional ego. The escape from this being can be approached from the phenomenological description. Levinas asserts that escape from being is possible by breaking that most radical and persistently binding of chains that link I to oneself until autonomy is finally attained. From the discourse between the self and the being, relationships and context are identified and clarified, until the escape begins and leaves the limits of being’s consciousness.
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