Emmanuel Levinas, the Jewish-French philosopher was asked: “Which nation most closely correlates with your concept of a State and democracy?”, the answer came promptly: “That’s easy: France” (Is it righteous to be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas). Levinas’ claim is lately echoed in France, after amending Article 34 of the French constitution which grants women the ‘right to abortion’. The French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, while addressing the lawmakers said: “We have the chance to change history”. France claims to be pioneering for individual freedom, setting a model for all nations. With this amendment, abortion becomes a fundamental right to women. On the flipside, a different question was raised by another State: Can the act of ‘taking a human life’ be glorified as a ‘right’? This can be branded as antiliberal, enslaving, inhumane conservatism, lack of sufficient understanding on human sciences, and masculinist cognitive endeavour that consequently promotes a sexist moralism. Interestingly, although Levinas in a certain way endorses individualism and the claims for rights that are found in democratic societies, the term ‘right’ calls for deeper scrutiny and self-retrospection. Because, he questions the possibility of the self’s very existence without the human other. Paul Ricoeur’s casual comment to Levinas: “Your ‘I’ has no esteem for itself” approves the necessity of the other for the separate self. The arguments based on ‘home’ and ‘vulnerability’ will shed more light on it.
Justifying one’s
existence
The argument based on home takes its
root from the philosophy of Heidegger. Dasein, meaning “being there” / “being here”, is the key to
understand his philosophy. Accordingly, human existence, being-in-the-world, is
not like any other existence, but the being that discloses itself by disclosing
the things in the world. Simply put, the human existence is in the process of
meaning making by taking care of / making use of things in the world. Things in
the world are the possibilities for self’s disclosure and its authenticity. Interpreting
Heideggerian position speculatively, Levinas sees in it, the unleashing of
uninhibited freedom of the self that assimilates, objectifies, subjugates,
consumes everything other than the self. After all these violences – in
Levinas’ terms, the self, returns to itself, to its home – a world of its own and
strives for egoistic glorification. This sort of creation of home, for Levinas
is usurpation of the space of the other. Citing Blaise Pascal,
Levinas writes: “My being-in-the-world or my ‘place in the sun’, my being at
home, have these not also been the usurpation of spaces belonging to the other
man whom I have already oppressed or starved, or driven out into a third world;
are they not acts of repulsing, excluding, exiling, stripping, killing?”
(“Ethics as first philosophy”). This usurpation, “occupying someone else’s
place”, calls for responsibility and impels one to say to the other, in the
words of Pascal: “you shall not die”. Levinas would qualify this as the justification
of one’s existence in the world. This reading on Levinas, who acclaims the
democracy of France, urges to scrutinise the absolute claim for right, that is
laced to abortion as well. It can be read as the denial of space to the
vulnerable and selfish usurpation of space belonging to the other.
Vulnerability and
sensible exposedness to the other
The second argument is based on vulnerability. Levinas moving away from the Cartesian cognitive mode that speaks of the self as thinking subject, names self as having “flesh and blood”, the sentient existence (Otherwise than being or beyond essence). The self, for Levinas, cannot be reduced to the status of cognitive agent, that retracts to itself in a self-closed cabin and engages in thinking by assimilating everything around it. Since human beings make their living through their bodies, they are already exposed to sensibilities around her/him. The sensibilities pierce through and affect the self. For Levinas, “sensibility is vulnerability, and exposedness”. Taking the argument forward, he equates vulnerability to incarnation, meaning, the sensibility about the other taking flesh within oneself, obsessing the self. Therefore “psyche”, or in Levinas’ own another expression, essence of being, “signifies … alterity in the same without alienation in the form of incarnation, as being-in-one’s-skin, having-the-other-in-one’s-skin”. Sentience, for Levinas, turns out to be the persuasive presence of the other, that cannot be brushed away simply as a guilty thought. Therefore, conceptualising freedom in Cartesian model, can deflesh the self, and consequently apathetic self. This invites us to rethink the term ‘right’, that too specifically, ‘right’ of the unborn.
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