Closer Look: Levinas, On Escape

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Hello and Welcome

0:44Hello, and welcome to Overthink. The podcast where your two favorite philosophy professors bring big ideas into everyday life. I'm David Peña-Guzman. And I'm Ellie Anderson. As always, for an extended version of this episode, community discussion, and more, subscribe to Overthink on Substack. Today, we're doing one of our Closer Look episodes where we dive deeply into a particular text. Today, that text is from a philosopher that I spent a lot of my 20s working on, Emmanuel Levinas.

1:15And we are going to be reading his essay on Escape, or we read it. We're going to be talking about it. If you want to read it, we recommend it. This pairs well with it. We're also hoping that it can be interesting, even if you're just a listener, because I have found that some of my favorite podcasts involve people talking about books that I actually haven't read. But this is a short essay that you can easily read. Well, I have worked on Levinas a lot less than you, Ellie, but he has been really influential

Influence of Levinas

1:42for me in thinking about ethics and the relationship specifically between phenomenology and ethics. And one thing that I cannot not point out is that I've been surprised to see Levinas pop up sometimes in the most unexpected of places in contemporary philosophy as a point of reference for thinking about ethics. So, for example, Karen Barad, who is a feminist science studies scholar, has this whole theory about quantum mechanics and physics, and at the end connects that to Levinas of all figures.

2:18And so even though he is primarily concerned with questions of ethics, his philosophy is quite versatile and lends itself to appropriation from many different philosophical corners.

Levinas' Philosophy

2:31He's been extremely influential in recent decades in American and French philosophy and beyond. And I think part of the reason that we wanted to do this episode is that we've actually found we haven't really talked about Levinas much on Overthink. I think his philosophy can be hard to integrate into other discussions of different topics, or maybe we've just done a bad job of doing so. And so I was really excited to talk about his work in this Closer Look episode. And just to situate his investments a little bit, or what he's best known for, for folks who maybe haven't encountered his work before, Emmanuel Levinas is most influential for his

3:07idea that ethics is first philosophy. Oftentimes, ethics is considered secondary or even an afterthought in philosophical systems. If you think about Immanuel Kant, for instance, another Immanuel, Kant's first critique is mainly about epistemology, knowledge, nature of reality, we might say. Kant's second critique is about ethics. And so it's like literally secondary, one of the most famous philosophical systems of all

Escape and Impotence

3:35time. I think you see also in the work of Hegel, for instance, another like big example, Hegel first talks about in phenomenology of spirit about things like perception and knowledge, and then eventually moves on to ethics and politics. And we can enumerate a lot more examples here. But I think Levinas sees that philosophy really goes astray when it thinks of ethics as secondary. We shouldn't be considering being and the study of being to be first and foremost.

4:07He has, you know, people like Heidegger in mind there. But instead, we should be really thinking about how we relate to the other as absolutely front and center. And in fact, maybe how we relate to the other isn't even quite going far enough, because Levinas' view of ethics centers around this figure of the other, which he sometimes calls the face to whom we find that we have to respond.

Shame and Existence

4:30And the other is somebody that I have no immediate knowledge of. I can't put myself in their shoes. His ethics is not a matter of empathy or really even of communicating. Let's figure out what we both want. It's rather about a sheer response to the vulnerability that the face of the other presents to you. Well, and aside from it not being about empathy or sympathy or community, it's a philosophy of a fundamental experience that rattles us to our core.

5:03So when I encounter another precisely because that other is so much more than I could ever assume them to be, much more than I can ever know about them, I am confronted with an abyss. This is the way in which Levinas talks about that primary encounter in phenomenology, which is my encounter with the other. It's something that ungrounds me. And so when Levinas encourages us to think of ethics as first philosophy, it's not just about suddenly inverting that traditional hierarchy where epistemology is first and suddenly we

5:37just do it the other way around. It's actually an entire transformation of what ethics even means in the first place. And although this is something that comes out much more clearly in his mature works in places like totality and infinity and other texts, you already see this orientation towards the ethical in the text that we are going to be talking about today, which is from 1935. So it's a very early text in Levinas' career. It's considered a young text in the lingo of Levinas' specialists because it does not yet

6:12fully capture the totality of his mature philosophy. Yeah, there's no face in this text. Yeah, there's no face. There is no other. Also, I want to point out that we did talk about Levinas in our Neighbors episode where we talked about the other in proximity. So we have talked about him. So if you want to hear more on his ethics, listen to that because like, yeah, we're kind of situating his influence in the history of philosophy as primarily being a matter of his claim that ethics is first philosophy. But as you said, David, this text comes from before that was really developed.

6:43Yeah, and so in this text from 1935, which is when he was 29 years old. Dang. Girl, we missed the boat. We don't need to hear that.

6:54You know, he's already wrestling with this fundamental question of how we relate to others, especially in the face of injustice and brutality. And you can hear that already in the title of the piece, right? The Lévasion or On Escape, which is an indirect response to the rise of national socialism in Europe in the early 20th century. And of course, as a Jewish intellectual, this was front and center in Levinas' mind because he was aware of the violation of others' humanity that motivated so much Nazi ideology.

7:30And in the years that followed the publication of this text, the rise of national socialism became completely inescapable for Levinas and his family. He was enlisted in the French army and captured by the Nazis in 1940, and he spent five years in a prisoner of war camp. Yeah. And, you know, he also didn't find out until after he was released that all his family in Lithuania, because he was originally from Lithuania, but then moved to France, also were killed by the Nazis, and his wife and his daughter managed to escape, largely because another French

8:05philosopher, Maurice Blanchot, helped hide them in a monastery. So they survived the Nazi regime by hiding out. I didn't know that Blanchot helped them out. This is what I get for working on philosophers who had, like, really fascinating and complex personal lives, and then just caring about the ideas and not actually learning about, like, the other... I mean, obviously, you can't escape some features of Levinas' biography, namely the fact that he was captured by the Nazis and most of his family died in the Holocaust.

8:36But I didn't know that fact about Blanchot. Wow. Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, the intellectuals, they were aware of one another, but either way, there was this solidarity tied to being philosophers who were committed to thinking the moment and to resisting power structures that were emerging in Europe and that were obliterating human life and individuality. And so, yeah, there are a bunch of connections that it's usually the task of biographers and historians to tease out, but that are obviously relevant also to the articulation of their

9:09theories and their philosophies, because you cannot disambiguate. Levinas' claim that ethics must become first philosophy from both his concern in the early 30s about the rise of National Socialism, and then the realities that he lived under Nazi capture in the 1940s.

Human Condition

9:30Today, we're talking about Levinas' on escape. Why are we humans constantly seeking to escape our condition? What is the role of nausea and shame in our everyday experience? And what do need and pleasure reveal about our inability to break away from ourselves? One of the things that really struck me when I was rereading this essay, David, is just how connected Levinas is to the pain and suffering of human experience, and not necessarily in

10:06a strong sense of like murder and genocide, but just the everyday discomfort that we tend to experience. And for him, this is not only important to consider and really tease out phenomenologically. Levinas had studied phenomenology in the 1920s, including at Freiburg, where Heidegger taught. He was like part of the reason that phenomenology became so popular in France in the 1930s. So we really have him to thank for a lot of then what became influential for the existentialist

10:37movement in France, but also because for Levinas, in phenomenologically articulating our everyday experiences of pain and suffering, we come to see that being, which was what Heidegger was obsessed with, is not really where it's at. And so I think that speaks to what we mentioned earlier, which is that Levinas is moving in a place of thinking of ethics as more important than the study of being or ontology. And I think what we really see here is, although he's not quite made the ethics leap, he's talking about just like what it is like to be a human in the world.

11:13And it's kind of rough. Yeah, it's kind of rough because being appears first and foremost as suffering, right? We are in a state of seeking to get away from ourselves in many ways. He has a lot of language about how we experience being, for example, as this desire to break from ourselves, but we can't do it. And so it produces a specific kind of existence that is tied to our inability to enact a break

11:45from the very being that we seek to escape from. And that's really essential to his understanding of the human condition. And so in this regard, he is very much influenced by Heidegger, who says, you know, as philosophers, we really need to take very seriously the notion of being as such. It's just that here Levinas gives us a slightly different interpretation of what it means for beings who are to be than Heidegger does. And Levinas' idea is that to be human is to constantly try and get out of your condition.

12:20So the human condition is essentially trying to escape from the human condition. And without getting too much into the weeds of Heidegger here, because it's maybe a little too early in the episode to like spell out some of their differences, I think Heidegger actually has a pretty similar view. Like we're trying to flee our condition all the time. This is actually one of the core ideas of existentialism in general. And so I think I was really struck by just how existentialist this text is, whereas I wouldn't necessarily identify Levinas as an existentialist. That's not how he's usually understood in the history of philosophy.

12:50But we see here that he thinks the idea that the self is sort of a sufficient individual entity is an artifact of bourgeois philosophy, like the myth of the individual who's just kind of got it, like I'm pulling myself up by my bootstraps, independent. That overlooks the fact that we're actually really internally divided. And we are in this state of discomfort from which we are trying to remove ourselves. Yeah, this definitely comes from bourgeois philosophy.

13:23But then we might ask, well, where does bourgeois philosophy get this idea that our self is this filled with itself, at peace with itself kind of being that is full, right? Like this sense of the self as self-contained and fully satisfied with itself. And Levinas makes a really interesting claim, which is that bourgeois philosophy actually looks at the history of philosophy, especially at the history of metaphysics, and looks at how classical philosophers all the way to antiquity have understood the concept of being.

13:56You know, here I think in the most abstract sense of what being is. And they take the definition of being as that which is, and there is nothing external to it, and then they apply that to our human existence. So we humans are kind of like being with a capital B in that we don't like anything. And the goal of philosophy in this bourgeois conception is always to get us to live up to that ideal of the self-sustaining, self-satisfied individual who has no internal fissures.

14:30Or internal breaks. And ultimately, Levinas is going to be very critical of this by pointing to the ways in which we humans are torn asunder, not accidentally, but essentially. What it means to be a human being is to not be at peace with oneself. In fact, it's impossible to imagine a human being who is at peace fully with themselves, because that's not what it means to be a human. Yeah, as I was rereading this, I was thinking about sculptures, like a Rodin sculpture, where

15:02you see a human form kind of trying to push its way out, or like some late Michelangelo works kind of indicate this, just the agony of being human. And he describes this in terms of being enchained to ourselves, riveted to ourselves. We can't get away from ourselves. We get so sick of ourselves in our lives. And wouldn't it be great if we could just kind of launch off and not be stuck with ourselves for a while? Unfortunately, that's not the case.

15:33Yeah, well, I mean, he says this is the malaise of our time, right? That we seek to escape ourselves. But that's an illusion. As he puts it at one point in the text, he says, you can't pass by your own side unaware, right? Like you can't leave yourself. You can't escape who or what you are. And so if we think about the human condition, I think the two most important terms to understand here are first, escape. We, by our very nature, by our very essence, are constantly seeking to escape who and what

16:07we are. The second term is impotence. And that's my term that I'm using to describe the Levinasian perspective. And that is that we seek to escape, but we fail every single time. And so we are left in this existential position of having been unable to achieve the thing that we want the most. And that is our human existence. It's a combination of a desire and a yearning for a departure that can never even get off the ground.

16:38This tension might seem abstract.

Nausea and Shame

16:40And I feel like we're just kind of saying over and over again, like, this is the pain of the human condition. We will talk about this, some of the specific affective experiences in which this shows up, including nausea, which I'm looking forward to and not looking forward to discussing later in the episode because I hate vomit. But anyway, for now, as we're thinking a little bit about the structure of malaise, the way that you just described it in terms of this tension between these two things, I think speaks to the fact that Levinas sees malaise as essentially dynamic. And he suggests that our malaise or like the sense of being ill at ease in the world appears

17:15as a refusal to remain in place as an effort to get out of an unbearable situation. And to that extent, it's not a purely passive state. And I think that is like so much of where the challenge here comes in the fact that we find ourselves thrown into a world which we did not choose to enter. We find ourselves having to take up this condition of being in the world, and it would actually be a lot easier if we either just didn't exist or if we existed but could just kind of passively

17:48receive whatever the world gave to us. Instead, what we find is that we're partially—I'm going to use a Kierkegaard locution here—we're partially self-created but not entirely self-created. I think when we use the term escape, immediately we have to start thinking, what are we escaping from exactly and where are we escaping to, if anything? And when Levinas talks about this from this existentialist perspective, he's very clear that the kind of escape that he thinks defines the human condition is not an escape to any

18:22particular place. Because he says, look, there are a lot of ways of thinking about an escape. When you write poetry, you're escaping into beauty. Or when you revolt against the established order, you're trying to escape into a more just human society. Even the religious notion of escape, where we escape into, like, heaven, for example, he says, that's not the kind of escape that I'm talking about. The kind of escape that I'm talking about is the desire to escape from being as such.

18:53It's not to escape from this earth. It's not to escape from this political regime. It's not even to escape from this universe that God created. The escape that we all feel in the marrow of our bones is a fundamental desire to get away from being, period. And I think that's a lot harder to grasp. But it's also way more interesting from a philosophical perspective, because it is a desire just for not any of the things that are.

19:24Okay. So I have a question about that. You said that we want to escape from being. Yeah. What do we want to escape to, on your view? And then I want to return to what we escaped from. Okay. Yeah. So not on my view, on Levinas' view, there is no destination. And in fact, that's what differentiates. He explicitly says, on my view, the kind of escape that we all are disturbed by when we really tap into it is that we just want to not be, but it doesn't mean that we want

19:55to go somewhere. Because if you were to identify a destination, whatever that destination is, it still puts you within the realm of being, right? Because that destination would be. It would be a thing. It would be a place. It would be a condition. And so it's a pure escape, as he says. It's just pure escapism, not in a fantasy sense of the term, but he introduces a new term to sort of capture this, where he says, it's not that we want to transcend. He says we want to ex-send, which is a term that he coins to capture this escape from being

20:30that has no destination whatsoever. And that's what makes it really difficult to conceptualize, honestly. And I think in what you're saying, there's a distinction from pessimist philosophy, too, because the claim is not that it would be better to be nothing rather than to be something. That would be where the pessimist would go. He's not saying we're trying to escape to nowhere or to nothingness because that's a better place to be, right? He's actually just saying, no, phenomenologically speaking, this is the human condition.

21:04And when we talk about phenomenologically speaking, we're talking about, like, what does it mean to describe the structures of our experience? And this, he thinks, is a structure of our experience. I want to press a little bit on the idea that what we're trying to escape from is being, not because I think it's wrong, but because I think there's more we can say about it. Does he actually explicitly say that we're trying to escape from being? Also, we should mention to our listeners, this essay is literally 27 pages long. But anyway, yeah. Where does he say that we're trying to escape from being? Yeah. So this comes out in page 55, where he describes being as a prison, and it's that from which

21:37we seek to escape. And part of the reason also is because of what you said earlier, that being's fundamental mode of manifesting itself in human existence is a suffering. And by definition, we experience suffering as a condition from which we want to get out, right? Like if I am walking and I break my leg, the quality of that experience is, I want this to end. I want to no longer be in pain. And so by extension, if being manifests itself in human existence under the modality of suffering,

22:10and suffering has this lift quality of something we always want to escape from, it follows that being is a prison, and that's the impulse to escape. It has that structure. I think it's a little different than that. And so he suggests on that page that what we are trying to escape is ourselves. I think that's not quite the same as we're trying to escape being, right? I think it's the same thing insofar as like being here is used in an existential sense. To escape being is to escape the kind of being that I am, which is the only thing that I can

22:42be. Yeah, I might want to be more careful there and just go with what he actually says, which is that escape tries to break the chains of the I to the self. Like that is a fascinating idea. And this is why I said before that we're stuck with ourselves. And so, yeah, I mean, sure, in a sense, like our I or ourself is our being. But I also think there is a kind of focus on the challenge of being chained to ourselves. That's that's specific here. Yeah, but I think in that case, a lot hinges on whether we agree on what we escape to, whether

23:18there's even anything that would be the target of the escape. And that's why I say that it's an escape from being because there is nothing on the other side. He even says nothingness is not the answer, because when you say that nothingness is the goal, you're thinking about the relationship between being and nothingness in a problematic way. According to him, it's like like thinking about being as if it were just crossed out. This is a little technical. But my interpretation of Levinas is that we're both right in our account, that he's saying we want to escape from ourselves.

23:49But to escape from oneself is to escape from being with a capital B as a human, because that's what we are, right? Like we have this structure in our relationship to ourselves that is defined by this impulse. I guess I'm actually just not convinced that being with a capital B even appears in this text. And I think underlying that is my sense that Levinas is trying to offer an alternative to Heidegger's philosophy, which is, of course, all about being so much of Levinas's philosophy is a response to Heidegger in a sense that like, Heidegger, you tried to give us really rigorous accounts of the structures of existence, but then you're just like kind of deferring to

24:23this abstract notion of being. We need to root our philosophy in existence itself. And I think that's where the embodied element of this text really comes in. The sense of being in chained to yourself, like there's just such a visceral component to it. Yeah, no, that's right. And a term that he uses to capture this sense of being chained, I really like. So the French term is inamovibilité. It basically should be translated as unmovableness. In the text here, they translated it as like the permanent quality itself of our presence,

24:58which I think is just like not good. But well, I stand between a Bergo who translated this. We had a delightful conversation on a train one time in Italy. So she could do no wrong in my mind. I do think the translation overall is very good, which I cannot say about a lot of other texts by Levinas. Alfonso Lingus translated most of Levinas' main works. They are atrocious. It's been controversial. Oh, they're just awful. I've like wanted to retranslate Totality and Infinity so many times, but who has the time for that? Oh, my God. In the bonus segment, David, you have to talk about your experience with Alfonso Lingus,

25:30the translator of those texts, which I thought was terrible because it's a really funny story. Maybe, maybe. But anyway, so to get back to the point here and just try to wrap this into a sentence that captures the spirit, I think, of Levinas, that is that our human condition is characterized by an impulse to escape. We can say it's an escape from the self, from a certain way of relating to ourselves, and that escape is never achieved, hence the sense of failure. And so the result is that we feel this inamovibilité, the sense of like, I want to get away from

26:05myself, but I'm tied to myself. And so there is a lot of language of being fastened or being tied or being buckled down by force to something from which you want to break free. And so I think the two terms have to be emphasized, the escape, but then also this sense of being fastened almost with belts. There's a lot of imagery of force and it being pinned down by existence itself. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and this time is an opportunity for all of us to be

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Need and Pleasure

28:41The title of this essay in French is de l'évasion, which means on evasion more so than it means on escape, and I think that both terms are perfectly reasonable translations, but evasion captures something that I think escape doesn't, which is that an escape is like a one-time event, like you escape from prison and then you're out and your escape is done, but evasion is something that can go on for a very long time, right? Like when you commit a crime and the police

29:12is after you, you can evade them over and over again to such a degree that evasion becomes your mode of life. Now if we keep that difference in definitions in mind, then maybe evasion is actually a better translation, because what Levinas is talking about is not an act that we perform once or twice in our lives. He's talking about the modality of our very existence. You know, we're like the criminal trying to get away at all times.

29:42Yeah, and what this provokes for him is an experience of shame. We are ashamed at our very existence. And so this notion of shame, he says, basically has to do with the vulnerability of being naked in front of our existence, not in a literal sense of being naked, and actually not in the sense of being naked in front of other people, but in the face of being naked in front of ourselves. And philosophically speaking, this is quite an original account of shame, because shame in the history of philosophy, especially in ancient Greek philosophy, Bernard Williams and other contemporary

30:16theorists have written about this, is generally understood to be a social reaction to doing something wrong or being perceived as doing something wrong by others. So the downcast glance of shame is always in the face of the other. And Levinas says, actually, no, we're pretty much ashamed in front of ourselves more so than we are ashamed in front of other people, because we are ashamed of our very existence.

30:46So I also picked up on this as a really original aspect of the text, because one of the most famous depictions of shame in existentialist philosophy comes from Jean-Paul Sartre, right? When he describes that very famous scene of somebody who is looking through a keyhole, observing a scene on the other side of the door, and they are fully immersed in the object of their perception, that they forget that they are basically peeping toms and that they're looking through the keyhole, which is a

31:16kind of creepy thing to do. Well, they don't actually forget it. They're just not reflectively aware of themselves to begin with. At all. Yeah, so it's not in their mind. And then suddenly, they become aware that somebody is looking at them looking through the keyhole. And then they, you know, like he says, like, my being liquefies. And that's the experience of shame, where I am ashamed before others, and it requires the gaze of the other. Here, it's an entirely different conception of shame, where I can be ashamed in private.

31:47And I wanted to resist this initially when I began reading the text. But then, based on his account of the human condition, as this combination of a desire for escape, plus the impotence of every attempt at escaping that I might perform, it does seem like I can be ashamed before myself, because I fail to do what I seek, right? And I think sometimes we experience that kind of shame before ourselves, that we should not describe as guilt. Guilt is something else altogether. And so this individualizing

32:23and privatizing of shame, I think is really useful in this existential register. And the way that shame and guilt often get distinguished in the history of philosophy is between shame as being just sort of a basic affective reaction, and guilt as having more cognitive content. You recognize that you actually did something wrong. So you can be ashamed of peeing your pants. But you shouldn't feel guilty about peeing your pants, because that's not something that you you know, could avoid doing. Think about like the school children on the playground. But if you willingly knowingly do something actually doesn't even have to be willing and knowing if you if you

32:56like, hurt another person, you feel you get caught hurting that other person, you feel both shame and guilt. And that and so there's Oh, my gosh, yeah, there's like, I think it might be Bernard Williams. There's some analysis of the move from shame culture to guilt culture in history of philosophy. Yeah, yeah, I'll find it. Where is this? Well, one difference between shame and guilt is that guilt requires an internalized norm, right? It's the violation of a norm that I agree should not be violated. And when I find myself violating that norm, in a sense, I have betrayed myself. So

33:32I agree that hurting others is bad. I really believe that. So when I hurt another person, I feel guilt for having done something wrong. Whereas shame, you know, sometimes I can be ashamed, even if technically, I don't really think what I did is wrong. I just I'm ashamed because other people are looking at me and judging me. You know, like the classic example is like, if I walk around naked outside, I might be ashamed, even if technically, I don't think there is anything wrong with that. Yeah, totally. It turns out that the shame guilt culture distinction is actually just like pretty

34:04established in cultural anthropology. I read like something about it in grad school that now I'm forgetting about. But it sounds like Bernard Williams actually kind of takes issue with the classical way that that's construed. In terms of Sartre's view, though, for Sartre, it is very possible for us to internalize the gaze of shame. So the shame doesn't necessarily have to be only in the face of an actual other person. We could I could actually even feel shame if I like, think that another person is nearby and imagine that they're seeing me. But shame turns me into an object in the

34:40face of the real or imagined gaze of the other. So the presence of the other is definitely a big difference between Sartre and Levinas' views. But another part of it, which I think is actually more important is that since Sartre grants that there can be a kind of imagined other as well, the difference is that shame is shame in the face of being an object for the other, where we're stripped of our transcendence and our subjectivity on Sartre's view. Whereas for Levinas, no, actually, we're shamed. We're ashamed about being transcendent. We're ashamed about the fact that we like want to escape our existence and can't. And shame is actually shame in the face of

35:14the totality of our existence, our total being. Yeah. And I think this is what he calls nudity, not in the literal sense, but in the existential sense. I'm naked. I'm laid bare and I can't do anything. And that existential nudity translates into the impossibility of justifying my very existence to myself. And so shame is also the inability to give a reason for existing that I recognize as good enough to continue existing. Exactly. Exactly. Okay. Let's get into one of the

35:50foremost forms of shame that Levinas discusses, which is nausea. David, I am ready, even though I'm a metaphobic, as we talked about in other episodes, I think in our discussed episode. Yeah. But I actually think Levinas' account of nausea is better than Sartre's far more famous account of nausea. Okay. The reason for that is so Sartre in 1938 published a very famous novel, nausea. It's one of his early works. It's probably something that many of our listeners have heard of. And Sartre conceives of

36:25nausea as the sense of our basic contingency, the way that we're exposed in the world and not in control of ourselves or our surroundings. Levinas' view is similar in some ways, but he thinks of it as mainly being about an inability to control ourselves. And Sartre kind of describes nausea in vague terms. And he misses the fact that what nausea is really about is the fear of throwing up. And Levinas totally recognizes that.

36:55It's not the fear. It's like the sense that it's inevitable that you will throw up, right? Like this sense that it's about to happen. Because you can be afraid of throwing up without experiencing nausea. As in your case, you're always like you have a phobia of it, but it doesn't mean that you're about to do it. Okay. I mean, fair. Although I think fear is a totally fine word to use here. But I was thinking about this. I had to give a paper a few years ago on felt senses of self. And it was an occasion for me to return to this text on escape. Funnily enough, literally three days before I was supposed to present the paper, which I also needed to still finish, I got the stomach flu. And for three

37:30entire days, all I could do was stay lying down, sipping some fluids and make trips to the bathroom. I think I could like barely even, you know, watch TV, maybe by day three. And so my stomach was like gurgling the entire time. I was feverish. It was even difficult to sleep. All I wanted was to find a comfortable position and stay there as long as I could. I wanted to be passive. And the nausea prevented me from doing that. The nausea forced me to get up. It forced me to worry about what was going to be

38:04ejected from my stomach. And this is precisely what Levinas gets at. He says that nausea is the state that precedes vomiting and from which vomiting will deliver us. So no holds barred with this 1935 account. Like throw up is on the table. Okay. So you just pointed to a quote on page 66. And I happen to know that because I have it open to that same page because it's so important. So yeah, he says the state of nausea that precedes vomiting and from which vomiting will deliver us and closes us all on all

38:37sides. But then the next two sentences are equally important. I want to add them to our conversation. He continues, yet it does not come from outside to confine us. We are revolted from the inside. Our depths smother beneath ourselves. Our innards heave. So it's not just that I am nauseous in the sense that the world is spinning. It's not a description of the outside world being chaotic or disordered or incoherent. It's actually a description of my insides of like literally the

39:13inside of my mind and my body and it revolting against myself. And so nausea for him is not a state that we occasionally experience as in your case, Ellie, like the literal physiological conception of nausea that happens when we're sick. For him, nausea is what we always are. And it has to do again with that sense of there's something about us that always wants to break free. And that is the antagonism at the core of the human condition that prevents us once again from ever achieving that

39:48ideal of bourgeois philosophy of being individuals who are fully satisfied with the kinds of beings that they are, right? Like we can never be fully satisfied because we're always nauseous, existentially speaking. Yeah. I'm really trying to keep us with the concrete phenomenon though. And I'm experiencing you as, yeah, like really wanting to move to the abstract. And I'm not quite sure it's right that he thinks that nausea is the human condition. He talks about it as a case. So I don't think, do you think it's really fair to say that he's giving us an account of nausea that

40:21is sort of universally applicable? I actually see in Levinas' view, in contrast with Sartre, much more of a focus on the fact that this is a contingent situation. It has a special relationship with shame in as much as it discloses the experience of shame, you know, in a particularly salient fashion. But I don't think that's the same thing as saying it's the human condition. I do think that he's saying that. And two pieces of evidence in this regard are at the top of page 66, when he introduces the definition of nausea, he says,

40:55let us analyze a case in which the nature of malaise appears in all its purity and to which the word malaise applies par excellence, nausea. So it crystallizes something that is much more general. It's just like a concentrated version. And in the next page, he says, this is the very experience of pure being, which we have promised from the beginning of this work. I think both of those quotes actually prove my interpretation. I don't think he's saying

41:29nausea is the experience of the human condition. I think he's saying it is a case that most clearly discloses the human condition to us. And I think that's not just a semantic point. I think it's an important point, because I think that keeps the account phenomenologically grounded. If we just said nausea is the human condition, then we lose our ability to describe it in any concrete fashion. No, but there is a difference right here. I think we are actually in agreement, if you agree to the following. Yeah, no, I think I think I actually pretty strongly disagree here.

42:02Well, I haven't said what I'm about to say, which is the condition. No, no, no. I mean, it would be one thing to say that we have these experiences of nausea. And then the rest of the time, we are in the human condition, right? Because then that would be a break between nausea and the human condition, and they would be different. The only way in which the experience of literal nausea, which I agree, like, we're not always literally vomiting. The only way in which the experience of nausea can reveal something about the human condition is if the human condition

42:36essentially contains something nauseous, that is crystallized in the experience of nausea. And that nauseous element is what he describes as the nothing more to be done, which is that when we're in a nauseous situation, in a literal sense, you know, you can't stop it. You just are overwhelmed. You are fastened to yourself, and your innards are revolting, and you can't control it. And that is true of the human condition as such. So what I think we can agree to is that there is maybe a kind

43:09of continuum here where literal nausea is a crystallized, like, concentrated form of something that is otherwise true, because otherwise the example wouldn't reveal something about the human condition in the first place. To say that it is a case that uniquely discloses human experience is not to say that it is evident in all human experiences. And I'm noticing maybe some slippage between those two things. So for instance, Beauvoir has this idea that erotic experience is what most saliently discloses the

43:41other to us. That doesn't mean that the other isn't also disclosed in other kinds of human experience. It's just that this is a uniquely crystallizing form. And I think the same thing is going on here with nausea. It definitely doesn't follow that if nausea is a unique experience, then it's distinct from the human condition. So I don't think that works. But again, I think the real relevance of this point here is that in actually saying what is crucial to nausea is the fact that I worry that I'm going to vomit. We're saying there's a way that to be human means to be sort of caught between activity

44:17and passivity. When I'm nauseous, I'm not purely passive. But I'm also definitely not in control of myself or purely active either. I'm thinking about the way that I'm waiting to see when is the nausea going to get bad enough that I'm going to have to go to the bathroom and throw up again. And so there's a real sensitive responsiveness to the bodily cues and a complex interplay between what we might call passivity and activity. And that I think does speak to the human condition. And yet it's also really specific to this experience of needing to vomit. Can we say a little something about the solitary

44:50nature of nausea? Yes. Because one of my favorite things about this account as well is Levinas' claim that here's the weird thing about nausea. You might think that it's more embarrassing or more shameful when it's happening in front of other people and when you throw up in front of other people. But actually being nauseous by yourself is way worse because when you're with other people, they're going to say like, oh my gosh, you're so sick. They're going to be able to understand your nausea in the context of an illness or something that's wrong with you. And you don't have that experience when you're

45:22with yourself and by yourself with nausea. David, tell us about how are you understanding the problem with being nauseous when you're alone? So I understand it following Levinas as a scandal. Because he says when we vomit, like in the privacy of our bedroom or bathroom, we are scandalized. Hopefully bathroom. Not always. Hopefully, let's be more specific. Hopefully toilet bowl. Yeah. He says the sick person in isolation who was taken ill and who has no choice but to vomit is still scandalized by

45:58himself. And so when we think about a scandal, of course, there is an element of shock. And I think that's true for those of us who have vomited in solitude that you are amazed by what your body can do. It's like, how did my body emit all of this? And with such violent force because the act of vomiting, sorry, Ellie, I know you hate this. It's okay. It's more like the sight and sound of it. Talking about it is not terrible. I'm only getting mildly nauseous. Well, I'm neither going to do it nor mimic the sound. So you're safe. Can you promise that though? You said nausea is the human

46:33condition. Yeah. And I still will defend that claim. So there's an element of shock. But I think what's most scandalous about this is the turning of the inside out. That food, which is meant to be inside the body, suddenly is ejected and is ejected in a non-logical, non-voluntary manner. The second thing about a scandal, of course, is that as any politician who has had a scandal or any celebrity who has had a scandal will tell you, you want the scandal to end as soon

47:06as possible. So there is this sense of urgency associated with it. But because you're not in control of it, you feel bulldozed by your own condition. And so in a sense, we are flattened by our own vomiting. I'm at the mercy of my guts. Think about what that means. It's a really weird experience that results in shame. And I think that's true. When I have vomited in a bathroom, I'm kind of ashamed, not because I think other people are looking, but because I'm like, what the

47:36hell? What is my body doing? This is shameful. If you take the term nudity as exposing what should be hidden, vomiting is the ultimate form of nudity because you are exposing your innermost bodily component, like at the center of your stomach.

47:58I think we've talked out the vomiting and nausea portion.

48:04You're so happy. I think the next thing for us to talk about, David, is the role of need and pleasure in this text. These are perhaps like more pleasant things to think about. And Levinas depicts us as needy creatures. We have a lot of needs that need to be satisfied. And he also wants us to think about need in a new way, in a way that is different from how other philosophers have understood need. So need in most philosophical registers is often described

48:37as a lack, right? Like I need water because I currently don't have water or like I want food because I currently don't have food. So it's almost as if our our life suddenly develops a hole in it or a lack or an absence. And then we go about our life trying to fill it. So it's almost like throwing sand into a pothole in order to reach that state of plenitude. And Levinas says, I think this conception of need is inadequate because it overlooks the phenomenological

49:13character of need. So how do we actually experience needing something? Do I experience it as like, oh, there happens to be this hole or this gap in my life? No, we experience need, not as lack, but rather as malaise, as suffering. So to give a concrete example, think about when you've been playing sports or going on a hike for like five hours, you forgot to bring your water bottle and

49:43you are dying of thirst. I mean, I wouldn't last an hour on a hike or playing sports without a water bottle. Sports an hour even with a water bottle, I'm struggling. No, you need to push the analogy, you need to push the example here to the limits as I see you taking a sip of water since only the discussion made you thirsty. Now my glass is empty. You know, luckily we've only got a few more minutes left of the episode. Yeah. But when you think about a need that you feel very intensely, he says, we experience it as so biologically pressing, as so existentially demanding that it yanks us out of our

50:24current condition. And he says it has the character of a refusal to stay in place, right? Like if I'm really dying of thirst, my lived experience is I need to do anything I can to find water. I need to move. I need to run to the river. I need to run to the kitchen. And so the most important feature of need is that it has this like need of the self to go somewhere else, which is why in needs we see also

50:55this element of the human condition revealed, which is that we're constantly trying to escape from ourselves. So it's also another window into the essence of the human condition. Yeah. And it's a specific window. So, I mean, one of the things that characterizes need as opposed to other ways of thinking about the human condition is that need he suggests is pretty closely tied to the present. So I need to satisfy this need now. And so it's not as future oriented as some of our other states. And I also think he talks about the satisfaction of a need as appeasing, but not

51:33destroying the need. So the getting the water will appease the need that I have, but it's not going to destroy the need altogether. And I don't know what you think about that because I'm not actually sure what I think about that. He didn't elaborate on that much. That seems right to me, right? Like if I'm thirsty and I drink water, I'll be thirsty again in five or six hours. If I am hungry and I go to the buffet, it doesn't mean that I'm never going to be hungry again. Right. So the need is never satisfied in the sense of being eliminated, but it can be appeased

52:03in the sense that it can be quelled for a time being. Yeah. And I think that temporal structure that you're talking about is really important for making sense of the human condition because it means that we are condemned to be needy beings because you can never get rid of hunger or thirst or any of the other needs that we might have as social beings. Right. You know, I've been focusing on the classic biological needs, but we have many other needs that have the same temporal organization that once they're there, they're never going to go away forever.

52:35Yeah. But I think there's also in the fact that we can appease our needs, a distinction between need and malaise that Levinas described. So I actually don't think it's as simple in looking back as saying that need is just like another way of thinking about the human condition of escape, because he suggests that in malaise, we have a different and superior demand than the demand that we have in need. In malaise, we have a kind of dead weight in the depths of our being whose satisfaction does not

53:05manage to rid us of it. So at least I would share that, know that they both cannot be gotten rid of, neither the need nor the malaise, based on the quote that you read. Yeah, that seems absolutely right to me. Maybe is it that malaise doesn't even get appeased? I think the malaise is the, what was the term that you use, the unmatching of satisfaction to need or the inadequacy of satisfaction? Yeah, I think that is part of the reason for the malaise. Like, why are we always suffering as human beings? One answer to that is because we are needy and our

53:40needs don't go away. We are perpetually in the cycle of only at best appeasing those needs. And he says, this is where, you know, you can kind of understand why some people turn towards asceticism, because they try to just quell those needs as much as they can. And of course, it's not that they're going to succeed, but at least we can understand the motivation for becoming a monk or becoming a hermit and trying to take control over our needy nature. I think another similarity here

54:14has to do with the fact that needs can be satisfied in many ways. And there's a kind of ignorance at the root of the human condition about all the ways in which a need can be satisfied. In the case of thirst, I can drink water, but I also could drink orange juice. I also could eat a very ripe fruit that has a lot of liquid in it, right? There are a lot of ways in which we can satisfy our needs. And that he interprets as suggesting that needs, kind of like our desire for escaping from ourselves,

54:48have no particular destination, right? Like, we're not trying to escape to any one place. We're just trying to escape. And I'm not trying to quell my thirst with any one kind of liquid. I'm just trying to quell my thirst. So that's another kind of similarity that he establishes between human need and human existence. It seems, though, that we can temporarily get some relief through pleasure. And I was interested to read Levinas' account of pleasure here because he talks a lot about

55:19enjoyment or jouissance in Totality and Infinity. And so you mentioned earlier, and I mentioned that I've worked a lot on Levinas. I mainly worked on Totality and Infinity. And so I actually don't know Onescape super well. But I was hearing some echoes with the account of pleasure here. His claim here in Onescape is that pleasure is a concentration of the instant. So that sort of present sense that we have in need is also experienced in pleasure, but like, you know, as the kind of positive valence of that. And he also suggests that pleasure is an abandonment or loss of self. And so it seems like in pleasure, we actually can escape from ourselves, achieve that

55:56thing we want. Why is it, though, that that's not going to fully be the case or not fully be satisfying, David? Yeah. So I have to say, I really like the account of pleasure because he says pleasure is not a state because a state makes it seem passive, like I'm just in this state of pleasure without doing anything. Rather, pleasure is a dynamic movement that unfolds. And as it unfolds, it changes. He says it's a progressive movement that exists wholly in the enlargement of its own amplitude. So it's almost like a wave that keeps growing and growing and growing. And you can think

56:30about any kind of pleasure, right? It can be a bodily pleasure, like when you have an itch that you really want to scratch and then you finally scratch it and you just get that, like, I mean, that progressive movement that enlarges its own amplitude. And I mean, you can also think about like erotic pleasure, like orgasm. I thought that's what you were just talking about. I mean, that's also an itch that we need to scratch. So I guess it's on the same continuum. But then he says the reason that it cannot be fully satisfactory is because by its very own

57:08nature, it comes to an end. You cannot have this progressive growth and the increase of amplitude forever. Like pleasure comes to an end. And yes, in fact, when you're in a state of not in a state of pleasure, but in a condition of pleasure, in a movement of pleasure. An instant, really. Yeah. Like it's almost as if like you have this intensification of feeling that ruptures the boundary of the self, but only for a moment. Right. And here, maybe the clearest expression of

57:40this would be an orgasm where you feel outside of yourself. You feel ecstatic. The boundaries of the self have been breached. But eventually that moment of pleasure ends and we are returned to ourselves. Yeah. And so to our listeners, if you feel like we're kind of saying the same thing over and over again in different examples, it's because that's what Levinas does. Right. Like he's he's saying in pleasure, we also see this desire for escape combined with this impotence. And that's also what he says

58:12about need. And that's kind of what he says about nausea. Yeah. I think kind of what we're facing is like I'm wanting to hold the distinctions between some of those terms from one another, whereas I think you're maybe wanting to see them all as expressive of the same phenomenon. I don't want to get back into into that because we're approaching the end of our episode. No, I don't. But you're right. That is how I want to see it. Yeah. But I think this account of pleasure for me was really interesting because it actually is importantly different from what Levinas says in Totality and Infinity. He no

58:43longer uses the term pleasure there. He uses the term jouissance, which gets translated by lingus, the translator I don't like of Totality and Infinity, as a jouissance in English. So I don't necessarily have a problem with that. I don't know whether I would translate it differently. But I will say what you definitely lose there is the connotation of jouissance in French as being about physical and especially sexual pleasure. And the way that jouissance is a way that orgasm in particular is described, especially in psychoanalysis. And so I don't know like whether Levinas was influenced by

59:16Lacan in between 1935, when he wrote On Escape and 1961, when he published Totality and Infinity. But it's noteworthy that he moves from the language of pleasure to the language of jouissance, which has this sexual connotation and especially is important in psychoanalysis. And I think part of what you get there is like an actual connotation of an escape from the self. That is a connotation of jouissance that exists in French. Very interesting, because you're right that here, I'm literally looking at the section on

59:47pleasure. Yeah. And there isn't much that explicitly draws our attention to sexual pleasure and to the body. Yeah. And he's using le plaisir. He's not using jouissance. Yeah, plaisir. But also, I mean, there is the fact that he uses examples of ecstasy and intoxication. Yeah. But that's different than jouissance. Jouissance, really, I mean, it can be translated as to come, like the verb a jouir. And so it very much has like an ejaculative association, even though it's used philosophically

1:00:19in a much broader sense. And I think that is missing here. So that's a really great thing to keep in mind in terms of tracking the evolution of Levinas from this early young text to potentially what happens later in Totality and Infinity. And I think even more important than that feature is the fact that for Levinas, jouissance in Totality and Infinity is actually all about the interiority of the ego. So we move from this like desire to escape to an account that is much more, let's say, maybe self-enclosed, this idea that the self is

1:00:52taking pleasure in itself. And so ironically, actually, there's maybe less of an excess or move beyond the self in that text than there is here. But the last thing I'll say here is that what I love most about this text is the concrete descriptions and the way that the body and the conditions of life are just inescapable. And I think that's also at the heart of our disagreement a while back in my sense that like, David, why make something that is so concrete abstract? And I think what interests me

1:01:24here, too, is the way that Levinas is very much responding to Heidegger, whose account on his view was way too abstract. Levinas says at one point, Dasein, you know, Heidegger's concept of existence, Dasein is never hungry. And instead, what Levinas gives us is a vomiting, ashamed, naked subject that is stewing in its own juices.

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