Levinas's Rhetorical Demand: The Unending Obligation of Communication Ethics by Ronald C. Arnett & Algis Mickunas

Author:Ronald C. Arnett & Algis Mickunas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Language Arts & Disciplines, General, Communication Studies, Rhetoric, Philosophy, Ethics & Moral Philosophy
Publisher: SIU Press
Published: 2017-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Levinas on Justice

A communal view of justice shoulders the importance of having concern for the neighbor; justice assumes a burden for those not present. Justice “relates back to the infinite original right of the neighbor, and to responsibility for the other . . . the third party.”47 Levinas refers to the notion of justice in twenty-three out of his twenty-four books, using the term at least three hundred forty times. His perspective acknowledges the communal nature of justice. Levinas’s contention is that justice dwells within a community constituted by a commitment beyond law. This sense of community has phenomenological proportions and includes those not immediately proximate. The third party, the unknown neighbor, provides a rationale for the use of violence in defense of “the third party.”48 Justice increasingly arises as “multiplicity” calls us to attend to those not proximate to us (Levinas, Is It Righteous, 223). Multiplicity commences with attentiveness to “singularity” as one acknowledges those not present at the immediate table of decision making (262); justice concentrates on the uniqueness of needs, hopes, and demands of unseen neighbors. In ethics, the uprightness of the face of the Other moves one to responsibility. In justice, participation in a covenant that extends beyond our reach demands responsibility for an unseen Other. Justice demands action out of moral height that embraces responsibility for an unknown Other. In contrast to this expanded conception of a community situated within justice, one finds evil living wherever there is hapless despair on the part of the ignored, forgotten, and abandoned—the unseen and unheard neighbor.49

With justice, contrary to the common tendency to disremember and ignore, one discovers no statute of limitations that relieves one of the particularity of concern and care for the neighbor. Levinas describes “the endless requirement of justice hidden behind justice, the requirement of an even juster justice, more faithful to its original imperative in the face of the other” (Levinas, In the Time, 121). The act of justice, however, is not charity. Charity, when rightly engaged, cries for justice that attends to care for an unknown Other. Justice is distinct from charity in that it introduces a form of equality and measure (131). At the same time, justice without charity morphs into a legalistic action of abstraction that trumps genuine concern for the neighbor. Justice tied to a community assumes concern for an unknown Other, education, and the admission that the perilous nature of justice emerges beyond law and/or charity.

Justice is the center of Levinas’s conception of truth, for truth emerges only when freedom becomes a question. The realm of justice works as a restraint on absolute freedom. One is subordinated to the Other, which nourishes the reality of conscience. Justice is possible when conscience inhibits self-concerned exploitations of one’s freedom. The critique of my own freedom commences with my welcome of the Other, which puts “in question my freedom.”50 The lie of an “evil genius” frequents the “interspace” between the illusory and the serious; it is the realm of mockery that eclipses the face of the Other (Levinas, Totality, 91).

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