The Harmony of Enjoyment and the Ethics of Suffering: A Reflection on Levinas

The French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995) develops his philosophy as “une défense de la subjectivité.” The inhumanity of the Shoah calls for a non-totalitarian concept of subjectivity. Consciousness is carried by various experiences (“sensations”) such as enjoyment, perceptions, loneliness, thought and work, but also physical suffering. Consciousness is understood in the Kantian way as “Ich denke” or synthetic activity. Consciousness knows, understands and integrates the sensory world that thus appears as an ordered whole. Enjoyment is “le moment harmonieux d'une expérience.” It makes the world habitable. The physical pain, however, means a double break with the sensitive harmony. Suffering is absolutely and definitively refractory to the synthetic possibilities of consciousness. Moreover, suffering is the very way in which the fracture takes place. In other words, suffering materially and formally breaks the harmony based on the enjoying consciousness. Suffering is the negativity par excellence. The pain breaks the consciousness and cannot be integrated. It is the radical refusal of meaning, a scandal for consciousness. In pain, man is thrown back on his body, the mere body, the body without consciousness. Suffering is “une souffrance inutile”, a dead-end street. Levinas inoculates here an ethics of suffering. The lamentation allows a fragile blossoming of meaning and sense, a beginning of humanity and sociality. The pain is an appeal to commitment. The impossibility to remain in-different is the source of true humanity. People are not involved with each other from a shared enjoyment, but from the possibility of physically supporting the other and elevating him out of the physicality. Levinas refers to “co-suffering” (“sym-pathie”) as the great ontological adventure that the animals are unknown to. Love is the suffering for the suffering of the other. The dignity of man is at stake here. As a break with the sensitive harmony, suffering gives meaning to an interpersonal involvement (and not the other way round) in which the person, reduced to his body, is raised to dignity. This leads to a reinterpretation of the Reich der Zwecke (Kant) as the interhuman involvement and connection of ethical beings who treat themselves and others not only as means, but also as personsedition: Harmony. Interface of Cosmic, Ethical and Religious Ordersstatus: publishe