Portrait · Other minds · 1961
Plate · Generated interpretation
The Face That Obliges
A philosopher says the other person’s face is not an object I interpret. It is a command I did not issue.
- Paris, on the page
- Postwar France
The face is withheld. What, if anything, still obliges you?
Listen · Eve
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Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et Infini (Totality and Infinity, 1961). The face of the Other (autrui) interrupts the self that would include everything in its knowing. Ethics, here, is first philosophy. This is not a psychology of eye contact.
Totalité et Infini. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1961. English: Lingis translation. The Jewish and phenomenological inheritances are named in the book. They are not decorations.
To know with, in this house’s title, can sound companionable. Levinas makes the with costly. The face says, in his language, you shall not murder. Whether that “says” is metaphor, revelation, or phenomenology is a fight among readers.
This is not Nagel’s bat, and not Nyāya’s inference. It is a claim that the other is not first an object of knowledge at all.
Whether a face can oblige before I understand it is the wager.
Distant echoes
Counterpoint
Classical Nyāya · North India, on the page of the sūtras and their commentaries
Smoke, fire, and the unseen mind
Nyāya infers the other. Levinas says the other arrives before inference.
One question remains
Other minds · How do we know when another being is experiencing anything at all?
If the face obliges before I know it, what kind of knowing-with is left?