What is Language?

Abstract

Levinas’ latest work shows an extraordinary thematic unity;¹ it is an attempt to ground phenomenologically the view that the advent of the other person is a primordial upsurge of language. Thus in his recent work, he attacks one of the most vexing and fundamental concerns of contemporary phenomenological research. What is language? What makes language mean? The novelty of his investigation lies in its assumption that a common ontological basis can be found for language and morality. Moreover he argues that language and morality rest upon non-rational foundations. Together with the question of language, Levinas develops an account of the responsible self, a phenomenology of responsibility as a primordial structure, and brings to light its character as the infra-structure of all decision making processes anterior to its activation in the world of freedom. The recovery of the moral self for phenomenological investigation in no way vitiates Levinas’ previous investigations which shed light upon such diverse phenomena as the separated self of need, of knowledge and of productivity. Ultimately these analyses do not presuppose sequentiality in the temporal order in the sense that their appearance in the life of an individual can be supposed to follow a prearranged pattern. Nor need they be considered as surpassed: it is an advantage of phenomenological research that the focus upon one region of being need not invalidate an analysis which arises from a quite different type of existence. The investigation of the moral self provides a reply to a query haunting all of Levinas’ reflections concerning the other person. This question is raised in passing in a relatively early work: how can one appear to oneself as face.² Let us direct our attention first to the problem of language and then to the question of the moral self.