Today’s Plan:
- A few questions
- Discuss Worsham
- Break
- Discuss Heidegger
- Prep Levinas and company
A Few Questions
- What does it mean to teach writing?
- Why is it important to teach writing>
- When did you learn to write? (And, perhaps, who taught you?
- How sure are you that/ can writing be taught?
I want to listen to a Bomani Jones clip from the Jan 23 episode “Coverage Dak” (starts at 35:31).
One more question:
- Does Chat GPT threaten what you think writing is, how we teach it, or why we think writing is important?
- In what ways *might/should* we rethink our pedagogy based on the emergence of ChatGPT
We might want to read this.
On why ChatGPT might be more “worrisome,” see Worsham 209.
Discussing Worsham
Chances are we will have already started to do so. I’d like everyone to pick a favorite moment or line in the Worsham and share it.
A few questions to consider:
- What is Heidegerrian about Worsham’s critique of invention in R/C?
- What is Heideggerian about the model of invention she introduces in the essay’s closing sections?
It might be worth illustrating Worsham’s approach, or comparing it, to Kalman.
Discussing Heidegger
- Explicate the nature of danger that Heidegger sees in the destining/enframing of revealing as standing-reserve? Why is the destining of revealing (of the essence of technology) the greatest danger humanity faces?
- How does Heidegger’s solution to the question concerning technology (poesis) compare to Lyotard’s solution for the emerging metanarrative of performativity (parology)? In explicating this distinction you *might* want to think back to how Heidegger opens the essay pointing to Aristotle’s four causes Links to an external site.. Bring the essay full circle.
I want to pay especial attention to pages 320-322. Let’s read.
Levinas and Company
Here’s the reading for next week:
- Levinas, Ethics and Infinity:
- Translator’s Introduction, 1-15
- Chapter 4, Solitude of Being, 55-62
- Chapter 7, The Face, 85-92
- Chapter 8, Responsibility
- Selections from essays pdf in Canvas:
- Being for the Other, 114-117
- Philosophy, Justice, and Love, 167
- The Awakening of the I, 182-183 and 186-187
- The Question of the Other, 99
- Alphonso Lingis, Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common
- Intro 1-13
- Chap 4 Murmur of the World, 69-91
- Chap 5 The Element that Faces, 107-127
- Diane Davis, “Addressing Alterity: Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and the Nonappropriative Relation”
- Jim Corder, Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love
I want to explicate a few difficulties you will face reading Levinas. I’ll call this “Levinas, the Other, the other, and the face (to face)”
One difficulty reading Levinas: French has two words for other: autre and autrui. (Levinas adds a layer of complexity by sometimes capitalizing these terms and sometimes using them lowercase, although most translators–inclduing Cohen in Ethics and Infinity, simply ignore this distinction). Put simply, autrui refers to another person, in their concrete materiality. L’autre is the more abstract sense of alterity in general, when (in French) Levinas capitalizes either term, it is often to mark off its (im)possible transcendence (the ultimate other as God, or the resonance of God that sounds in my perception of another human face).
Another difficulty: Levinas will often talk of the encounter with another person as an encounter with the face of the other. Face here is tricky. The French is visage, a word that has some resonance with our English word semblance. Levinas is also playing with the fact that (even in French) “face” can operate as a noun and a verb. As a phenomenologist, he is caught up in analyzing the affective contours in the encounter with another person. It doesn’t necessarily mean the fleshy, material thing on your head. Rather the face of the other is there presence–their Being (there) before they arrive to you as a person. That’s a really tricky concept to grasp, but hopefully Heidegger and Worsham help you conceptualize a phenomenological encounter prior to consciousness in knowledge–the presence of a person (as an other) before they appear to human subjectivity as a person (who can be known). Here’s how Bruce Young describes it:
By “face” Levinas means the human face (or in French, visage), but not thought of or experienced as a physical or aesthetic object. Rather, the first, usual, unreflective encounter with the face is as the living presence of another person and, therefore, as something experienced socially and ethically. “Living presence,” for Levinas, would imply that the other person (as someone genuinely other than myself) is exposed to me and expresses him or herself simply by being there as an undeniable reality that I cannot reduce to images or ideas in my head. This impossibility of capturing the other conceptually or otherwise indicates the other’s “infinity” (i.e., irreducibility to a finite [bounded] entity over which I can have power). The other person is, of course, exposed and expressive in other ways than through the literal face (e.g., through speech, gesture, action, and bodily presence generally), but the face is the most exposed, most vulnerable, and most expressive aspect of the other’s presence.
Which leads us to think about this seemingly hyperbolic line in Levinas:
[An] infinite resistance to murder, . . . firm and insurmountable, gleams in the face of the Other, in the total nudity of his defenceless eyes, in the nudity of the absolute openness of the Transcendent. (Totality and Infinity 199)
Of course I can murder someone. There is nothing in the injunction voiced by the face of the other that prevents me from beating them to death with a crowbar. But even having done so I will not be able to murder their face–nor counter my ability to master (know) them (hence, reading Young above, the infinity of the face).
As you read Levinas, understand that he considers his work indebted to Heidegger but also a critical response to him. If, as Worsham describes, Heidegger seeks to help us recover a more authentic relation to the mystery of Being, then Levinas would remind Heidegger that the ultimate experience of mystery, of the limitations of our powers, lies in the relationship to others and, more important, to Other. Not to the world in general, but specifically to the call inherent in the faces of others.
Also, the heart of Levinas’ project is to suggest that the central concern of philosophy lies not in the pursuit of knowledge, but rather in recognizing our obligations to others (what he terms ethics).
