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122: śramana, Vol 64, No. III, July-Sept. 2013
illnesses and distractions, the work of our hands and the anguish of our eyes, the letters we received from France and those accepted for our families--all passed in parenthesis. We were beings trapped in their species: despite their vocabulary, beings without language..... How can we deliver a message about our humanity which, from behind the bars of quotation marks, will come across as monkey talk? 13
And then, half way through their captivity, a dog comes to set them free. Levinas says, Then one day, a wandering dog entered our lives, greeting us as we returned (from work) under guard....We called him Bobby....He would appear at morning assembly and wait for us as we returned, jumping up and down and barking in delight. For him, there was no doubt we were men.14
If the Jain concepts of nayavāda and syādvāda suggest the irreducibility of an object to only a single perspective of it, then story is a perfect politicalizations of those concepts. For in this moment of Nazi brutality, 16 where Levinas is understood as a life form unworthy of glance, touch, or care, Levinas only becomes more than this when he considers himself from the perspective of a dog."? Like Yudhisthira in Mahābhārata would not enter heaven without his companion stray dog, who, despite having traveled with him through thick and thin, was prohibited from entering paradise, Levinas cannot enter into 'humanity' without the power and primacy of Bobby's perspective: 18 Despite being denied equality by Levinas and despite being denied heaven by Indra, the king of gods, the perspective of stray dog that makes Levinas human and the companionship of the dog (dharma) makes Yudhisthira righteous."
This passage excellently demonstrates both the reason for and method of the Levinasian shift from metaphysics or ontology as a first philosophy to ethics as a first philosophy. Similar to Jainism, Levinasian philosophy arose in response to the privileging of transcendence over immanence, of abstract knowledge over real, bodily relations and conditions in the here and now. For Levinas, it was precisely these rankings that led to the holocaust. So he created a philosophy that 1. considers ethics as first philosophy and 2. criticizes the metaphysics of presence, violence through cognition (or incorrect and violent knowledge) and other Enlightenment tendencies.
Instead of beginning philosophy by assuming we can know everything about a creature, Levinas begins with the phenomenologically driven principle of the multi-faceted, irreducible and uncapturable nature of the Other as expressed in the face-to-face relation. Levinas sums up this principle of irreducibility in the figure of the face, which he understands to signify vulnerability, the forbidding of violence and the hesitation to capture through frameworks of similarity and difference.20 Even as we encounter another creature, we cannot know it fully--because there will always be another perspective from which to see it, because they have such complex relations with the world, possesses infinite attributes. The face is an aporetic figure that marks the infinite alterity and irreducibility of the Other presented in the moment of encounter.
For Levinas, the irreducible relation exposed in the encounter with another is a privileged phenomenon in which the other person's proximity and distance are both equally felt; just as
