Oldal 94 [94]
OCR
92 | THe Puitosopny or Eco-Pouirics effective counter-measure to any attempt to anthropomorphise nature, including those which claim to perceive the measure of good in nature (in the immeasurable).” Merleau-Ponty himself was prevented by death from accounting for the ethical consequences of the ontological turn he had carried out. However, Emmanuel Lévinas, his contemporary, bases his own radical ethics of responsibility on many similar presuppositions. Here too, the starting point is the body, with the difference that for Lévinas, the basic bodily connection with the world is not sensing but feeding. Above all else, man lives from the world, makes it his own and identifies with it. He is only forced to differentiate between himself and others, when he is called by the Other. A new meaning is revealed in the speech of the Other. It resists all attempts to trace it back to the familiar. This is what Lévinas means by the statement that only another human being can be an absolute stranger. “The presence of the Other is equivalent to this calling into question of my joyous possession of the world. (...) To speak is to make the world common...”, he writes in Totality and Infinity.*° ‘The Other is infinite, ie., transcendent, because its identity cannot be the object of the dialogue which aims to grasp meaning (force things within limits), since its starting point is exactly the encounter of the two of us. I am speaking not of him but to him; I am seeking to understand not something but someone. “...the comprehension of being in general cannot dominate the relationship with the Other. The latter relationship ” "The meaning of the quoted metaphor (being speaks through us) is, however, opaque. During his further inquiries, Toadvine develops the question: if the meaning that gains expression through language is not given to the world by the subject, but is rather achieved by life with the mediation of the sensing body and squeezed out of the preexisting things, as claim the ecophilosophers who appeal to Merleau-Ponty, what then is the ontological status of the expression? What can be the motive of the process during which meaning is placed from one medium (nature) to the other (expression)? He concludes that this supposed dialogue between the living being and some kind of external world simply does not exist. The act of sensing cannot be deduced. “Sense is ontologically more primordial than either a sense-bestowing subject, or a sense-carrying substance, more basic than the poles of life and world themselves. It is the pure event from which the two orders of subject and object, or the two series of causality and intentionality split off, (...) ...sense is rather a happening, an event of radical creation, a vortex of selfreflective movement whose ongoing rupture throws off questioner and questioned, subject and object, body and thing, as so many by-products of its fission.” (Ted Toadvine: Singing the World in a New Key. Janus Head 7.2. 2004, pp. 279-80.) Toadvine’s final conclusion is that it is not only philosophy that begins with questioning and the wonder that leads to it, but nature as well. 80 Emmanuel Lévinas: Totality and Infinity, pp.75-76. Martins Nijhoff Publishers, The Hague, 1979.
