Desire, Personal Identity, and the Infinite in

1
Desire, Personal Identity, and the Infinite
in Descartes, Whitehead, and Levinas

• David Banach
• Department of Philosophy
• St. Anselm College-----
• If a thing loves it is infinite. William Blake

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Two Meditation III ArgumentsReally the Same
Argument

• 1. The argument from the idea of an infinite
  being.
• 2. The argument from my continuing existence in
  time.

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From Objection I (Reply to Caterus)

• . . . this ability to have within us the idea of
  God could not belong to our intellect if the
  intellect were simply a finite entity (as indeed
  it is) and did not have God as its cause. Hence I
  went on to inquire 'whether I could exist if God
  did not exist'. But my purpose here was not to
  produce a different proof from the preceding one,
  but rather to take the same proof and provide a
  more thorough explanation of it.

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The Idea of the Infiniteand the HorizonFrom
Objection I (Reply to Caterus)

• But in the case of the thing itself which is
  infinite, although our understanding is positive,
  it is not adequate, that is to say, we do not
  have a complete grasp of everything in it that is
  capable of being understood. When we look at the
  sea, our vision does not encompass its entirety,
  nor do we measure out its enormous vastness but
  we are still said to 'see' it. In fact if we look
  from a distance so that our vision almost covers
  the entire sea at one time, we see it only in a
  confused manner, just as we have a confused
  picture of a chiliagon when we take in all its
  sides at once. . . . In the same way, God cannot
  be taken in by the human mind, and I admit this,
  along with all theologians.

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Memory and the Cartesian CircleFrom Objection
IV, Reply to Arnauld

• I have already given an adequate explanation of
  this point circularity in my reply to the
  Second Objections, under the headings Thirdly and
  Fourthly, where I made a distinction between what
  we in fact perceive clearly and what we remember
  having perceived clearly on a previous occasion.

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Memory and the Cartesian Circle From
Objection II, Reply to Mersenne

• Now some of these perceptions are so
  transparently clear and at the same time so
  simple that we cannot ever think of them without
  believing them to be true. The fact that I exist
  so long as I am thinking, or that what is done
  cannot be undone, are examples of truths in
  respect of which we manifestly possess this kind
  of certainty.
• There are other truths which are perceived very
  clearly by our intellect so long as we attend to
  the arguments on which our knowledge of them
  depends and we are therefore incapable of
  doubting them during this time. But we may forget
  the arguments in question and later remember
  simply the conclusions which were deduced from
  them. The question will now arise as to whether
  we possess the same firm and immutable conviction
  concerning these conclusions, when we simply
  recollect that they were previously deduced . . .
  . My reply is that the required certainty is
  indeed possessed by those whose knowledge of God
  enables them to understand that the intellectual
  faculty which he gave them cannot but tend
  towards the truth . . . .

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Dual Nature of Consciousness

• I am at once
• A. a fully constituted I think at each moment
• B. an awareness that we exist within something
  else and that our persistence within this
  something reveals an infinite outside of us and
  our confrontation with it. 
• Cf.  Dennis King Keenan, Reading Levinas Reading
  Descartes Meditations, Journal of British
  Society for Phenomenology (29)1 (1998) 63-74.

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Two Kinds of Process in Whitehead

• Transition movement from one constituted moment
  of time to another. A series of totalities. The
  passage of time
• Process non-temporal process within the internal
  constitution of an actual entity. Only reaches
  totality when process comes to an end as the
  actual entity is appropriated into an other.

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Dripping Drops
dripping
drops
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Two Natures of God

• Consequent- Gods coextensiveness with each
  instant of finished time of the universe.
  Constitutes the history of the universe in time.
  (Objective Immortality)
• Primordial- The drip that never drops. The
  primordial process which never reaches totality
  and the repository of all possibility (eternal
  objects).

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Giving and Taking in Whitehead

• Prehension The other enters into the internal
  constitution of an actual entity, but not as
  representation
• The Principle of Relativity To be is to be for
  an other. The culmination of every process is to
  be taken into the constitution of another actual
  entity.

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Time and Transition Process in Levinas

• Resurrection constitutes the principal event of
  time. There is therefore no continuity in being.
  Time is discontinuous one instant does not come
  out of another without interruption, by an
  ecstasy. In continuation the instant meets its
  death, and resuscitates death and resurrection
  constitute time. But such a formal structure
  presupposes the relation of the I with the Other
  and, at its basis, fecundity across the
  discontinuous which constitutes time.
• TI 284 IV, G. The Infinity of Time

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Transition and Process in Levinas

• The profound work of time delivers from this
  past, in a subject that breaks with his father.
  Time is the non-definitiveness of the definitive,
  an ever recommencing alterity of the
  accomplishedthe "ever" of this recommencement.
  The work of time goes beyond the suspension of
  the definitive which the continuity of duration
  makes possible. There must be a rupture of
  continuity, and continuation across this rupture.
  The essential in time consists in being a drama,
  a multiplicity of acts where the following act
  resolves the prior one. Being is no longer
  produced at one blow, irremissibly present.
  Reality is what it is, but will be once again,
  another time freely resumed and pardoned.(TI
  283-4 IV, G. The Infinity of Time )

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Memory and Personal Identity in Levinas

• The very permanence of the I . . . produces the
  irreparable, and consequently limits. The
  irreparable is not due to the fact that we
  conserve a memory of each instant on the
  contrary, memory is founded on this
  incorruptibility of the past, on the return of
  the I to itself. But does not the memory arisen
  in each new instant already give to the past a
  new meaning? In this sense, better than clinging
  to the past, does it not already repair it? For
  in this return of the new instant to the former
  instant lies the salutary character of
  succession. But this return weighs upon the
  present instant, "laden with all the past," even
  if it is pregnant with the whole future. (TI 282
  IV, G. The Infinity of Time)

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Time and Consciousness

• Distance with regard to being, by which the
  existent exists in truth (or ad infinitum), is
  produced as time and as consciousness, or again,
  as anticipation of the possible. Across this
  distance of time the definitive is not
  definitive being, while being, is not yet,
  remains in suspense, and can at each instant
  commence. The structure of consciousness or of
  temporalityof distance and truthresults from an
  elementary gesture of the being that refuses
  totalization. This refusal is produced as a
  relation with the non-encompassable, as the
  welcoming of alterityconcretely, as presentation
  of the face. (TI 281 IV, G. The Infinity of
  Time)

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The Other as source of continuity of subjective
aim

• The instants do not link up with one another
  indifferently, but extend from the Other unto me.
  The future does not come to me from a swarming of
  indistinguishable possibles which would flow
  toward my present and which I would grasp it
  comes to me across an absolute interval whose
  other shore the Other absolutely otherthough he
  be my sonis alone capable of marking, and of
  connecting with the past. But then the Other is
  alone capable of retaining from this past the
  former Desire that animated it, which the
  alterity of each face increases and deepens ever
  more profoundly. (TI 283 IV, G. The Infinity of
  Time)

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Infinite Impotent Will

• Infinite Impotent Will Our wills are infinite in
  the scope of their love, but finite in the scope
  of their power.
• A will that loves goes beyond all bounds. When
  you care about something, all other things being
  equal, you care about it always and everywhere.
• Though our will finds itself impotent to create
  the realities of the things it values, the reach
  of its commitments is not bounded by space or time

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Infinity and the Virtues

• The virtues are excellences of a will that
  organizes its activities into a synthetic unity
  based upon the lure of a pattern that does not
  exist in time in the same way as the events that
  comprise it.
• Faith is belief that goes beyond proof loves is
  care that goes beyond just deserts, hope is
  commitment that outruns our abilities to see and
  do. Each allows our reach to extend beyond the
  grasp of intellect. The virtues engage the will
  fully in a project to whose end our mind cannot
  see.
• Forgiveness is the triumph of future over past.

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The Welcome of the Face

• We recognize in the finitude to which the
  Hegelian infinite is opposed, and which it
  encompasses, the finitude of man before the
  elements, the finitude of man invaded by the
  there is, at each instant traversed by faceless
  gods against whom labor is pursued in order to
  realize the security in which the "other" of the
  elements would be revealed as the same. But the
  other absolutely other the Otherdoes not limit
  the freedom of the same calling it to
  responsibility, it founds it and justifies it.
  The relation with the other as face heals
  allergy. It is desire, teaching received, and the
  pacific opposition of discourse. In returning to
  the Cartesian notion of infinity, the "idea of
  infinity" put in the separated being by the
  infinite, we retain its positivity, its
  anteriority to every finite thought and every
  thought of the finite, its exteriority with
  regard to the finite here there was the
  possibility of separated being. The idea of
  infinity, the overflowing of finite thought by
  its content, effectuates the relation of thought
  with what exceeds its capacity, with what at each
  moment it learns without suffering shock. This is
  the situation we call welcome of the face.(TI
  197 III, B, 1. Infinity and the Face)

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Primordial Nature of God in Levinas?

• Truth requires both an infinite time and a time
  it will be able to seal, a completed time. The
  completion of time is not death, but messianic
  time, where the perpetual is converted into
  eternal. Messianic triumph is the pure triumph
  it is secured against the revenge of evil whose
  return the infinite time does not prohibit. Is
  this eternity a new structure of time, or an
  extreme vigilance of the messianic consciousness?
  The problem exceeds the bounds of this book.(TI
  285 IV, G. The Infinity of Time)

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Perspective and life from in Levinas

• The "somewhere" and the home render egoism, the
  primordial mode of being in which separation is
  produced, explicit. Egoism is an ontological
  event, an effective rending, and not a dream
  running along the surface of being, negligible as
  a shadow. The rending of a totality can be
  produced only by the throbbing of an egoism that
  is neither illusory nor subordinated in any way
  whatever to the totality it rends. Egoism is
  life life from . . . , or enjoyment. Enjoyment,
  given over to the elements which content it but
  lead it off into the "nowhere" and menace it,
  withdraws into a dwelling. So many opposed
  movements
• (TI 175 II, E, 1. Separation Is an Economy)

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Responsibility to All for All

• We can never meet the infinite obligations that
  our love places on us. Once you start caring
  about the hunger of children, you will find that
  there are more of them than you can even think
  of, let alone feed. Once you allow yourself to
  feel the infinite value of each set of eyes that
  look at you, you will feel yourself to be, in
  Dostoevsky's words responsible to all, for all.
  

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Two Modes of Perception

• Perception in the mode of Presentational
  Immediacy Clear and Distinct perception of
  totalities mediated by the sensory apparatus.
• Perception in the mode of Causal Efficacy Our
  vague (horizonal) awareness of how the past
  enters into out internal constitution as a source
  of subjective aim or purpose.

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Immediacy and the face to face in Levinas

• The idea of contact does not represent the
  primordial mode of the immediate. Contact is
  already a thematization and a reference to a
  horizon. The immediate is the face to face.
• (TI 52 I, A, 5. Transcendence as the Idea of
  Infinity)