The Production of Infinity

A reflection on the preface to Totality and Infinity by Emmanuel Levinas

6 March 2022

To philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the history of Western thought is dominated by the concept of totality, the idea that all knowledges must logically cohere. From Aristotle’s principle of non-contradiction right up to Heidegger’s overarching question of the meaning of Being, Levinas sees a constant desire in the history of Western philosophy for a fundamental explanation that is totalizing, if not outright totalitarian. In his book, Totality and Infinity, he seeks to show that that totalizing tendency has grave ethical consequences which have often manifested in tyrannical systems of oppression. The drive for scientific objectivity and rational systems of social organization has often drowned human agency in an oppressive belief system that reduces human history and politics to reductive theories of cause and effect. As he says, “Individuals are reduced to being bearers of forces that command them unbeknown to themselves” (21). 

To the totality he contrasts infinity. For Levinas, the self experiences an infinity that transcends totality in the encounter with another person. He is particularly concerned with the face of the other*. 

When human beings meet in face-to-face interaction, they “produce” infinity (26). That is an experience that “transcends” totality (25). Although it can be “conceptualized” (ibid), it is not a concept the way we normally use that term.  To Levinas, there is something volitional about conceptualization. This is perhaps best captured in the phrase ‘grasping an idea.’ When we think representationally with concepts, we seek to recreate in our own consciousness something that is alien to us, and, in a way, make it part of ourselves, to take an objective experience and make it a subjective reality (23). But that cannot be done with another person. The other person is a “surplus always exterior to the totality” that “institutes a relation with being beyond the totality” (22). When such a relation is created in the face-to-face encounter, “infinity overflows the thought that thinks it” (25). This rings true to me. It explains why I am always surprised by the actions of others. 

Levinas contends that, because this unique human experience has been improperly understood, the Western drive to place epistemology and metaphysics as prior to ethics is has resulted in horrendous political forms of organization. It is worth mentioning he was writing this book shortly after WWII and had spent most of that war in a concentration camp only to discover upon his release that his family had been murdered by totalitarians.  

He begins his preface with a short reflection on the relationship between war and the totalizing epistemologies that have been the backbone of Western culture since ancient Athens: 

“The trial by force is the test of the real. But violence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action. Not only modern war but every war employs arms that turn against those who wield them. It establishes an order from which no one can keep his distance; nothing henceforth is exterior. War does not manifest exteriority and the other as other; it destroys the identity of the same” (21). 

As I type, on 27 February 2022, another war is underway. Russia invaded Ukraine last week and the Russian forces are now attempting to take the capital, Kiev. This morning, Vladimir Putin announced he was putting his nuclear forces on the highest level of readiness. Many fear there will be a nuclear strike in the coming days. Reading Levinas’s paragraph above, I cannot help but think that there must be many Russian soldiers who have no idea why they are fighting, who feel like they are betraying their own conscience and “playing roles in which they no longer recognize themselves.” Similarly, the Ukrainians, whose “continuity” Putin seemed to think it would be easy to interrupt, appear to grow stronger and more united with each passing day.