Levinas (2) – Evasion and the “Il y a”

“The Overflowing of the Self (On Evasion)” by Levinas

• Levinas’s work, On Evasion (1935), marks the beginning of his philosophical training.
• The text explores fundamental states of mind, such as necessity, shame, and nausea, similar to those of Heidegger in Being and Time.
• Levinas criticizes the notion of Being, calling for a new approach to ontology.
• The book introduces the theme of the necessary departure from ontology, or escape from Being.
• Levinas criticizes the idea of Being as unsatisfactory and calls for a new route to leave it.
• The being explored in On Evasion experiences physical and affective states such as need, pleasure, shame, and nausea.
• The being is characterized by a “need for excess” or “excedancer,” which is not due to a fundamental lack but a desire to transcend itself.
• The self feels desires that can be satisfied and a metaphysical desire to transcend itself that is impossible to fulfill and inexhaustible.
• The need to evade takes on a dramatic form as it is the need to escape existence as such, escaping the brutal truth that there is being.
• The self’s identity contains the need to escape from itself, a movement outwards with no specific destination.
• The self’s desires that can be satisfied admit of disappointed satisfaction, as it also feels the non-fulfillment of the great Desire, that of leaving the self behind.

Understanding Human Duality and Ontological Claustrophobia

Understanding Pleasure, Shame, and Nausea

• Pleasure symbolizes the unfulfilled promise of self-emancipation, often mixed with pain.
• Shame is the shame of being oneself, revealing the self that uncovers itself.
• Nausea is the pure being of being oneself, experiencing oneself without reflective knowledge or any idea.

Ontological Claustrophobia

• This suffering is not due to a lack of the power of being, but fullness.
• The power of being drives the desire to leave being, and the need to escape is existence itself.

The Concept of “There is”

• Levinas’ main concept is “There is being” (il y a de l’être), which is impersonal existence.
• Il y a is inextinguishable, beyond any conceivable or defined existence.
• Being is rooted in a time and a space, found in the delocalized ubiquity of its y.
• The il y a lacks the principle implied in subjectivity, as it does not admit any subjectivity.

The “There is”

• Levinas’ main concept before his development of the ethical relationship.
• The il y a is always present, like the ever-deepening abyss upon which beings exist.
• Levinas adds images of the il y a, such as the silence of a child’s room and the void that can be imagined before creation.

The Concept of ‘Ilya’ in Philosophy and Art

Empirical Illustrations of ‘Ilya’

• Film and music create silence, revealing the presence of absence and existence without existing.
• The energy released in the initial singularity of the universe is also ‘ilya’.
• The concept of ‘ilya’ is impenetrable to reason and philosophical inquiry.
• Levinas offers an empirical example of ‘insomnia’, the absence of sleep but not of consciousness.

The Perception of ‘Nocturnal Space’

• The perception of this nocturnal space produces horror due to the insurmountable fatality of being irredeemable.
• The ‘there’ in its deaf neutrality never disappears, even when the individual subject emerges from it.

The Emergence of Consciousness from ‘Ilya’

• The emergence of consciousness from ‘Ilya’ is ‘hypostasis’, where the subject acquires a separate existence from the neutral background of the ‘there is’.
• Consciousness, the subject, and personal identity emerge from the ‘Ilya’, they do not pre-exist it.

The Attachment of Beings to Being or Existence

• Beings or existents are attached to being or existence, and vice versa.
• There is an emergence, a hypostasis, whereby being is individuated and acquires a separate identity.

Fatigue and Resistance to Existence

• Fatigue is the way of appearing of the need to escape, rejection of existence that cannot be rejected.
• It is the ego’s resistance to existing, a resistance that presupposes existence.

The ‘Ilya’ will almost completely disappear as an explicit principle in Levinas’ later reflections, but will still exist as it exists in existence anonymously.

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The Overflowing of the Self (On Evasion)

On Evasion (1935) marks the beginning of Levinas’s own work. Despite the enormous importance he has had as an introducer of phenomenology in France almost at the same time as it was taking shape in Germany, and that at the age of only twenty-six, his lucid understanding of the new philosophy has mainly meant the last stage in his philosophical training (an enormously elevated training). On Evasion already raises its own issues, and in a personal style. It is undeniable that the shadow of Heidegger still extends over this brief text, as it will also (in a more tenuous way) over the two subsequent books: the exploration of fundamental and revealing states of mind, such as necessity, shame and nausea in On Evasion are of the style of those that the German philosopher makes of anxiety, fear and care in Being and Time. But there is also an uneasiness, a dissatisfaction with the notion of Being. He declares that “the old problem of ontology” must be reformulated in a new way. Read within the context of his philosophy, Of Escape stands out for introducing one of Levinas’ great themes: the necessary departure from ontology, the departure (escape) from Being.

In this, his first work, Levinas already denounces as unsatisfactory the idea of Being predominant in the philosophical tradition: “It is a question of leaving Being by a new route, even at the risk of destroying certain notions that seem evident to common sense and to the wisdom of nations” (DE 127). This approach is situated “beyond” Husserl’s phenomenological intellectualism — of his transcendental ego — and of the entity seen from the being as it is presented in Being and Time. The being that Levinas explores experiences physical and affective states: need, pleasure, shame, nausea. In On Evasion there is a phenomenological and existential analysis of these states that retains many features of the method of the two masters, but which is already distinguished from them by the determination with which the particular dimension of the human being is emphasized.

This being is characterized by his “need for excess” (besoin d’excedancer, this term is one of the few Levinasian neologisms). This need consists of not feeling satisfied within one’s own being, in one’s particular sphere, and in the desire to transcend it or to go outside oneself. This need is not due to a fundamental lack, but quite the opposite: the being desires to transcend itself precisely because it is full, because the fundamental aspect of the experience of fullness is to go beyond itself. The self feels desires that can be satisfied — hunger, thirst, learning… — and that affirm it, and a metaphysical desire to transcend itself that is impossible to fulfill and at the same time is inexhaustible. It is a duality specific to the human being that has a dramatic form:

Existence is an absolute that asserts itself without referring to anything else. It is identity. But in this reference to himself, man distinguishes a type of duality. His identity with himself loses the character of a logical or tautological form; it assumes, as we shall show, a dramatic form. In the identity of the self, the identity of being reveals its nature of entrapment because it appears in the form of suffering and is an invitation to evasion. So evasion is the need to get out of oneself, that is, to break the most radical, most irredeemable entrapment, the fact that the self is itself. (DE 98)

The need to evade takes on a dramatic form because it is the need to escape existence as such, to escape the elementary and (as Levinas defines it) brutal truth that there is being (il y a de l’être). Being is insurmountable because existence is something permanent and basic. In a few pages we will see how this statement is argued in From Existence to the Existing and Time and the Other. Now it is important to remember that human beings by their very nature want to get out of themselves. Being is experienced as imprisonment, as being chained, riveted to oneself. To be is already an invitation to get out of being. The very identity of the self contains the need to escape from itself. This need is for a movement outwards with no specific destination, a restlessness that does not seek repose. Desires that can be satisfied — those that concern the self as an identity with itself — in reality only admit of a disappointed satisfaction, because at the same time as the self pleasurably experiences its fulfillment, it also feels the non-fulfillment of the great Desire, that of leaving the self behind. Adopting the Heideggerian distinction between the ontic (that which concerns the entity) and the ontological (that which concerns being), Levinas’ description of the duality of the human being is that it is disappointingly realized in the ontic and painfully frustrated in the ontological. The being desires to escape from itself and cannot.

The aforementioned analyses of the states of pleasure, shame and nausea are linked to the observation of human duality. Pleasure augurs the emancipation of the self, a promise of evasion that is not fulfilled: that is why it is mixed with pain. (We almost lose ourselves in pure joy when drinking cool water in summer after a long walk, when listening to a favorite piece of music, when suddenly and unexpectedly understanding something that happened ten years ago. Almost but not quite: we do not lose ourselves.) Shame is the shame of being oneself, of not being able to break with oneself, of not being able to hide one’s nakedness from oneself: “What shame uncovers is the self that uncovers itself” (DE 113). In nausea one experiences the pure being of being oneself: one experiences oneself without reflective knowledge, before any idea, in its simplest and most oppressive neutrality. The self feels attached to itself, enclosed in itself, “without any window to anything else” (DE 120).

All these states reveal what John Llewelyn calls “ontological claustrophobia”. It is of the utmost importance to understand that this suffering is not produced by a lack of the power of being — it is not the frustration of a desire unsatisfied by incapacity — nor by the fact described by Heidegger and Sartre that the being has found itself, at birth, involuntarily thrown into existence. The suffering of ontological claustrophobia is not denial or deprivation, but fullness. It is consubstantial with the fact of being fully being: the power of being drives it to desire to leave being. The need to escape is existence itself.

For Levinas, to be means primarily and almost exclusively to be human. All the states and the existence of the human being are described in their concreteness. The problem of being, the need to escape, is revealed to the human being in his or her daily life, in the fact of being placed as substance in existence, in his or her embodied present. It is this very model of the human being that will be the object of reflection in later books.

Il y a (“there is”) (From Existence to the Existing)

Existence is permanent and basic, irrepressible, which is why the Desire of the self to escape from itself is frustrated. “There is being” (il y a de l’être), has been declared as an elementary truth in On Evasion. This is the main concept of From Existence to the Existing: il y a, or “there is”. Il y a is impersonal existence — il y a as in il pleut (“it’s raining”), il fait nuit (“it’s dark”) or il fait chaud (“it’s hot”) — anonymous, general, indeterminate, neutral, in itself: it is “existing without existing”, prior to the constitution of the individuated human subject. Any further definition is necessarily paradoxical: it is presence within absence, the sound that is heard when everything is silent, Being without beings, the fullness of emptiness. The il y a is inextinguishable, it is beyond any conceivable or defined (particular) existence. Being is rooted in a time and a space; the il y a is found in the delocalized ubiquity of its y. It is existence without a world. Since it does not admit any subjectivity, the il y a lacks the principle implied in subjectivity.

The “there is” (Il y a)

The il y a is Levinas’ main concept before he develops his reflection on the ethical relationship Although it is hardly ever explicitly mentioned in works subsequent to On Evasion, From Existence to the Existing and Time and the Other, this enigmatic presence is always there, like the ever-deepening abyss or background upon which beings exist. To the initial equation of the il y a with insomnia — in which there is no proper consciousness, no subject, no representations, only “there is” — Levinas will add two more images in an interview (included in Ethics and Infinity): “My reflection on this subject starts from childhood memories. You sleep alone, the grown-ups go on with their lives; the child experiences the silence of his room as a ‘buzzing’. […] Something similar to what you hear when you put an empty shell to your ear, as if the void were full, as if silence were noise. Something that can also be experienced when you think that even if there were nothing, you cannot deny the fact that “there is”. Not that there is this or that, but that the very scene of being is open: there is. In the absolute void that can be imagined before creation, there is».

Three more empirical illustrations can be added. Film buffs are familiar with the empty shots that the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu inserts between scenes: the characters leave the field of the camera and the camera remains motionless. For a moment, what the viewer sees is the pure presence of absence, existence without existing, il y a. Music, by creating silence — silence in music and in everything else does not happen from the outset, but is produced — also reveals this fundamental il y a. Astrophysicists explain to us that the snow that can be seen on the screen of analog televisions when no channel is tuned in is, in part, the energy released in the inconceivable initial instant of the big bang that gave rise to the universe. This energy, already contained in the initial singularity, has remained timelessly in the universe: it is also il y a.

It can therefore be related to eternity: to the timeless eternity of the unnameable being.

The notion of il y a, prior to any thinkable object, is impenetrable to reason, to the philosophical inquiry subsequent to this initial description. It is what in philosophy is called incomparable. It is more acceptable to intuition. That is why Levinas offers an empirical illustration of it: insomnia, which is the absence of sleep but not of consciousness. In the small hours of the morning, insomnia blurs everything, there is neither wakefulness nor sleep, consciousness is not there but neither does it cease to be. There is a presence without a beginning. The self is not there in insomnia as I am not there. Something similar happens in the twilight state, that no man’s land, a state without content. There is a presence, but a neutral, anonymous presence. In both states there is existence or presence without a subject.

The perception of this nocturnal space, which is not empty but full of the nothingness of everything, produces horror, because “the fatality of being irredeemable” is insurmountable: it cannot be circumvented by death, by sleep or by dreaming. Levinas quotes several Shakespearean passages to express (not explain) this horror: Hamlet’s soliloquy on to be or not to be (“but in that sleep of death, what dreams may come we shall remember”), Macbeth’s anguish in the face of Banquo’s ghost (“Macbeth hath killed sleep”)[10]. The “there” in its deaf neutrality never disappears. Even when the individual subject emerges from it to pass into existence, they take it with them, they do not detach themselves from it.

The emergence of consciousness from the il y a is hypostasis. This term — which Levinas takes from the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus — should be understood as production and realization, in which the subject acquires a separate existence from the neutral and anonymous background of the “there is”. Consciousness, the subject and personal identity emerge from the il y a, they do not pre-exist it. The sense of movement is clearly expressed in the title: from existence (il y a) to the existent (being, human being).

Beings or existents are attached to being or existence, and vice versa. They are like light emerging from darkness but retaining this darkness within itself. However, there is an emergence, a hypostasis, whereby being is individuated and acquires a separate identity. Levinas examines this process based on three conditions that make it possible. If in On Evasion he has analyzed existential states such as pleasure, shame and nausea in their relationship with the need to leave the self, in On Existence to the Existing he examines laziness, fatigue and effort as states that accompany hypostasis. These analyses are phenomenological and are on the metaphysical, essential level; they do not refer to an effort or to an empirical or sporting tiredness. They are situated in the ontic perspective, which concerns the entity, being or existing as such.

Fatigue is the way of appearing of what Levinas has called the need to escape: rejection of existence that cannot be rejected, because il y a de l’être (“there is being”). It is the reluctance of being at the moment of hypostasis, of its emergence and presentation. It would be the propensity to sleep due to the effect of the weight of being. Fatigue is also the ego’s resistance to existing, a resistance that, as such, already presupposes existence. Like tiredness, it occurs at the moment of hypostasis. Its effect is to delay: it delays the emergence of being into existence. Like tiredness, it is a concrete way in which reflexivity assumes particular and personal existence.

The il y a will almost completely disappear as an explicit principle in Levinas’ later reflection, but it will not lose its basic presence as the background of being. In later books it will exist as it exists in existence: anonymously. If in this il y a de l’être, in Levinas’ books il y a de l’il y a, “there is there is”.