A Chronology of Levinas’s Metaphorics

Many readers of Emmanuel Levinas understand his thought as being oriented only by transcendence and therefore denigrate the immanent dimension of metaphor within his texts. Such readings reduce the complexities of Levinas’s text to a set of polemical, orthodox proclamations such as The Other is Most High and Ethics is First Philosophy. However, Levinas’s work invites us to contemplate not only transcendence, but also the way that immanence emerges though relationships with an infinitude of others, third persons whose voices murmur within the system of language, articulated in concrete elements such as metaphor. Levinas employs metaphor to converse with the inherited ways that temporal becoming has been articulated, recurrently reorienting them to expose a variety of ethical-phenomenological constellations. To expose the dynamics that remain clandestine to the orthodox interpretation, this paper will chronologically trace the development of various families of metaphors such as those of having and doing; those of dimensionality, those of orality, those of familiarity, and those of birth, gender, and death, thereby demonstrating the multitude of roles and perspectival positions assumed by the subject during its temporal becoming.

Patchworks: The Ontology of the World

Chapter 3 turns to ‘Patchwork ontologies’. Compared to Resilience, Patchwork ontologies shift debate towards affirmation and replace the modernist imaginary of islands with a more open ontology of spatial and temporal becoming. While this remains a relational understanding, Patchwork ontologies are more disruptive, destabilising the ‘solutionist’ or instrumentalising aspects of Resilience; making them more open, less governmentalising and human-centred. This is reflected in the work of the many ‘Patchwork ontologists’, critical thinkers, artists, designers, experimenters and poets who today frequently turn to islands and islander life to draw out how entanglements of relation are never fixed. Patchworks instead attend to disturbances and how islands are powerful ways of expressing processes of world-making. A key figure here is Glissant, and his focus upon ‘giving-on-and-with’ ‘Relation’, which pushes thinking with islands to the point that we can never stand outside and grasp (island) relations, only immerse ourselves in the texture and turbulence of the weave. For patchwork approaches, thinking with islands then becomes a ‘verb’ (Teaiwa) and practice of ‘staying with the trouble’, opening ourselves to relational affects – an immersive process of becoming which is today being developed by a wide engagement with islands and islander life.

Phenomenological approaches to personal identity

This special issue addresses the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological viewpoint, especially contemporary phenomenological research on selfhood. In the introduction, we first offer a brief survey of the various classic questions related to personal identity according to Locke’s initial proposal and sketch out key concepts and distinctions of the debate that came after Locke. We then characterize the types of approach represented by post-Hegelian, German and French philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We argue that whereas the Anglophone debates on personal identity were initially formed by the persistence question and the characterization question, the “Continental” tradition included remarkably intense debates on the individual or the self as being unique or “concrete,” deeply temporal and—as claimed by some philosophers, like Sartre and Foucault—unable to have any identity, if not one externally imposed. We describe the Continental line of thinking about the “self” as a reply and an adjustment to the post-Lockean “personal identity” question (as suggested by thinkers such as MacIntyre, Ricœur and Taylor). These observations constitute the backdrop for our presentation of phenomenological approaches to personal identity. These approaches run along three lines: (a) debates on the layers of the self, starting from embodiment and the minimal self and running all the way to the full-fledged concept of person; (b) questions of temporal becoming, change and stability, as illustrated, for instance, by aging or transformative life-experiences; and (c) the constitution of identity in the social, institutional, and normative space. The introduction thus establishes a structure for locating and connecting the different contributions in our special issue, which, as an ensemble, represent a strong and differentiated contribution to the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological perspective.

The Myth of Passage

This chapter is a defense of the pure manifold theory of time against those who argue that the pure manifold theory fails to account for the passage of time because it does not postulate genuine temporal becoming. It is argued that the motivation for postulating genuine temporal becoming is an unwarranted belief and based on sheer myth. It is further proposed that we should believe that there is no real passage of time in the sense of a genuine temporal becoming, but that this rejection of such a phenomenon does not imply that we are doing violence to our temporal experience of reality.

Conscience

This article proposes a phenomenological view of conscience and argues that it plays a role in the pathogenesis of some mental illness. Taking advantage of Kępiński’s concept of biological conscience, Heidegger’s notion of the call of conscience, and von Gebsattel’s idea of existential neurosis, the article claims that these different epistemological accounts of conscience refer to the phenomenon of temporal becoming. Original conscience, unlike its psychological manifestation, embodies primary values and helps to overcome nihilism that is the root of human suffering. It reveals nothingness and opens the horizon of expectations toward the possibilities of being, which in turn enables the transcendence of oneself. Presented understanding of conscience is relevant for values-based practice by pointing at a shared framework of becoming that conditions the very possibility of finding an agreement between conflicting worldviews.

Quantum Becoming?

Two of quantum mechanics’ more famed and spooky features have been invoked in defending the idea that quantum time is congenial to manifest time. Quantum non-locality is said by some to make a preferred foliation of spacetime necessary, and the collapse of the quantum wavefunction is held to vindicate temporal becoming. Although many philosophers and physicists seek relief from relativity’s assault on time in quantum theory, assistance is not so easily found.

Intimations of Quantum Gravitational Time

Quantum gravity is not so much a developed theory as a set of research programs. The project inevitably demands hard and deep decisions about time. The chapter explores a fascinating example wherein temporal “becoming” is possibly restored, followed by an elegant example of the opposite, wherein time “disappears” altogether. The chapter shows that the time of relativity—such as it is—is quite resilient. It is both harder to kill off and harder to improve upon than is usually thought.