The challenge of the Holocaust

The circular reasoning prompted by virtual identification of morality with social discipline makes the daily practice of sociology well-nigh immune to the 'paradigm crisis'. There are few occasions, if any, when the application of the extant paradigm may cause embarassment. Programmatic relativism built into this vision of morality provides the ultimate safety valve in case the observed norms do arouse intinctive moral revulsion. It therefore takes events of exceptional dramatic power to shatter the grip of the dominant paradigm and to start a feverish search for alternative groundings of ethical principles. Even so, the necessity of such a search is viewed with suspicion, and efforts are made to narrate the dramatic experience in a form that would allow its accommodation within the old scheme; this is normally achieved either by presenting the events as truly unique, and hence not quite relevant to the general theory of morality (as distinct from the history of morality -much like the fall of giant meteorites would not necessitate the reconstruction of evolutionary theory), or by dissolving it in a wider and familiar category of unsavoury, yet regular and normal by-products or limitations of the morality-producing system. If neither of the two expedients measures up to the magnitude of the events, a third escape

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as a set of rules rather than norms (much less as inner propulsion); rules that are naturally resented, as they reveal other humans as a hostile externality of human condition, as a constraint upon freedom.

There is, however, a third description of the existential condition of being with others' - one that may provide a starting point for a truly different and original sociological approach to morality, able to disclose and articulate such aspects of modern society as the orthodox approaches leave invisible. Emmanuel Levinas,⁷ responsible for this description, encapsulates its guiding idea in a quotation from Dostoyevsky: 'We are all responsible for all and for all men before all, and I more than all the others.'

To Levinas, being with others', that most primary and irremovable attribute of human existence, means first and foremost responsibility. 'Since the other looks at me, I am responsible for him, without even having taken on responsibilities in his regard.' My responsibility is the one and only form in which the other exists for me; it is the mode of his presence, of his proximity:

the Other is not simply close to me in space, or close like a parent, but he approaches me essentially insofar as I feel myself - insofar as I am - responsible for him. It is a structure that in nowise resembles the intentional relation which in knowledge attaches us to the object - to no matter what object, be it a human object. Proximity does not revert to this intentionality; in particular it does not revert to the fact that the Other is known to me.

Most emphatically, my responsibility is unconditional. It does not depend on prior knowledge of the qualities of its object; it precedes such knowledge. It does not depend on an interested intention stretched towards the object; it precedes such intention. Neither knowledge nor intention make for the proximity of the other, for the specifically human mode of togetherness; 'The tie with the Other is knotted only as responsibility'; and this moreover,

whether accepted or refused, whether knowing or not knowing how to assume it, whether able or unable to do something concrete for the Other. To say: me void. To do something for the Other. To give. To be human spirit, that's it ... I analyze the inter-human relationship as if, in proximity with the Other - beyond the image I myself make of the other man - his face, the expressive of the

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Other (and the whole human body is in this sense more or less face) were what ordains me to serve him ... The face orders and ordains me. Its signification is an order signified. To be precise, if the face signifies an order in my regard, this is not in the manner in which an ordinary sign signifies its signified; this order is the very signifyingness of the face.

Indeed, according to Levinas, responsibility is the essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity. Responsibility which means responsibility for the Other', and hence a responsibility 'for what is not my deed, or for what does not even matter to me'. This existential responsibility, the only meaning of subjectivity, of being a subject, has nothing to do with contractual obligation. It has nothing in common either with my calculation of reciprocal benefit. It does not need a sound or idle expectation of reciprocity, of 'mutuality of intentions', of the other rewarding my responsibility with his own. I am not assuming my responsibility on behest of a superior force, be it a moral code sanctioned with the threat of hell or a legal code sanctioned with the threat of prison. Because of what my responsibility is not, I do not bear it as a burden. I become responsible while I constitute myself into a subject. Becoming responsible is the constitution of me as a subject. Hence it is my affair, and mine only. 'Intersubjective relation is a non-symmetrical relation ... I am responsible for the Other without waiting for reciprocity, were I to die for it. Reciprocity is his affair.'

Responsibility being the existential mode of the human subject, morality is the primary structure of intersubjective relation in its most pristine form, unaffected by any non-moral factors (like interest, calculation of benefit, rational search for optimal solutions, or surrender to coercion). The substance of morality being a duty towards the other (as distinct from an obligation), and a duty which precedes all interestedness - the roots of morality reach well beneath societal arrangements, like structures of domination or culture. Societal processes start when the structure of morality (tantamount to intersubjectivity) is already there. Morality is not a product of society. Morality is something society manipulates - exploits, re-directs, jams.

Obversely, immoral behaviour, a conduct which forsakes or abdicates responsibility for the other, is not an effect of societal malfunctioning. It is therefore the incidence of immoral, rather than moral, behaviour which calls for the investigation of the social administration of intersubjectivity.