Levinas - The Levinas Reader (ed Hand)

Time and the other 39object. All enjoymtnt is also sensation - that is, knowledge and light. It isnot just the disappearance of the self, but self-forgetfulness, as a firstabnegation.WorkBut this instantaneous transcendence through space does not manage toescape solitude. The light that permits encountering something other thanthe self, makes it encountered as if this thing came from the ego. The light,brightness, is intelligibility itself; making everything come from me, itreduces every experience to an element of reminiscence. Reason is alone.And in this sense knowledge never encounters anything truly other in theworld. This is the profound truth of idealism. It betokens a radical differencebetween spatial exteriority and the exteriority of instants in relation toone another.In the concreteness of need, the space that keeps us away from ourselvesis always to be c6nquered. One must cross it and take hold of an object -that is, one must work with one's hands. In this sense, 'the one who worksnot, eats not' is an analytic proposition. Tools and the manufacture of toolspursue the chimerical ideal of the suppression of distances. In the perspective'that opens upon the tool, beginning with the modern tool - themachine - one is much more struck by its function which consists insuppressing work, than by its instrumental function, which Heideggerexclusively considered.In work - meaning, in effort, in its pain and sorrow - the subject findsthe weight of the existence which involves its existent freedom itself. Painand sorrow are' the phenomena to which the solitude of the existent is finallyreduced.Suffering and Death lIn pain, sorrow, and suffering, we once again find, in a state of purity, thefinality that constitutes the tragedy of solitude. The ecstasis of enjoymentdoes not succeed in surmounting this finality. Two points must be emphasized:I am going to pursue the analysis of solitude in the pain of need andwork, not in the anxiety of nothingness; and I am going to lay stress on thepain lightly called physical, for in it engagement in existence is without anyequivocation. While in moral pain one can preserve an attitude of dignityand compunction, and consequently already be free; physical suffering in allits degrees entails the impossibility of detaching oneself from the instant ofexistence. It is the very irremissibility of being. The content of suffering