“The Call of the World, A Levinasian Response”

Abstract

This paper addressed my desire to respond to the devastation of nature through the postphenomenological thought of Emmanuel Levinas. Its intent was to describe Levinas’s event of the pre-cognitive face-to-face encounter with the radical alterity of the Other as ethical, an appeal that commands a responsible response to the otherness of the Other. The paper presents discourses that address the conceptual roots of our environmental destruction. The first discourse is a critique of the Scientific Revolution of the Enlightenment that sees the shift from a medieval world-view to one structured along scientific-rational terms as the problematic. The second looks at our relationship to nature through the work of the Institute for Social Research (the first wave of the Frankfurt School) who saw the objectifying universal character of reason itself via the concept as having led to our domination of both outer and inner nature (ourselves). The paper brings Levinas’s development of singular infinite ethical responsibility into view providing a way to move beyond the impasses of the prior discourses as well as the perceived absence of ethics in poststructuralism/postmodernism theories. Levinas’s thought offers us an insight into the realm of the environmental movement as a political and institutional response to the cry of nature as a face-to-face event. The paper has implications for planning as well as policy directions. It does so by focussing on the establishment of the first wind turbine in an urban setting on Toronto’s lakeshore by the Toronto Renewable Energy Co-operative (TREC) as a model for the production/ownership/management of power in Ontario.