The face (Fr. visage) is, in Emmanuel Levinas, the original address of the Other, which precedes all thematization and binds ethically. It is not the visual countenance as datum, but the experience of the non-availability of the Other, of his obligating me in advance.
Levinas’s determination
In Totalité et Infini (1961, Section III), Levinas develops the face against the tradition that sees in the Other primarily an object for my consciousness. His objection: the Other is not something I know — he is someone who addresses me before I grasp him. The face “speaks” before it says anything. Its first word is not propositional but imperative: “You shall not kill” (TI III B).
This ethical demand is not derived from a rule or a contract; it is the first ethics, prior to all theory. Levinas speaks of the asymmetry of the ethical relation: the Other comes “from on high,” as the one to whom I am responsible — not as my mirror image, not as my equal in the sense of a contract, but as the one to whom I am ex-posed.
Saying and the Said
In Autrement qu’être (1974), Levinas sharpens this: the Saying (le Dire) is the exposure to the Other — the holding-oneself-out, the speaking-oneself-out, the making-oneself-responsible. The Said (le Dit) is the secondary consolidation — that which remains thematically. The face belongs to the level of Saying: it is event, not content.
From this it follows that the face cannot be depicted. A photograph, an avatar, a simulated face are images of the face — but the face itself is in the in-each-case-actual enactment of address.
Why AI has no face
This determination has a hard consequence for the AI discussion: an AI system whose output can be arbitrarily reset, regenerated, re-rolled is available — and therefore no face. The face is precisely the experience of that which cannot be disposed of. Availability is the opposite of the face.
Mark Coeckelbergh and Anne Gerdes (“The Issue of Moral Consideration in Robot Ethics”, ACM SIGCAS 2016) have asked whether a robot could have a face. Phenomenologically strict, the answer reads: a simulated face is no face; a photorealistic avatar is no face; even a future, perfectly embodied humanoid robot would be no face — so long as the non-availability that Levinas means is lacking.
The missing structural condition is not visual quality, but personality.
Face and love
Levinas’s face can be thought together with Dietrich von Hildebrand’s The Nature of Love (1971) and Robert Spaemann’s concept of recognition (Persons 1996): the face demands not only “You shall not kill,” but also opens the space in which love becomes possible as a value-response to the dignity of the person. The negative determination (you shall not do to the Other what you would not want done to yourself) is the outer side; the positive one (you shall will his good for his own sake) the inner side.
Ontological classification
- is the appearance of the person in her non-availability
- constitutive for: ethical relation, address in the original sense
- exclusive to: persons — not for artificial agents (German) or things
- related to: Ontological Dignity, Personalist Norm
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Levinas, Emmanuel (1961): Totalité et Infini. Essai sur l’extériorité. The Hague: Nijhoff. (English: Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority, transl. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969.)
- Levinas, Emmanuel (1974): Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence. The Hague: Nijhoff. (English: Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, transl. A. Lingis. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1981.)
- Hildebrand, Dietrich von (1971): Das Wesen der Liebe. Regensburg: Habbel. (English: The Nature of Love, transl. J. F. Crosby & J. Crosby. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2009.)
- Spaemann, Robert (1996): Persons. The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’, transl. Oliver O’Donovan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
- Gerdes, Anne (2016): The Issue of Moral Consideration in Robot Ethics. ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society 45(3), 274–279.
- Introna, Lucas (2014): Towards a Post-human Intra-actional Account of Sociomaterial Agency (and Morality). In: Kroes, P. & Verbeek, P.-P. (eds.): The Moral Status of Technical Artefacts. Dordrecht: Springer.