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levinas questioning plato on eros and maieutics Francisco J. Gonzalez In a 1961 outline of the doctoral thesis that would become Totality and Infinity , Levinas provocatively characterized his project as “a return to Platonism.”1 This is certainly a surprising description of a book that carries out a radical critique of the entire history of ontology and whose project one would therefore expect to be anti-Platonist. Yet the influence of Plato is indeed evident throughout Totality and Infinity, not only in the explicit citations of Plato’s texts, which exceed in number the references to any other philosopher, including Descartes, but also, and even more importantly, in the very frequent and unattributed use of Platonic ideas and language. But why this appeal to Plato? And what is the nature of this “return” to Platonism, assuming that it is not simply a repetition? These are difficult questions to answer because, as will be seen, both Levinas’ appropriation and his critique of Plato are characterized by a certain ambiguity. Once both the ambiguity and its source are recognized, however, a genuine Auseinandersetzung between Plato and Levinas becomes not only possible but indispensable. Levinas’ Retrieval of Platonic Themes Probably the best-known Platonic theme in Totality and Infinity, and that in which Levinas’ main debt to Plato is usually located, is the transcendence of the Good. In Plato’s description of the Good as “beyond being,” Levinas sees a transcendence that resists the totalizing tendency of ontology as the study of beings in their being . Thus Levinas observes that the thesis expressed in Plato’s description of the Good’s transcendence “should have served as a foundation for a pluralist philoso40 3 phy in which the plurality of being would not disappear into the unity of number nor be integrated into a totality” (TI 80). Later in the text Levinas makes his own retrieval of the Platonic idea of the Good even more explicit: “If the notions of totality and being are notions that cover one another, the notion of the transcendent places us beyond categories of being. We thus encounter, in our own way, the Platonic idea of the Good beyond Being. The transcendent is what can not be encompassed ” (TI 293). Yet what Levinas retrieves is not only the idea of a transcendence beyond the totality of beings, but also Plato’s characterization of what transcends as the Good. Here he finds the priority of ethics to ontology or, more specifically, the idea that the good, as good in itself, resists all reduction to relations between beings. “The Good is Good in itself and not by relation to the need to which it is wanting; it is a luxury with respect to needs. It is precisely in this that it is beyond being” (TI 102–103). In confronting the Good as in itself Good, we confront not something relative to our needs, not something that fulfills a lack in our being and can thereby be assimilated to our being, but rather a surplus, an excess, beyond what we need and what we can thus make our own. It is in the Good, therefore, that we encounter something genuinely other, and it is only in the ethical relation that we can relate to another as other. If my relation to you has the character of a need (for example , a need for money, for sexual gratification, for companionship), then I am making you a part of me, or the same as me. But if I relate to you in the name of what is good in itself, then I recognize you as irreducible to my own needs and my own being. You are then, like my relationship to you, a surplus and a luxury.Thus in the 1987 preface to the German edition, Levinas expresses his debt to Plato simply as follows: “Wisdom that teaches the face of the other man! Was it not already announced by the Good beyond essence and above the Ideas in Book VI of Plato’s Republic?” (TI iv, my translation). Here we see most clearly the extent to which Totality and Infinity is indeed “a return to Platonism.” Yet it would be wrong to confine Levinas’ retrieval of Plato to the Idea of the Good. The key opposition in Levinas’ thought is that between the Same and the Other. Levinas sees in traditional ontology, as the study of beings as beings, the attempt to reduce...

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