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28 two Revelation as Enigma and Paradox For how transparent is the shadow that troubles the clarity of coherent speech! —(PE 71) Can Two Walk Together . . . In his splendid book To the Other,1 Adriaan Peperzak presents Levinas’s 1957 essay ‘‘Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity’’ as the best brief introduction to Totality and Infinity (1961). A similar case could be made for the 1965 essay ‘‘Phenomenon and Enigma’’ in relation to Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1974). It has been described as the most Kierkegaardian of Levinas’s essays,2 which gives it special interest in the present context. What makes this description apt is not merely the fact that its latter half contains four of the rather rare references to Kierkegaard in Levinas’s writings; it is rather the fact that ‘‘the Kierkegaardian God’’ (PE 66–67) plays the role in this essay that the Cartesian God plays in the 1957 essay, the infinity that is an ‘‘inassimilable alterity’’ (PE 71). The Cartesian God serves to provide a formal structure of transcendence and heteronomy over against the totality and autonomy of the ontological tradition, in terms of which the face of the human Other can be understood to address me from on high (PII 47). Levinas surprisingly finds in Descartes’s God a break with the tradition of the ‘‘I think’’ and of reminiscence according to which truth is found ‘‘in the already-known.’’ For Plato philosophy is athe- Revelation as Enigma and Paradox 29 ism, or rather unreligion, negation of a God that reveals himself and puts truths into us. This is Socrates’ teaching, when he leaves to the master only the exercise of maieutics: every lesson introduced into the soul was already in it. The I’s identification, its marvelous autarchy, is the natural crucible of this transmutation of the other into the same. Every philosophy is—to use Husserl’s neologism—an egology (PII 49–50). By contrast, the infinity we find in Descartes’s idea of God is exceptional in that its ideatum surpasses its idea. . . . The intentionality that animates the idea of infinity is not comparable with any other;3 it aims at what it cannot embrace. . . . In thinking infinity the I from the first thinks more than it thinks. . . . [The idea of infinity] has been put into us. It is not a reminiscence. (PII 54) Borrowing from Aquinas’s notion of infused virtues, those implanted within us by God, we might speak here of infused truth. But the explicit contrast with the Platonic doctrine of recollection brings us even closer to Kierkegaard’s notion of revelation in which God gives us both the truth and the capacity to recognize it as such. In his discussion of this aspect of Descartes , Levinas provides commentary on his own concept of revelation and its convergence with Kierkegaard’s. In ‘‘Phenomenon and Enigma,’’ however, a further dimension of this convergence is developed. Let us not forget that just as it is a formal feature of Descartes’s thought that Levinas affirms, so it is a formal aspect of the Kierkegaardian God that interests him (PE 67). Just as he abstracts from Descartes’s attempt to prove the existence of God via reflections on the idea of infinity, so he abstracts from the specifically Christian ‘‘salvation drama’’ (PE 67) that provides the content of Kierkegaard’s challenge to the speculative tradition. But this does not signify a shift of emphasis from the divine transcendence to human transcendence. For this reason, it is the shadow of God, however transparent it may turn out to be, that makes this a disturbing essay. For ‘‘absolute alterity’’ turns out to be an ‘‘absolute disturbance’’ (PE 64) to every order, semantic or social, by means of which human reason seeks to make itself lord of the earth. This disturbance is thematized on virtually every page of the essay. It signifies that to go ‘‘beyond being’’ (PE 62, 73) is to go ‘‘beyond reason’’ (PE 61). Kierkegaard’s Climacus insists that reality may indeed be a system for God (CUP I, 118); but he and Levinas agree that it cannot be such for us, precisely because the infinite that is other to us continually disturbs, disrupts, and, if you like, deconstructs each totality we seek to construct, every logos into which we try to make everything fit (PE 61). Revelation stands in overt tension with reason as...

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