Being and God: A Systematic Approach in Confrontation with Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Luc Marion

Chapter 4: Critical Examination of Two Counter positions: Emmanuel Levin as and Jean- Luc Marion

283 Chapter 4 Critical Examination of Two Counterpositions: Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion This chapter deals with the most radical counterpositions to the conception presented in chapter 3: contemporary versions of so-called postmodernist Judeo-Christian philosophy and theology. The chapter raises two central objections to these counterpositions. First, by radically rejecting even the project of developing a comprehensive conception of reality or of Being, advocates of the counterpositions deprive themselves of any adequate basis for addressing the question of God. A “God” not situated within a philosophical theory of everything—a conception of Being as such and as a whole—would ultimately be some sort of curious, mysterious “superthing,” even if it were embellished with designations like “love.” Second, in spite of all their protests and counter-assertions, these authors develop conceptions—ones that are usually completely unsystematic and that are never sufficiently systematic—on the basis of what Heidegger calls the philosophy of subjectivity, even—and especially–– when they attempt to articulate an “extroversion” or a “reversal” of subjectivity . As a consequence, the God they in one way or another arrive at—if the X they arrive at deserves the name “God” at all—is the Other, the absolute Other, the absolutely Distant, or the like. But this “God” proves in the last analysis to be nothing other than a function of human subjectivity. If the author decided to use the language most postmodernist philosophers and theologians employ when they criticize metaphysically oriented philosophies and theologies, he would have to say that their God is an idol. But the author opts not to employ such language, so says instead that no postmodern “God” is the genuine, divine God. This chapter’s critique does not consider the immense variety of postmodernist philosophical and theological positions. To be effective, such a critique would have to be too extensive to be contained even in a voluminous book. For this reason, only two authors, whom the author 284 C H A P T E R 4 considers to be the most radical opponents to the kind of conception propounded in chapter 3, are treated; these are Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion. Moreover, even the extraordinarily extensive oeuvres of these two thinkers cannot be fully considered in all their details. Nevertheless, the account that follows does aim to identify the decisive coordinates of their conceptions, and to subject those coordinates to meticulous critique. 4.1 Levinas’s Misguided Conception of Transcendence “Beyond B/being” 4.1.1 General Characterization Levinas states: “It is not by accident that the history of Western philosophy has been a destruction of transcendence.”1 The reason he provides is that Western philosophy has been mainly, if not exclusively, a philosophy of B/being. But, he asserts, the intelligibility of transcendence is not ontological. The transcendence of God can neither be said nor thought in terms of B/being, the element of philosophy behind which philosophy sees only night. But the rupture between philosophical intelligibility and what is beyond B/being, or the contradiction there would be in com-prehending the infinite, does not exclude God from the significance that, although not ontological, does not amount to simple thoughts bearing on a being in decline, nor to views without necessity, nor to words that play.2 How does Levinas arrive at such an extreme conception? To give an adequate answer to this question, a very long story would have to be told—a story that would include the most important stages in the history of modern philosophy, especially in Europe from the end of the nineteenth century to the mid-1960s. Because that story cannot be told here, a few elucidatory and critical remarks must suffice. In what follows, the main points of what could be called, with Kant, the architectonic (or, mathematically, the coordinate system) of Levinas’s thinking are sketched and critically examined—although it is debatable 1 Emmanuel Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” in E. Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 57. 2 Ibid., 77. 285 C R I T I C A L E X A M I N A T I O N O F T W O C O U N T E R P O S I T I O N S whether it makes sense to speak of an architectonic of the thinking of a postmodernist philosopher. There...