Levinasian Meditations: Ethics, Philosophy, and Religion

INTRODUCTION

199 INTRODUCTION Part Two From a theological perspective, religion is a challenge to human freedom . Here I will speak of the monotheisms, but monists face problems of a similar order. If God is omnipotent, then how can humans be free? If humans are free, then how can God be omnipotent? Lacking freedom, humans would be no more than puppets, their morality and justice rendered risible, their salvation or damnation completely arbitrary . Despite the sound and fury of rhetorical subterfuge, or a retreat to “mystery,” theology has no answers adequate to its own pretentions to logos. But what if the problem lies not with religion, not with the practices and beliefs of monotheists, but with theology? What if knowledge, rationality, comprehension, logic, disclosure, revelation, and all the various resources and approaches of intellect, with its logical and ontological alternatives of being and nonbeing, freedom and necessity, as well as their possible dialectical interplay, what if these are all simply inappropriate registers of the deepest or highest sense of religion? Unless religion is a form of self-deception, surely the answer must be yes. Would the result then be affirmation of the irrational and foolishness , idiocy or madness of beatitudes? Would the monotheisms then be asylums? Certainly there have been preachers aplenty who have proclaimed such beliefs, perhaps in defensive reaction to the irresolvable conundrums of theology. Heedless of its own long hostility to paganism and hedonism, monotheism would then be indistinguishable from mythology, from the worship of miracles through a faith confirmed in and by its very blindness. In the name of religion, of monotheism in particular, Levinas offers an emphatic no to both alternatives: the self-deception and mystery 200 Religion for Adults of theology and the self-stupefaction and mystification of mythology. The irrational, after all, is but the flip side of rationality, not its alternative . Irrationality is not only inferior to monotheism, the sort of thing monotheism abhors as “superstition,” “sorcery” “witchcraft,” and the like, it is inferior to rationality. For Levinas, emphatically, the proper significance of monotheism is found neither in the rational nor in the irrational. Monotheism is ethical religion. “Ethics,” Levinas has written, “is not the corollary of the vision of God, It is that very vision....To know God is to know what must be done” (DF 17). And the ethical, as we have seen in part one of this volume, is both the condition for the possibility of rationality and that in whose service rationality finds it very purpose. For rationality, for science, the irrational is exactly that: irrational; in the context of monotheism, however, where science is made possible by morality and made necessary by its service to justice, the irrational has a deeper signification: it is the ground or the abyss of evil and injustice. It derives from a refusal of the other person and an indifference to the needs of a suffering humanity, the reduction of the needs of the other and of all others to the desires of the same. One sees right away, then, that there is no essential division in Levinas’s thought between his philosophical writings and his so-called “confessional” writings. One can distinguish Levinas’s writings in this manner, to be sure, but the resulting differentiation depends on their intended audience and not their message. Levinas everywhere propounds the same primacy of ethics, the primacy of moral responsibility before the other, and the call to justice demanded by that same responsibility. Levinas was a Jew and a philosopher. Furthermore, as a Jew he was a “Litvak,” a Jew of Lita, Jewish Lithuania, a mentality—an extreme intellectualist sobriety—even more than a geography. When Levinas writes for his coreligionists, for his fellow Jews that is to say—and let us not forget that he was principal of a Jewish high school and teachers’ college long before and then during his appointments as professor of philosophy—he can and does assume a shared familiarity with Jewish traditions, practices, rituals, holidays, commentaries, historical experiences, language, sacred texts, and the like. He cannot , of course, make these assumptions when he writes for a general audience. In his philosophical writings, then, Levinas elaborates his Introduction to Part Two 201 ethics for all intelligent and educated human beings, regardless of their historical particulars. To be sure, Levinas assumes a familiarity with Western cultural and intellectual history, but here, too, as I indicated in the introduction to part...