Emmanuel Levinas and the Problem of Religious Language

THE THOMIST A SPECULATIVE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY EDITORS: THE DoMINICAN FATHERS OF THE PROVINCE OF ST. JosEPH Publishers: The Thomist Press, Washington, D. C. ~0017 VoL. XXXVI JANUARY, 1972 No.1 EMMANUEL LEVINAS AND THE PROBLEM OF RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE EMMANUEL LEVINAS IS A French phenomenological thinker with deep roots in Jewish tradition. His work shows an extraordinary thematic unity; it is an attempt to ground the view that the advent of other persons is a primordial upsurge of language. Thus he attacks one of the most vexing and fundamental concerns of contemporary religious thought: the primary meaning of language as a human phenomenon. The novelty of Levinas's investigation lies in its assumption that both language and morality rest upon nonrational foundations. Together with the question of language, Levinas develops an account of the responsible self as an infrastructure prior to all decision-making processes, that is, prior to the activation of responsibility in the world of freedom. Working in the tradition of Edmund Husserl, Levinas seeks to uncover for phenomenological investigation not only the moral self but such diverse phenomena as need, knowledge, and work. From Levinas's point of view the method of phenomenology makes possible an analysis of what is present to consciousness 1 EDITH WYSCHOGROD by revealing the structures of consciousness in its various spheres of operation. The work of consciousness presupposes existing entities, a world; it presupposes the relation with an object, with what is posited, with the being which is before consciousness. Levinas does not question the adequacy of Husserl's phenomenological method in its power to uncover the structures of cognition. But at the heart of Levinas's thought is the question: does consciousness, as phenomenological philosophy understands it, exhaust the data of all experiencing? Is not phenomenology itself more than a method, that is, does it not, like the entire tradition of Western metaphysics to which it belongs, eventuate in relations of dominance, power, and egoity? To discover the answers to these questions we must not only identify thematizing consciousness, consciousness which intends its object, but reveal its essential operations. We must find out what is accomplished in thematizing and what sorts of experiences are distorted when brought into its purview. As Husser! had already shown, a method arises naturally from a particular region of being and is a powerful instrument for the discovery of the meaning of the being from which it originates. But the misapplication of a method falsifies an ontological realm into which it has been transplanted but from which it does not derive. For Levinas, thematizing consciousness is exercised in a particular way; it is not activated neutrally to do its cognitive work but as power, violence, and domination. When the self is identified exclusively with the work of reason, when cognition is invoked as the paradigm for all experiencing, some domains of actuality are falsified. Particularly when the relations in existence between the self and other persons are assumed to be only variants differing in object but not in kind from the cognitive model, the experience of the alterity of other persons is distorted. There are for Levinas experiences such that they contain at any given moment more than consciousness can hold. These are the metaphysically significant experiences of the infinite, of transcendence, of the face of the other as something alien and rich, something foreign to one's own being. PROBLEM OF RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE The task of metaphysics is to attest the reality of these experiences which resist conventional analyses of consciousness and to bring these experiences into relation with the totality of existence. ToTALITY AND INFINITY: SETTING THE QuESTION In his major work, Totalite et infini, Levinas undertakes to show that all psychic life, even in its infra-cognitive structures, tends to incorporate the world into a totality, a network of functional relationships with others which betrays the interiority of personal life by reducing persons to their social roles within a complex network of socio-economic relationships. Totality devours individuality by failing to recognize the sphere of inner life. The totality is the whole into which individual lives are incorporated. From his earliest work, Levinas assumes the inevitability of this process. Within...