Levinas and Kierkegaard in Dialogue

Notes

153 notes Introduction 1. Modern Theology 8, no. 3 (July 1992), pp. 241–61. 2. Quoted in Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 406. 3. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1929). Subsequent references are to this work. The next five paragraphs are taken from ‘‘Levinas, Kierkegaard, and the Theological Task.’’ 4. Abraham as presented in Fear and Trembling will appear repeatedly in the chapters below. For Levinas, see the contrast between Ulysses and Abraham in chapter 7. 1. Revelation as Immediacy 1. On the two modes of metaphysics as onto-theology that have these two foundations , see Jean-Luc Marion, ‘‘Descartes and Onto-theology,’’ in Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology, ed. Phillip Blond (New York: Routledge, 1998). 2. Louis Menand, ‘‘The Real John Dewey,’’ The New York Review of Books, 39, no. 12 (June 25, 1992), p. 52. It is, of course, Richard Rorty who has most explicitly developed the link between American pragmatism and French postmodernism. See especially Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). 3. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 315. Alvin Plantinga identifies such privileged representations as those that are self-evident, incorrigible, or evident to the senses. See his ‘‘Reason and Belief in God,’’ in Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), p. 59. This view should not be confused with ‘‘weak’’ foundationalism, which does not require such apodicticity for foundational beliefs. 4. The holisms of thinkers like Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars, Brandom, and Kuhn are pluralistic, resisting the Hegelian claim of the whole and thus any claim to Absolute Knowledge. 5. Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 44–45; cf. pp. 17, 64. The absence of absolute criteria, of any common measure between various language games, or of any unifying metanarrative is the theme of Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1986) and The Differend, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1988). Notes to Pages 10–17 154 6. See Plantinga’s volume cited in note 3 above. 7. The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), p. 198 (‘‘Upon the Blessed Isles’’). Heidegger is another source of postmodern atheism. His view that whatever one’s ‘‘ontic’’ commitments may be, one adopts an atheistic perspective, outside of religious faith, the moment one begins to philosophize. This is a curious remnant in his thought of an Enlightenment rationalism whose chief opponent he purports to be. For his sharp separation of philosophy from theology see especially the lecture ‘‘Phenomenology and Theology,’’ in The Piety of Thinking, trans. James G. Hart and John C. Maraldo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976). Cf. History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 79–80, and The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 140. 8. Kierkegaard, CUP I, 118. That the thing in itself is quite simply the thing for God is quite clear in the Kantian text. See my ‘‘In Defense of the Thing in Itself,’’ KantStudien 59, no. 1 (1968), pp. 118–41. 9. For Hart see The Trespass of the Sign (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). For Marion see God without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 10. See, for example, Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter , ed. Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), and Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987). 11. See note 3 above. 12. Foucault’s Madness and Civilization was also published, in French, in 1961. 13. It needs to be emphasized that what I’ve been calling French negativism shares this positive appraisal of critique in relation to the possibility of ethics. The common goal of these writers is not to eliminate the moral life by establishing a world of arbitrary choice, but so see how justice may be possible in a world whose Enlightenment project has failed. Just because their answers differ significantly from those offered by the American debate between liberalism and communitarianism (and the German counterparts stemming from Habermas and Gadamer), they need to be included in the North American debate. For Derrida, see...