The Demanded Self: Levinasian Ethics and Identity in Psychology

3. The Idol of Reason

55 3 The Idol of Reason From a Disengaged Self to a Dis-interested Ethics Knowing is not due to coming upon something, naming and explaining it. Knowing is due to something forcing itself upon us. (Heschel 1963, 109) Philosophyisthewisdomofloveintheserviceoflove.(Levinas 1974/1998c, 162) In ancient Greece, truth, goodness, and beauty were qualities of the Divine and inexorably linked, mutually illuminating dimensions of life. Nonetheless, within Plato, Aristotle, and the traditions that followed , Western philosophy was frequently articulated as a “love of wisdom.” Goodness and aesthetics were lived and interwoven into reason, but reason had subtle primacy. In modernity, truth—the seeking of conceptual clarity, universal principles, discernable patterns , order, and autonomous rationality—is triumphant, goodness and beauty clearly subservient to it (Cohen 1994). Reason has become hegemonic. Embracing the mandates of scientific rationality, philosophy itself moved from questions of meaning and purpose to validation and logic (e.g., logical positivism). In modernity, with significant precursors in Greek epistemology, truth and goodness were divorced, with truth wanting its emancipation from goodness for the sake of “purity.”1 This divorce marked the beginning of a tenuous relationship between ethics and reason. Ethics became subservient to reason. 56 Levinas’s Project: Love of Wisdom ≠ Wisdom of Love Hobbesian social contract theory, democratic assertions concerning individual rights, and the generic claims of value in human life were the products of an ethics starved of deeper rootedness (Taylor 1989). Linked to human history, human methodology, and human horizons of meaning, ethics became an afterthought, forced to play within the rules of a game that utterly altered it. The constructs of self that have emerged from this scientific worldview emphasize freedom as self-creation, autonomy, functionality, and rationality. In the West, modern psychology has become a systematized vehicle through which the modern self—rational, immanent, and internal—is still propagated.2 In a world where scientific method and practices have become the “neutral,” universal language, most perceive truth and reason of greatest consequence, with goodness and beauty extraneous elements or compartmentalized as a part of one’s religious ideology or personal choice (Bellah et al. 1985). Levinas understood and based his critique on the ramifications of this divorce between ethics and reason (and, ultimately, ethics and identity) and their profound bearing on the self’s relationship to itself and the other.3 Obedience to reason has often laid the bases of discourses that exclude responsibility for the other. Subjection to reason has meant an eschewing of ethical subjection to the other. Impersonal maxims dictate identity, selfhood, and love more fundamentally than the live, interhuman dynamic and its calling upon the self. This is seen most clearly in the modern depictions of reason as disengaged, detached, objective, and capable of being “value-free” and “neutral.” Ironically, within modernity, this objectifying discourse was forged as a means of avoiding violence and providing the possibility of conversation in the heat of warring traditions (Toulmin 1990). For Levinas, however, autonomous and disengaged reason is a cardinal source of violence on the micro and macrolevels of Western civilization. It leads persons to live anonymously alongside one another and leads nations to totalitarian violence (Levinas 1989, 1976/1990b). The promise of unification under reason has, according to Levinas, been a false promise from which many of our ailments arise. It has been a “more subtle and sophisticated violence perpetuated intellectually and spiritually in the name of the abstract universal” (Cohen 2003b, 145). Burggraeve (2007) expressed this with great clarity: The Idol of Reason 57 According to Levinas, left to itself, Greek thinking begins from the question of how to overcome the conflictual plurality and irrationality of ‘Opinion,’ or doxa, and passion. That is, it is animated by a desire for unity and autonomy. Furthermore, Greek thought has always held that the only way to achieve these things was obedience to Reason, which is general and all-encompassing. The vision of Reason can be found throughout western thinking....This obedience to the will of Reason is also to resolve all violence, both subjective and interpersonal. After all, this obedience is based on the insight and evidence that it holds not only for me, but everyone and equally. Hence does the subject agree, submitting itself to the law of Reason, making it its own inner law (thus also defining humanity by the power of understanding). Hence, too, can many people, with their very plurality threatening to be in conflict, enter into...