Divine Ab-solutes: Alterity in Kierkegaard and Levinas

Divine Ab-solutes: Alterity in Kierkegaard and Levinas

For Levinas the Other is, in the first instance, the human Other, and the first commandment is 'You shall not commit murder,' while for Kierkegaard the Other is, in the first instance, the divine Other, and the first commandment is, 'You shall have no other gods before me.' What makes this difference especially interesting is Levinas' emphasis on the face to face character of our meeting with the human Other, while for Kierkegaard we most definitely do not encounter the divine Other face to face.

Despite the marked difference established above, Merold Westphal begins his article "Levinas, Kierkegaard, and the Theological Task," with a litany of similarities between Levinas and Kierkegaard. My paper will engage not only the imprecise moments in Westphal's comparison, but also an incompleteness in Levinas' own assessment of Kierkegaard. It will be shown that Westphal tends to downplay the holy, even religious, aspect of Levinas' ethics; and correlatively, Levinas ignores some of the more ethical moments in Kierkegaard's corpus. It may be that as a scholar of Kierkegaard, Westphal takes his cues from Levinas' own distinction between his ethical project and Kierkegaard's writings. Though, his article does not actually cite Levinas' words about Kierkegaard. He only engages the Emmanuel Levinas of Totality and Infinity. Thus, he misses Levinas' own sympathies with and critiques of Kierkegaard's contributions. He also neglects Levinas' exegetical texts, where the relation between his religion and his philosophy is most evident. This is, to my mind, a mistake as grave as Levinas' primarily engaging the Søren Kierkegaard of Fear and Trembling. Therefore, both Levinas' incomplete reading of Kierkegaard, and Westphal's insufficient reading of Levinas must be addressed. Only then can one appreciate these two thinkers' respective contributions (and occasionally resonant tendencies) for the 'theological task' and the ethical encounter.
To begin, I would agree with the following points of Wespthal's comparison: both seek to preserve alterity in its difference; both resist the totalizing tendencies of their philosophical predecessors; both suggest alterity's difference as "decentering"; both deny that knowledge is some sort of anamnesis-recollection; both employ a rhetoric that exposes paradox; and perhaps they both "link the ethical and the religious very tightly together and set them off as a region of self-transcending subjectivity thoroughly different from the violent objectivity of both speculation and politics." I would question, however, Westphal's assertion that they both consider the will of a subject countering my will. This language of will, especially as a characteristic of the subject, is generally alien to Levinas. For Levinas, the reason my self (and not simply my will) is put into question has little to do with the will of the other. It is the face of the other that intrudes. The face signifies in its auto-expression, "You shall not commit murder," and thus prompts me to say, like the prophets to their God, "Here I am!" This "Here I am" is an intentional reversal of Heidegger's Dasein as being-here. The prophet's exposure to alterity is not the enclosure of a being-in-the-world; the ethical subject is a being-for-the other. Though the face interrupts one's solitude in its solicitude, Levinas does not write of this face as a will:
Responsibility for the other, going against intentionality and the will which intentionality does not succeed in dissimulating, signifies not the disclosure of a given and its reception, but the exposure of me to the other, prior to every decision. There is a claim laid on the Same by the Other in the core of myself, the extreme tension of the command exercised by the Other in me over me, a traumatic hold of the other on the Same, which does not allow the Same time to await the Other.

Levinas wants to bend philosophical rhetoric toward this ethical relation; this will require thinking of the subject in the accusative case as "more passive still than any passivity." Given this rhetoric, not only the will but also Westphal's category distinction of subject-object is foreign to Levinas. Westphal writes of Levinas' Other as a willing subject, "rather than an object." And he thereby suggests a superficial connection between Levinas and Kierkegaard: they both conceive of alterity as a subject, not an object. However, this distinction disintegrates as Westphal himself calls Kierkegaard's other, God. God is no more a subject than an object of inquiry. Likewise, Levinas' Other is no more a subject than object; these categories are unhelpful to Levinas. If Levinas mentions the subject at all, it is to critique subjectivity itself as totalizing.
While it is true that Kierkegaard and Levinas are not concerned with a phenomenological investigation of God as totalized object, this is also because they are not Hegelian or Husserlian phenomenologists in the strict sense. Westphal is certainly correct about their departures from predecessors. As distinct as their predecessors are, so too the polemic of their projects. Kierkegaard strives to save the subject from being subsumed into the totality of society, of history, or of a Hegelian absolute. Westphal does draw a significant connection between Kierkegaard's critique of Hegel and Levinas's critique of Heidegger's Mitsein. But this point of comparison is poor, from Levinas' perspective. What Westphal sees as their resonance—resisting the fusion of the subject into "collective representation"—mirrors, in fact, Levinas' critique of Kierkegaard. For Levinas, Kierkegaard's presentation of Abraham in Fear and Trembling smacks of a mystical fusion, of a possession of the subject by the divine in a dangerous departure from ethics. Elsewhere, Levinas calls this sort of secret, mystical relation with God an unethical relation: "The Sacred that envelops and transports me is a form of violence." Levinas would disagree with Westphal's premise that "all theology should be mystical theology, a guide to the practice of spiritual formation." Spiritual formation, for Levinas, is in the ethical relation. And, concordantly, his God is only revealed in the ethical relation to the other. God is revealed in God's absence, in the trace. This trace is not a mystical sign. Levinas is emphatic:
The revealed God of our Judeo-Christian spirituality maintains all the infinity of his absence, which is in the personal 'order' itself. He shows himself only by his trace, as is said in Exodus 33. To go toward Him is not to follow this trace which is not a sign; it is to go toward the others who stand in the trace of illeity.

To be clear, this is not simple "atheism." Westphal cites Levinas on this point: it is not a superficial form of atheism; it is "prior to both the negation and the affirmation of the divine." And yet, he fails to account why, for Levinas, God is necessarily absent from phenomenality—or, put otherwise, why God ab-solutely is 'present' as language, ethical contact, and the 'religion' of the neighbor. Furthermore, the atheism Levinas describes in Totality and Infinity is in a sense ontological. To become an "I" the self separates from God; the I is not God, does not participate in God. This atheism need not dismay theologians as "godlessness"; it is the very condition for one's choice to "eventually [be] capable of adhering to it by belief." Nevertheless, Westphal continues to quote Levinas' atheism without its nuance, suggesting that ethics is prior to "monotheistic faith." On the contrary, Levinas' atheism is the withdrawal of God, a disincarnation, that permits monotheism to "surpass[s] and incorporat[e] atheism." If he incorporates a certain atheism in his ethics, it is because this atheism grants God transcendence; and this transcendence founds an unquenchable desire for the Other, necessitating ethical encounters with every other.
It is not that God is beyond revelation. For Levinas, "God must show His face" when just relations "reign on earth." Only when the mythical gods of "participation" have fled, can the God of justice be revealed. Levinas absolutely refutes the suggestion that his ethics are prior to monothesism, in this sense. His 'religion' of the ethical relation "is a long way from a warm and almost tangible communion with the Divine and from the desperate pride of the atheist. It is a complete and austere humanism, linked to a difficult adoration!" For Levinas, ethics is integrally holy; the declared absence of God is more pious, if not more authentic, than a calculation of sin or redemption. God's absence is the condition for a relation (without relation) to God and to the other. It would be therefore better to say that Levinas seeks another relation, freed from ideology and economics:
I'm looking for a relation in which my obligation, my awakening toward the other, my attachment to the other are not in any way an attachment or a form of generosity that brings reward…at the basis of the pure relation, of the generosity toward the other, there's a relation that one can call a relation of holiness. As if holiness were the supreme dignity of the act of the relationship with the other, what one calls love or respect of one's neighbor.

In this sense, Levinas is deeply connected to the prophetic tradition. One is reminded of Micah, "He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" Westphal's reading of Totality and Infinity, should have signaled as much; especially given that, in this philosophical work, Levinas places God's "absolute presence (that is, disengaged from every relation)" within the ethical relation. The paradox: the unconditioned God appears in the very concrete conditions of the "face of the Stranger, the widow, and the orphan." In the ethical, the spiritual and the material are never disengaged from one another, nor simply unified into a totality.
Thus, via the "royal road" of ethics, Levinas can claim exemption from the traditional distinction of theory and practice. This is not because his ethics is exempted, like Kierkegaard's religion, from the universal; rather, Levinas' ethics is exempt altogether from the distinction universal/particular, spiritual/material. Under the accusation of totalizing thought: abstract universals, the Hegelian Absolute, and the particular subject are suspect. And although the particular person and the universal claim can serve as violent orders, alterity—infinite and infinitesimal—can offer exteriority. Levinas may speak of the stateless, the stranger, the neighbor, the widow as sites for divine alterity, but even "our everyday actions of generosity or good will towards the other: even the smallest and most commonplace gestures…bear witness to the ethical." Levinas' God is thus thought "in terms of desire"—erupting in the disproportion, the asymmetry, the diachrony, of my relation to alterity. I will grant that Kierkegaard, like Levinas, considers the divine wholly Other. And Kierkegaard would agree that the "God of the Bible cannot be defined or proved by means of logical predictions or attributions."
However, how this wholly other communicates is where Levinas and Kierkegaard diverge. One knows Levinas' God through the Torah; and thus knowing God is "to know what must be done." Levinas' God is also made known in the "saying" of an ethical relation. If Westphal finds, as suggested in the opening quote, Levinas' ethical relation not explicitly theological enough, it is precisely because—in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling—the relation to God seems unethical. God is made known in the test: both of Abraham, and of God's promise. In this case, "to know what must be done," is to do the unthinkable: to put aside the Torah and follow an interior voice, a God in secret. If one were to only read Fear and Trembling, the absolute alterity is a God who teleologically suspends a certain ethics for Abraham.
In Kierkegaard's defense, it is only a certain ethics that is suspended, namely, the "social morality" of a banal bourgeoisie. Christendom has forgotten the radicality of faith, convinced as they are by Hegel's claim that faith should conform to Reason. That faith must submit to abstract reason, ethical or otherwise, disgusts Kierkegaard. Is not faith aligned with a particular kind of unreasonable truth—an incognito irreducible to one's categories, a persecuted truth? Thus, tor Kierkegaard, "there is no established order which can do without fear and trembling….And fear and trembling signifies that a God exists." Given Kierkegaard's link with the fear and trembling of the Order through God, we must note that "God's exist[ence]" is crucial for disruption. Kierkegaard perceives the relation to God as singular, even exempting the subject from the "worldly" construal of ethical practices. Levinas would agree that a divine relation to God (what he calls ethics) keeps the subject from being subsumed into "a universal order [that] unite[s] all rational beings, like ideas, in a kingdom of ends." However, to link God with an exemption from the ethical relation is to both violate human alterity and, therefore, God.
This already makes clear the difference (and similarity) of their projects. Both are concerned with awakening the totalizing order, making it tremble. Both speak against abstract reason as the basis for ethics. However, Kierkegaard's critique of Kantian ethics leads him to dismiss ethics as the domain of divine alterity. Levinas, critiques Kant's subject (and Kierkegaard's), forcing the subject into an ethics deeply religious, a religion thoroughly ethical. Kierkegaard awakens Christendom from Hegel and Kant; Levinas seeks to awaken the philosophical subject traditionally construed (rational agent)—if not also the philosophical project of ontology. They each have their totality to disrupt; and in this disruption, divine alterity is the infinite rupture, the leverage of exteriority. Even Levinas honors Kierkegaard, writing:
Kierkegaard opposed [Hegel's] claim by denying that the movement in which idealism grasped subjectivity was originally thinking, that is, he denied that it was that power of 'taking as theme' which totalizes experiences, shows them to be comparable, and consequently generalizable, forming System and Idea through their differences and oppositions. He denied that subjectivity came down to that power that simultaneously places all being on a part with the thinker and expresses the thinker in the beings he or she fashions in thinking. Thus, he denied that Being was the correlate of thought.

Given this summary, even praise, of Kierkegaard's contribution to philosophy, one cannot help but read Kierkegaard in Levinas' Totality and Infinity: "By virtue of the dimension of interiority each being declines the concept and withstands totalization—a refusal necessary for the idea of Infinity." Kierkegaard's resistance to totality is the first step in ethically opening toward alterity. Even Kierkegaard's opening toward "truth persecuted" exposes the "illusion[s] of totality." As opposed to comprehensive knowledge, Kierkegaard fixates on the individual's belief. For Levinas, this means that the particular 'truth' of belief requires one to suffer the "manifestation of the divine: simultaneity of All and Nothingness, Relation to a Person both present and absent—to a humiliated God who suffers, dies and leaves those whom he saves in despair. A certainty that coexists with an absolute uncertainty…" Levinas praises this refusal of synthesis. It is, after all, the condition for his own subject's "going forth from the self."
However, this resistance to synthesis becomes "a wound, in a state of endless bleeding." Levinas suggests that Kierkegaard's suffering too quickly transmutes a relation to the infinite into an "inner drama." He fears that Kierkegaard's inner drama devolves into pathos, or even a "desire for salvation," that does not sufficiently renounce the ego. Despite his initial homage to Kierkegaard, as a phenomenologist of "great rigor," Levinas continues his suspicion on the matter of subjectivity. If the subject is not founded in the totality of thought or its adequation to Being, what is subjectivity for Kierkegaard? Levinas immediately turns to Fear and Trembling, where the singularity of the subject derives from a secret that scandalizes. Kierkegaard's exteriority from the totality, in Levinas' reading, is thus too terribly tied to a violent interiority. Here, Levinas cannot go with Kierkegaard. He senses that Kierkegaard is stuck in the very subjectivity that Totality and Infinity seeks to renounce. Is there much difference between Kierkegaard's "subjectivity as a tensing on oneself" and the self-sameness of "I am I?" Levinas responds, no: "The identification of A as A is the anxiety of A for A."
It is one thing to resist the totality of one's context (over-reaching objectivity, society, assimilation to the absolute) through inwardness; but to seal this inwardness with a secret relation to God—beyond ethical relations to human others—this is as dangerous to Levinas as Nietzschean "amoralism." According to Levinas, Kierkegaard's persecuted truth makes for a wounded subject, too obsessed with his wounds to enter into an ethical relation. The strange result is that Kierkegaard's philosophy is not only a violent lashing out against totality, it is also the expression of a violence interiorized. Levinas distrusts Kierkegaard's solitude, especially if linked with Abraham's exemption from the ethical. Kierkegaard's exteriority (exemption of the subject from the totality) is not exterior enough. Levinas diagnoses, "If the relation to exteriority cannot form a totality whose parts can be compared and generalized, it is not because the I keeps its secret within the system, but because the exteriority in which human beings show us their faces shatters the totality." Thus, Levinas believes his project better equips the subject for responsibility; subjectivity is responsibility to the other, and not simply freedom to be other.
In remaining suspicious of Kierkegaard's subjectivity, Levinas questions Kierkegaard's God. Levinas' God, as already suggested, "renounces all aids to manifestation [as theophany], and appeals instead to the full maturity of the responsible man." He critiques Kierkegaard's suggestion that God would ask anyone to be a murderer—that the only matter separating Kierkegaard's Abraham from Cain is God's voice telling Abraham to sacrifice his son. Of course, Kierkegaard makes clear, "In the moment he is about to sacrifice Isaac, the ethical expression for what he is doing is: he hates Isaac. But if he actually hates Isaac, he can rest assured that God does not demand this of him, for Cain and Abraham are not identical." Kierkegaard is not calling Abraham's sacrifice a murder. Levinas' counters that God is not the voice that called for an unethical sacrifice, but rather, the voice that interrupted the sacrifice. God is the one who summons Abraham "back to the ethical order," or even, the God in dialogue with Abraham over Sodom and Gomorrah.
Levinas insists that the disruption of the divine Other is not one of "fear and trembling," but rather an inducement to the "high thoughts" of justice. When Levinas writes of God, "His greatness does not provoke fear and trembling," he is clearly rejecting a mystical or affective experience of God as the requisite for religion, let alone ethics. In this sense, he understands "fear and trembling" as if it were Rudolf Otto's mystical mysterium tremendum—where the divine encounter is mingled with the demonic. Apart from the phrase as a reference to Kierkegaard, or a dismissal of Otto, Levinas does not use it in the context of Psalm 2. It may be that the God of Psalm 2, ready to smite the peoples who do not "with fear, with trembling kiss his feet," proves too violent for Levinas' transcendent God. A transcendent divinity is neither near enough to save, nor near enough to smite. Levinas' God depends on our non-violent, ethical relations for an appearance; it is no surprise that Levinas wants to be rid of the mystical and mythical God. However, for Levinas, this is not accomplished in an agnostic dismissal. He simply would not claim these as the site of God's appearing; this appearing is left to justice.
If I stress Levinas' God, in contrast to his own assessment of Kierkegaard's God, it is not without acknowledging, again, that they write in very different contexts. Levinas' God must necessarily be akin to Yossel son of Yossel's God. The latter comes to Levinas in a short story, accounting for the last hours of the Warsaw Ghetto resistance. Yossel has witnessed the horrors, including the loss of his own children. Thus, neither the God who might irrationally justify child sacrifice, nor the God who interrupts violence, appears. Levinas, with Yossel, is left with the question, "What can this suffering of the innocents mean? Is it not proof of a world without God, where only man measures Good and Evil? The simplest and most common answer would be atheism." However this perfectly sane response is not what Levinas finds in Yossel. Instead, "The adult's God is revealed through the void of the child's heaven." In facing the emptiness of the sky, Yossel is more than ever convicted of God's presence—not as Hegel's Absolute, or Kierkegaard's secret, but in the understanding that, "The path that leads to the one God must be walked in part without God." Thus the disincarnation of God, 'manifesting' (though absent from strict phenomenality) in the face of the human other, is the very condition for an ethical relation. One relates to God without relating to God directly. Alterity requires this indirection not because alterity is allergic, but because it is the face of the other that "opens up to the beyond." Religion is this "relation without relation," the ethical encounter of alterity. It cannot at all resemble the "emotional communion that takes place within the love of a God incarnate." This is because, for Levinas, incarnation makes God dangerously proximate, tangible, like an idol: obstructing the divine absence that inspires vigilance (and desire) for alterity. Levinas' God is "the persecuted God of the prophets who is always in relation with man, and whose difference from man is never indifference." Levinas' alterity neither exempts God nor humanity from ethics. However, Levinas might claim that one's indifference toward a neighbor closes the channels for God's difference, and perhaps also, God's mediated justice.
Westphal does emphasize, rightly so, that Kierkegaard's God can also be this "Deus absconditus"—insfoar as the God-Man remains incognito. Levinas appreciates this aspect as well, if incognito means an alterity unmanifest. For this reason, Levinas points to the Christ of Matthew 25:31-46, sifting the sheep from the goats based on an ethical relation to alterity. However, perhaps Levinas is right to suspect the incognito God-Man of Practice in Christianity. Here the incognito, like Kierkegaard's God in Fear and Trembling, is still tied to a God in secret who tests the subject. This test occurs in the context of the claim that, "Many are called, few are chosen." Life is an exam that decides one's election. For Levinas, this election is not Kierkegaardian salvation based on tests of belief (an obsession of the ego), but rather responsibility (the obsession for the other). Perhaps Levinas distrusts the practice of testing, based simply on the fact that neither testing (nor being tested) prepared Kierkegaard for relation to human others. Certainly Kierkegaard's behavior toward Regine should not serve as an ethics. Yes, Kierkegaard offers an access to persecuted truth (which breaks totalities), via the persecution of the subject. Yet, Levinas claims that we must not romanticize this persecution, this suffering, but rather, see this persecuted other (the "visible invisibility" of God's trace) and be responsible. As responsible, the subject will suffer in self-sacrifice for the other. However, this renunciation is not one of cruelty. Whereas, in Kierkegaard's own biography and writings, there is an undeniable link between responsibility to God and "cruel[ty] to the beloved."
I have given a certain priority to Levinas, perhaps out of respect for how his biography informed his ethical project. I will conclude, however, claiming that Levinas does not do justice to Kierkegaard. It has been suggested, by Derrida, that in Levinas' terms, to appreciate a thinker one must be ungrateful for him. Perhaps I will be guilty of such ingratitude. I believe I have done enough to accentuate their differences, and would like to draw Levinas (and his readers) into their shared contribution. Westphal's distinction of whether one prefers the neighbor ahead of the God seems inadequate for both Levinas and Kierkegaard. Surely Kierkegaard gives priority to God as absolute, even over Kantian ethics. But had Levinas read Kierkegaard's piece, Works of Love, he would have recognized this absolute in human relations. He would have found a Kierkegaardian love resonant with his own—resisting the relation of two egos, opening instead to the illeity of the third in justice. He would have discovered a person whose inwardness is deeply, reflexively, engaged in an ethics of alterity. And, he would have perhaps credited Kierkegaard with his own aneconomic thrust. Kierkegaard, too, drives love—like Levinas' ethics—away from the initiative of the subject's will, impulse, intellect, feeling, and calculation. Thus love, for any serious reader of Kierkegaard—be it Derrida, Heidegger, and Levinas—demands a critique of pure presence, temporal and spatial.
Kierkegaard suggests that his inwardness is not synchronism or egoism, but the interior dwelling of God's love which "makes every relationship to other human beings into a God-relationship." He even writes these words within the horizon of loving the dead [God], because the absence of the other requires the utmost love. The absence of a certain God, in Levinas' ethics, is the condition for a proximity to God in responsibility for the human other. The absence of a certain beloved, in Kierkegaard's love, is the condition for testing love's eternal quality; this love is not anethical, but the condition for self-sacrifice. The question then becomes whether one must be loved by or love the Divine other in order to practice this sacrifice; or whether, indeed, the ethical demand of the human other is absolute—without condition of a loving God, an incarnate God, or even an incognito whose trace marks the face of the other. Kierkegaard and Levinas have led us to a particular Ab-solute, who manifests not simply as the knife poised over Isaac, but as the interruption of every totality—even, ultimately, the anxious self. For Kierkegaard, like Levinas, resolves:
In a certain sense [the lover's] life is completely squandered on existence, on the existence of others; without wishing to waste any time or any power on elevating himself, on being somebody, in self-sacrifice he is willing to perish, that is, he is complete and wholly transformed into being simply an active power in the hand of God.

Levinas and Kierkegaard have perhaps most prepared us for this squandering, while also noting its dangerous implications for subjectivity, the other, and even God's name. If Levinas questions the vulnerability of the subject under the terror of Kierkegaard's God, it is perhaps not without sensing that his postulated subject is under the very same threat of a terrorizing other. The difference is that Levinas cannot link God with the unreasoning, unethical authority; to do so would be to see in God a demonic alterity. Levinas would rather have an absent God than Abraham's Absolute (as Kierkegaard poses it). However, even Kierkegaard cannot imagine Abraham's God as loveless. It may be that their shared work of developing sacrifice within an aneconomic relation can join in this gift of love's absolute value; a love of infinite debt to love.




Merold Westphal, "Levinas, Kierkegaard, and the Theological Task," Modern Theology 8:3 (July 1992), 246.
Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).
Emmanuel Levinas, "Kierkegaard: Existence and Ethics," "A Propos: Kierkegaard vivant," Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 66-79. Also, a few throwaway references occur in Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Séan Hand (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1990), 6, 118, 144, 184. Even if Westphal were to ignore these texts—as they are more exegetical than strictly philosophical—he still could make note, as I will, of the references to Kierkegaard in Emmanuel Levinas, "Phenomenon and Enigma," Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 61-73. Also, there is a reference to Kierkegaard's God-man in the essay titled, "A Man-God?" Entre Nous: Thinking of the Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University, 1998), 53-60. Kierkegaard's God-man paradox can be found in Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). Levinas' often makes remarks against Kierkegaard in light of this text.
Westphal's use of this term seems problematic. He links it with "self-transcendence" (Merold Westphal, "Levinas, Kierkegaard, and the Theological Task," 244). Levinas would not speak of a self-transcendent subject, insofar as this emphasis might make the subject a transcendental ego, an exception to the ethical demand posed by the other. Kierkegaard's Abraham certainly transcends his own subjectivity in a sense; but he also transcends the ethical order and therefore becomes more singular (Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 55).
Though, even this point is a bit muddy as Levinas writes, with either mourning or insightful reporting (one can hardly tell), "It is as if Plato's anamnesis, which for centuries maintained the unity of representation, were becoming amnesia—as if disorder did not necessarily re-establish a different order." On one level, Levinas would resist orders as totalizing, and even a certain 'unity' of representation; but in this context, the result of amnesia seems just as undesirable. (Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, 4). I suggest reading this in context of the foreword (Ibid., 3-6).
Merold Westphal, "Levinas, Kierkegaard, and the Theological Task," 241-242.
"…that it is in the subject encountered as a will that challenges the autonomy of my own will that I encounter the wholly other." (Ibid., 241).
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 216.
Emmanuel Levinas, "God and Philosophy," Collected Philosophical Papers, 168, 170.
Emmanuel Levinas qtd. in Jacques Derrida, "At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am," Re-Reading Levinas (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 17.
Emmanuel Levinas, "God and Philosophy," Collected Philosophical Papers, 165.
Levinas would prefer desire over the terminology of will—which still rings of egoism. (Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 236.)
"Both affirm that the wholly other has the character of subject rather than object…" (Merold Westphal, "Levinas, Kierkegaard, and the Theological Task, 241.)
This is a major contribution of his work. However, one often wonders if the link of subjectivity with sameness isn't perhaps unnuanced. Is not the self an other? Is it totalizing to have sympathy or compassion for the other? Paul Ricoeur Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Ibid., 242.
Emmanuel Levinas, "A Religion for Adults," Difficult Freedom, 14.
Merold Westphal, "Levinas, Kierkegaard, and the Theological Task," 243.
Emmauel Levinas, "Meaning and Sense," Collected Philsophical Papers, 107.
Merold Westphal, "Levinas, Kierkegaard, and the Theological Task," 247.
(Ibid., 247). He is quoting from Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 58.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 58.
(Merold Westphal, "Levinas, Kierkegarard, and the Theological Task," 247). He inadequately exegetes this statement from Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 77.
Emmanuel Levinas, "A Religion for Adults," Difficult Freedom, 16.
Westphal calls this atheism of the ethical encounter "antithetical to mythological religion." This much is true insofar as mythology—say, Kierkegaard's interpretation of Abraham and Isaac—claims to surpass the ethical. But when Westphal then claims that this atheism is "antecedent to monotheistic religion," he does so without acknowledging the trace-like structure of Levinas' monotheistic God, and God's priority as the first saying which makes possible the ethical relation. (Merold Westphal, "Levinas, Kierkegaard, and the Theological Task," 247.) This comes back to the difficulty of his distinction that for Levinas, the other is "in the first place" the human other. "First" and "place" are both complicated by Levinas philosophy. For example, see Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987). Westphal does say that "first' doesn't mean temporal primacy, but even his suggestion that, the "human Other is logically prior" imposes "logic" on Levinas (Ibid., 248).
Emmanuel Levinas, "Loving the Torah More Than God," Difficult Freedom, 145.
"How can separate beings be maintained, and not sink into participation, against which the philosophy of the same will have the immortal merit to have protested?" Emmanuel Levinas, "Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity," Collected Philosophical Papers, 54. Thus, participation infects both totalizing philosophy and mystical theology.
Ibid., 145.
Emmanuel Levinas, Conversations with Emmanuel Levinas: 1983-1994, trans. Gary D. Mole (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2010), 22.
NRSV, Micah 6:8. One could also suggest the writer of James in the New Testament. "Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress…" (NRSV, James 1:27).
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 78
Ibid., 78.
Ibid., 29.
Emmanuel Levinas, "Emmanuel Levinas: Ethics of the Infinite," Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers, ed. Richard Kearney (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 83.
Ibid., 82.
Emmanuel Levinas, "A Religion for Adults," Difficult Freedom, 17.
Emmanuel Levinas, "Language and Proximity," Collected Philosophical Papers, 125-6.
Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). Certainly Jacques Derrida, in his homage to both Levinas' ethics and Kierkegaard's ethical suspension stresses this distinction to its upsetting result. One is left viewing God as both demonic and divine, and thus the 'ethics' resulting from Kierkegaard's is based on a religion of secrets. This troubles Levinas insofar as justice will always be the priority, even above God's secret communication to the soul. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago, University of Chicago, 2008). If one were to stress only Totality and Infinity, alterity would be that of the human face. Though even this is complicated by Levinas' own references to God in Totaltiy and Infinity.
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 54-67.
Ibid., 55.
This is alluded to in the footnote, describing the "social morality" Kierkegaard stands against (Ibid., 346).
Levinas respects these categories. Emmanuel Levinas, "Kierkegaard: Existence and Ethics," Proper Names, 69.
Qtd., in Merold Westphal, "Levinas, Kierkegaard and the Theological Task," 242.
Emmanuel Levinas, "Meaning and Sense," Collected Philosophical Papers, 116.
Derrida in fact uses this Kierkegaardian rhetoric of trembling to describe Levinas' thought: "It is at this level that the thought of Emmanuel Levinas can make us tremble. At the heart of the desert, in the growing wasteland, this thought, which fundamentally no longer seeks to be a thought of Being and phenomenality, makes us dream of an inconceivable process of dismantling and dispossession." Jacques Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics," Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 82.
Against Hegel especially (Merold Westphal, "Levinas, Kierkegaard, and the Theological Task," 245).
Emmanuel Levinas, "Kierkegaard: Existence and Ethics," Proper Names, 66-67.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 57.
Emmanuel Levinas, "Kierkegaard: Existence and Ethics," Proper Names, 69.
Ibid., 69. This encounter sounds perhaps more like Heidegger's descriptions of the gods present and absent; the poet-believer certain and doubtful of the encounter. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin's Hymns "Germania" and "The Rhine," trans. William McNeill and Julia Ireland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming) .
Emmanuel Levinas, "Kierkegaard: Existence and Ethics," Proper Names, 70.
Ibid., 70.
Ibid., 70.
Ibid., 71.
At least, on the matter of a relation to truth crucified. (Ibid., 70.)
Ibid., 67.
Ibid., 69.
Ibid., 72.
Levinas is not free from the charges of a "harshness and aggressivity in thought"—his accusation of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Levinas' subject is a "hostage" to the other (Emmanuel Levinas, "Language and Proximity," Collected Philosophical Papers, 123-4.) The subject is also the "haemophiliac's haemorrhage," emptying itself as it is "hunted down even in one's own home." (Qtd. in John Llewelyn, "Levinas, Derrida and Others Vis-à-vis," The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, ed. Robert Bernasconi (New York, Routledge, 2003), 144.
Emmanuel Levinas, "Kierkegaard: Existence and Ethics," Proper Names, 73.
Emmanuel Levinas, "Loving the Torah More Than God," Difficult Freedom, 143
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 74.
Emmanuel Levinas, "Kierkegaard: Existence and Ethics," Proper Names, 74.
Emmanuel Levinas, "Loving the Torah More Than God," Difficult Freedom, 145.
Ibid., 145.
NRSV, Psalm 2:11-12.
An easy exegesis of disposal is precisely why Levinas condemns Simone Weil's scriptural interpretations in "Simone Weil against the Bible," Difficult Freedom, 133-141.
Granted, Levinas offers a strangely pragmatic (if nor incorrect) corrective to Simone Weil, repulsed as she was by the violence of a wrathful God. "The harsh law of the Old Testament is perhaps not a doctrine based on kindness, but what does this matter, if it is a school of kindness?" (Ibid., 138.)
Emmanuel Levinas, "Loving the Torah more than God," Difficult Freedom, 143.
Ibid., 143.
Ibid., 143.
Kierkegaard would agree, "he wants to be incognito; he presumably wants to be recognized, but not directly." (Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 129.)
Emmanuel Levinas, "A Religion for Adults," Difficult Freedom, 18.
Emmauel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 80.
Emmanuel Levinas, "Loving the Torah More Than God," Difficult Freedom, 144.
Emmanuel Levinas, "Emmanuel Levinas: Ethics of the Infinite," Debates in Continental Philosophy, 82.
Given this explication of Levinas, I am suspicious that liberation theology would expose the "major difference between [Levinas and Kierkegaard]." I think it is correct, however, for Levinas to question whether Kierkegaard could ever overcome the oppression of his own anxieties, even his own oppressive need for salvation.
Levinas praises, though not without question, the incognito of Kierkegaard in "A Man-God?," Entre Nous, 56-57.
The incognito informs Levinas' phenomenon. Emmanuel Levinas, "Phenomenon and Enigma," Collected Philosophical Papers, 72.
Levinas mentions this passage when asked, "Concretely, how is this responsibility for the other translated?" Emmanuel Levinas "Is It Righteous to Be?" Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jill Robbins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 52.
Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 182-183.
Ibid., 181.
Emmanuel Levinas, "Kierkegaard: Existence and Ethics," Proper Names, 73.
Emmanuel Levinas, "Language and Proximity," Collected Philosophical Papers, 121.
Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christanity, 137.
(As if gratitude for a shared vision would reduce a gift to economic exchange, or totality) Jacques Derrida, "At This Very Moment In This Work Here I Am," Re-Reading Levinas, 14, 44-6.
If Westphal began with a litany, I will end with one, as a prompt for further theological reflection.
Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 66-67.
"Consequently, in order to be able to praise love, there is need for inward self-denial and outward sacrificial disinterestedness." (Ibid., 343.) In the context of love, inwardness cannot be separated from exteriority, "simultaneously as [love] goes beyond itself (in an outward direction), it is in itself (in an inward direction)…and this inward turning and this going beyond are simultaneously one and the same." (Ibid., 261.)
"One can therefore say that this is the essential characteristic of love: that the lover by giving infinitely comes into—infinite debt. (Ibid., 172.)
Ibid., 143.
"But what is self-renunciation? It is precisely to give up the present moment and the immediate." (Ibid., 339).
Ibid., 345.
Ibid., 317-329.
I acknowledge that Levinas opposes a certain love. But I remain open to understanding what might, for Levinas, be a rigorously ethical love—if even under the name of eros.