Agape and Hesed-Ahava. David L. Goicoechea
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The monks nourished their agape artistically with music,
scientifically with the sciences, mathematically with intuitive reason,
and came to a practical wisdom that revealed their celibacy
as a sublimated eros that facilitated a new affection and friendship.
They nourished us in all of that historically, for we had art
and music appreciation courses in which we came to know
the history of art and music and we learned the history of ideas.
We studied the Hebrew Bible in the nine stages of its history.
All the fathers had majored in philosophy before they
studied four years of theology and then studied their specialties.
Just at the time that I went to the seminary around 1950
Scripture study went through a revolutionary change in the Catholic
world, for the higher biblical criticism was making an impact.
Father Mathias was back from Rome and teaching us after getting
his Doctorate of Sacred Scripture and William Foxwell Albright’s
“From Stone Age to Christianity” was being read by Catholics.
We saw how the Law and the prophets with their loves of
Ahava and hesed prepared the way for the new agape of Jesus.
We were beginning to understand the history of the various
spiritualities, from the Benedictine to the Franciscan and
Dominican to the Jesuit and the Carmelite; we started
to understand the history of modernity, from Luther and
Descartes to Calvin and Hobbes to Henry VIII and Locke
to Spinoza and Leibniz to Berkeley, Adam Smith,
Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Marx; and all of this at bottom was
a history of agape, which gave us confidence even as high
school students that all things work together unto the good.
The monks, who knew this history so well because much of it
was their own Benedictine history, gave us such a positive
attitude that we could successfully mourn any loss that came our way.
II. With Levinas and Derrida
II,1 Levinas’s Ethics as First Philosophy
II,1.1 Levinas Grew up with the Jewish Religious Ethics
Emmanuel Levinas tells us that the Hebrew Bible directed his
thinking from the time of his earliest childhood in Lithuania.
He was born in 1905, and entered the University of Strasbourg in 1923.
Besides studying philosophy and learning its history in the West and
besides learning the contemporary philosophy of Heidegger and Husserl,
he made a study of Talmudic sources under the guidance of a teacher
who communicated the traditional Jewish mode of exegesis.
Just as Maimonides came forth with a Jewish version of Aristotelian
philosophy in the thirteenth century and just as Spinoza gave us his
Jewish version of ethics in modern times, so Derrida and Levinas
give us their Jewish version of the postmodern approach to ethics.
From his perspective of Jewish responsibility Levinas reworked
the whole history of Western philosophy and Totality and Infinity,
which he published in 1961, gives the full view of the early Levinas.
My world is a totality and I try to control every aspect of it.
I might even explain it to myself and others with a philosophical theory
that gives an account of its beginning, its process, and its purpose.
Each person‘s religious worldview could let him or her order
everything in a totality that again makes sense of all the parts.
But, according to Levinas, the face of the other can call me out of
my totality into an infinity of responsibility of care for others.
Levinas entitles the first section of Totality and Infinity with
a parallel when he calls it “The Same and the Other” and it is the face
of the other than can breach my totality and open me to transcendence.
Levinas sees ethics in the West as a self-realization ethics in which
I will be virtuous in order than I might be happy but he sees Judaism
as having an ethics that looks out for the good of the other and especially
for the needs of widows, orphans, and aliens who look to me for help.
The Hellenic philosopher loves wisdom to understand the totality
and the Hebraic sage is given wisdom’s love when he welcomes infinity.
II,1.2 Philosophy’s Love of Wisdom and the Wisdom of Love
In his book Levinas and the Wisdom of Love Corey Beals quotes
Levinas’s Otherwise than Being (p. 161):
Philosophy is the wisdom of love
at the service of love.
This formula of the wisdom of love as distinct from the love
of wisdom may distinguish Hebraic ethics from Hellenic
philosophy and get to the main point of Levinas’s philosophy of
ethics in which he wants to show how ethics is beyond philosophy.
On page 13 Beals quotes Derrida who, after reading Totality and Infinity,
said that it “proceeds with the infinite insistence of waves on a beach.”
Beals says that this means that Derrida sees Levinas as just
insistently repeating the same point and Richard Bernstein
takes up the metaphor and agrees that Levinas is always repetitious.
However in trying to be clear about Jewish postmodernism we
will here explore the ideas that once Derrida criticized Totality
and Infinity Levinas took it to heart and moved on to the new
position of Otherwise than Being, which stresses the wisdom of love.
As we examine the repetitious points of Totality and Infinity
we will prepare ourselves to see why and how Derrida criticized
the very relation of totality as logically exclusive of infinity.
In Totality and Infinity Levinas’s main point is that Jewish ethics
is based upon a belief in a bond of responsibility between all
members of the family of man and I should be responsible
to the face of others especially widows, orphans, and aliens.
The look of need on their face calls me to an infinite responsibility.
However, Derrida shows how Levinas is working with a logic of
exclusive opposites