Agape and Hesed-Ahava. David L. Goicoechea
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the divine madness of Plato’s sublimated eros.
II,1.6 And an Infinity beyond Descartes’ Infinite
Levinas treats Plato and Descartes together as he shows how
they each in different ways had a transcendent infinity
in their metaphysics and this was felt in Plato’s Phaedrus.
On page 49 Levinas writes:
Against a thought that proceeds from him
who “has his own head to himself,”
he affirms the value of the delirium
that comes from God, “winged thought.”
This enthusiasm and divine madness is thought in its highest
sense and is a kind of ecstatic possession by the divine Other.
Plato discovered something akin to Levinas’s infinity that calls
me and teaches me of the other when I behold the face of the other.
Levinas shows how Plato and Descartes are not thinking of
an object but are in touch with the transcendent, the other.
However, the transcendence that is the point of Levinas’s book
does not empower the I by sublimating the power of vulgar passion
to become the energy of noble passion and its new creativity.
Rather, the face of the other, as Levinas writes on page 50,
lets the desire proper to the gaze
turn into a generosity incapable
of approaching the other with empty hands.
This has to do with the Jewish loves of hesed and ahava
which are called to care for widows, orphans, and aliens and
which will even let the Jewish people become a suffering servant.
As Descartes considered what it was that let him be certain
when he was able to say, “I think, therefore, I am,” he saw
that his criterion had to be an idea of perfection within his mind
that only a perfect being could cause.
That standard that let him know when an idea was certain
or not was the idea of the infinite or the perfect beyond limits.
But again this is not the infinite transcendence of the needy other.
II,1.7 And a Face beyond Heidegger’s Ontology
Levinas sees his ethics as totally opposed by Heidegger’s ontology.
On page 46 Levinas writes:
A philosophy of power, ontology is,
as first philosophy which does not
Call into question the same,
a philosophy of injustice.
Aristotle really emphasized an ethics of self-realization and did
not emphasize my self-sacrifice to love and serve the needy other.
Heidegger is like that with his ontological ethics of authenticity.
I can be authentic if my life is a connected whole throughout my time.
If I see that every decision makes me guilty because in choosing
for something I must choose against something else then I can go back
to my first decision and live it in my guilt, just as I can see
that anxiety is being threatened by the indefinite so that if I
anticipate my death in anxiety my ecstatic time can be authentic.
With anticipatory resoluteness as a being-unto-guilt and a
being-unto-death I can realize myself as an authentic Dasein.
Levinas sees this ontology as a first ethic as being a philosophy
of power in which I empower myself by integrating my life.
But this only builds up the ego and does not call it into question
as does the look of the other for Levinas. And consequently Levinas
sees the whole project of Being and Time as a philosophy of injustice.
Heidegger’s philosophy is still part of modernity in standing alone
before Being as the powerful, authentic individual looking
down on the inauthentic.
In an article by William Richardson in Adriaan Peperzak’s book
Ethics as First Philosophy (p. 123) we get a good picture of how
Levinas thought of Heidegger as even working with the Nazis.
Richardson quotes Levinas:
In 1943, my parents were in one concentration camp
and I was in another.
He implied that Heidegger had something to do with that injustice.
II,1.8 And a Responsibility Beyond Kierkegaard’s Subjectivity
Levinas mentions Kierkegaard only twice in Totality and Infinity.
On page 40 he writes:
It is not I who resist the system
as Kierkegaard thought; it is the other.
On page 305 he writes:
The I is conserved then in goodness
without its resistance to system
manifesting itself as the egoist cry
of the subjectivity still concerned for
happiness or salvation, as in Kierkegaard.
In Proper Names Levinas explains this more fully with two
articles on Kierkegaard and on page 76 he writes:
[W]hat disturbs me in Kierkegaard
may be reduced to two points: . . .
he bequeathed to the history of philosophy
an exhibitionist, immodest subjectivity . . .
The second point. It is Kierkegaard’s violence
that shocks me . . . That harshness
of Kierkegaard emerges at the exact moment
when he “transcends ethics.”
When Kierkegaard leaps from the ethical stage on life’s way to the
religious stage of absolutely relating to the absolute Levinas points
out the violence that is done by paying attention totally to God and
not being concerned with other human beings in our world here.
As Kierkegaard leaps into the religious he leaves behind the ethical,
but then for Kierkegaard there is the second movement of the leap
by which the knight of faith in Fear and Trembling gets Isaac back
a second time and returns to the ethical and loves the neighbor.
Levinas seems to take literally with nothing further in it that
“unless you hate your father, mother, wife, child and even
yourself, you cannot be my disciple.” So Kierkegaard is violent.
II,1.9 And beyond Nietzsche’s Philosophizing with a Hammer
Levinas