Yesterday, while sitting in the parent area of the kids’ weekly trampoline and tumbling class I read pgs. 87-92 after deciding to skip over the question of “is ‘beyond Being’ a platonic concept?” and is it a baptizable one, even though I had attempted to tackle it in my previous post on the subject but erased what I’d written. I can’t get it out of my head though. We believe God’s essence is Other than ours. But we are created in His image. So are we a form of a higher reality? I know one way Orthodox differ from Platonic thought is to say that we will not someday be absorbed into God’s essence. That we will forever not be able to experience it. We become deified in Christ’s humanity, not His divinity. But still our humanity is in God’s image, so that almost sounds Platonic. And Genesis says that there was light before there was the sun, so that sounds sort of Platonic formish. I think Platonists would say that natural light represents a higher form of light. That natural light is a metaphor. We wouldn’t say that, so in that way the Platonic metaphor that is creation, is gnostic. We believe in Incarnated creation (though this would be fully realized in the eschaton, which at times transcends time, as the telos of creation) which fuses uncreated and natural light together, yet without confusion. There. All sorted out. Right?

Derrida says Levinas uses Heidegger’s science-ranks-after-perception against Husserl’s opposite point of view. Yet he also rejects Heidegger’s dogmatic, totalinarian, dominating definition of the other by this method, which seeks side by side, though penetrating solidarity “with” the other. But he agrees with Heidegger’s assimilation of non-refuted historical tradition in viewing others. So he’s not anti-knowing of others.

However it is also a question of inaugurating, in a way that is to be new, quite new, a metaphysics of radical separation and exteriority. One anticipates that this metaphysics will have some difficulty finding its language in the medium of a traditional logos entirely governed by the structure “inside-outside,” “interior-exterior.” (p. 88)

Beneath solidarity, beneath companionship, before Mitsein [being with], which would be only a derivative and modified form of its originary relation with the other, Levinas already aims for the face to face, the encounter with the face… without communion. (p.90) 

And thus without explanation. So instead of taken for granted definitional solidarity, there is an isolated, unthinking observance of the other’s face. “A community of non-presence, and therfore of non-phenomenality. Not a community without light, not a blindfolded synagogue, but a community anterior to Platonic light. A light before neutral light, before the truth which arrives as a third party, the truth “which we look toward together,” the judgmental arbitrator’s truth. Only the other, the totally other, can be manifested as what it is before the shared truth, whithin a certain nonmanifestation and a certain [non-dogmatic] absence.” (p.91)

This is not the end of the essay, so I’m not sure where he’s going with this absence, and non-communal solitude in the presence of the illumined other. The main reason I became Orthodox is because for the first time I experienced and believed the teaching of the Communion of the Saints in the Body of Christ. Yet, I still like the non-assuming stance of Derrida’s. There is still more to the Other, be they other people, God, or the rest of creation than meets the eye. I also still balk at the idea of being a possession of someone else’s. Being controlled by another against one’s will is oppressive and eventually intolerable to me. Love is a whole nother ballgame. It is not possessive or oppressive or controlling. Individuality is not annihilated. So in that way, I think Derrida’s right. It takes a Saint to know and perfectly commune the Other. All the rest of us who aren’t saints will be off in our assessments and judge people, ourselves, creation, and God wrongly. We need to stay open to this idea. To me this goes along with Father Stephen’s quote from the Philokalia, edited by Father Hopko:

Because of our conceit and our failure constantly to have recourse to God, we should cast ourselves down before Him, asking that His will should be done in all things and saying to every thought that comes to us:  I do not know who you are; God knows if you are good or not; for I have thrown myself, as I shall continue to throw myself, into His hands, and He looks after me.  (1Pet 5.7)

Violence and Metaphysics an Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas by Jacques Derrida in Writing and Difference (pt 2)

Derrida begins by pronouncing the death of the Greek philosophical tradition in it’s supposed function of knowing.

That philosophy died yesterday, since Hegel or Marx, Nietzsche, or Heidegger – and philosophy should still wander toward the meaning of its death. (p. 79)

… if something is still to transpire within the tradition by which philosophers always know themselves to be overtaken, then the tradition’s origin will have to be summoned forth and adhered to as rigorously as possible? Which is not to stammer and huddle lazily in the depths of childhood, but precisely the opposite. (p. 81)

That Plato for Husserl, was the founder of a reason and a philosophical task whose telos was still sleeping in the shadows; or that for Heidegger, on the contrary, Plato marks the moment at which the thought of Being forgets itself and is determined as philosophy – this difference is decisive only at the culmination of a common root which is Greek. The difference is fraternal in its posterity, entirely submitted to the same domination. Domination of the same too, which will disappear neither in phenomenology nor in “ontology.” (p. 81)

He seems to think that introducing Levinas’ Jewish experientialism into Greek philosophical language will solve the problem. Again to deconstruct from within.

… this thought summons us to a dislocation of the Greek logos, to a dislocation of our identity, and perhaps of identity in general, and to move toward what is no longer a source or a site …, but toward an exhalation, toward a prophetic speech already emitted not only nearer to the source than Plato or the pre-Socratics, but inside the Greek origin, close to the other of the Greek (but will the other of the Greek be the non-Greek? Above all, can it be named the non-Greek? An our question comes closer.) A thought for which the entirety of the Greek logos has already erupted …, seeks to liberate itself from the Greek domination of the Same and the One (other names for the light of Being and of the phenomenon) as if from oppression itself – an oppression certainly comparable to none other in the world, an ontological or transcendental oppression, but also the origin or alibi of all oppression in the world. A thought, finally, which seeks to liberate itself from a philosophy fascinated by the “visage of being that shows itself in war” which “is fixed in the concept of totality which dominates Western philosophy” [Levinas in Totality and Infinity, p.21] (p.82,83)

If the messianic eschatology from which Levinas draws inspiration seeks neither to assimilate itself into what is called a philosophical truism, nor even to “complete” [Levinas in TI] philosophical truisms, nevertheless it is developed in its discourse neither as a theology, nor as a Jewish mysticism (it can even be understood as the trial of theology and mysticism)…. It seeks to be understood from within a recourse to experience itself… the passage and departure toward the other… Truthfully, messianic eschatology is never mentioned literally: it is but a question of designating a space or a hollow iwthin naked experience where this eschatology can be understood and where it must resonate. This hollow space is not an opening among others. It is opening itself, the opening of opening. (p.83)

It is this space of interrogation that we have chosen for a very partial reading of Levinas’s work. Of course it is not our intention to explore the space, even in the name of a timid beginning. Faintly and from afar, we will attempt to point it out.

And if we must have faith in [Levinas] who stands most accused in the trial conducted by [his Totality and Infinity], the result is nothing without its becoming, which then would be no more than pure disorder. We will not choose between the opening and the totality. Therefore we will be incoherent, but without systematically resigning ourselves to incoherence. The possibility of the impossible system will be on the horizon to protect us from empiricism. Without reflecting here upon the philosophy of hesitation, let us note between parentheses that by simply articulating it we have already come close to Levinas’ own problematic. (p.84)

My response: Western language and thought, we can’t live with it, we can’t live without it.

Chapter 4, Violence and Metaphysics, an Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas

This essay compares, contrasts, and I believe tries to Derridistically and characteristically integrate, for lack of a better word in my rushed state, Jewish metaphysical and Greek philosophical relationships to the Other.

From Wikipedia,

Emmanuel Lévinas derives the primacy of his ethics from the experience of the encounter with the Other. For Lévinas, the irreducible relation, the epiphany, of the face-to-face, the encounter with another, is a privileged phenomenon in which the other person’s proximity and distance are both strongly felt. “The Other precisely reveals himself in his alterity not in a shock negating the I, but as the primordial phenomenon of gentleness.”^[2]. At the same time, the revelation of the face makes a demand, this demand is before one can express, or know one’s freedom, to affirm or deny. One instantly recognizes the transcendence and heteronomy of the Other. Even murder fails as an attempt to take hold of this otherness.

In Lévinas’ later thought following “Totality and Infinity”, he argued that our responsibility for-the-other was already rooted within our subjective constitution. It should be noted that the first line of the preface of this book is “everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality.”^[3] This can be seen most clearly in his later account of recurrence (chapter 4 in “Otherwise Than Being”), where Lévinas maintained that subjectivity was formed in and through our subjected-ness to the other. In this way, his effort was not to move away from traditional attempts to locate the other within subjectivity (this he agrees with), so much as his view was that subjectivity was primordially ethical and not theoretical. That is to say, our responsibility for-the-other was not a derivative feature of our subjectivity; instead, obligation founds our subjective being-in-the-world by giving it a meaningful direction and orientation. [bold mine] Lévinas’ thesis “ethics is first philosophy”, then, means that the traditional philosophical pursuit of knowledge is but a secondary feature of a more basic ethical duty to-the-other.

 The elderly Lévinas was a distinguished French public intellectual, whose books reportedly sold well. He had a major impact on the young Jacques Derrida, a fellow French Jew whose seminal Writing and Difference contains an essay, “Violence and Metaphysics,” on Lévinas. Derrida also delivered a eulogy at Lévinas’ funeral, later published as Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas, an appreciation and exploration of Levinas’s moral philosophy. Here, Derrida followed Bracha L. Ettinger’s interpretation of Lévinas’ notion of femininity and transformed his own earlier reading of this subject accordingly.

I already feel myself beginning to relax with Levinas’ explanation of encountering the other and emphasizing duty and responsibility, even though it feels a little like pressure in relationship, which I’m trying to back off of right now. The philosophical approach sometimes seems clinical and cold, and this feels warmer, more intuitive, and human. I’ve read the first 8 pages of the essay so far and since he’s now adding a Jewish “experiential” emphasis to traditional Greek philosophy, even though it feels more natural, I’m a bit overwhelmed. The last Chapter went faster because he was more repetitive (I sort of rushed through the sand part and Jewish word-based tradition) and I got falsely confident that I’d found the key to understanding him the first go-round. But now it’s back to the tough slough.

I didn’t realize there was such a serious study of the Other in philosophy.

Our son, who’s thinking about eventually going to seminary, got his application to St. Thomas More today, and on their entrance exam they ask a lot of questions about essence and  accidents, which sounds close to noumenon and phenomen to me, but we’ll have to look it up. I’m just glad I’m sort of getting a background into what he’ll be studying and can maybe help point out the western differences if he ends up going to a Catholic College.

My interpretation of what Derrida means, which I’m not advocating wholecloth, in “Edmond Jabes and the Question of the Book” (pgs 64-78):

The pause between, the silence, the circle

the distance, the void, the fissure

into which we must fall headfirst like Alice

but without the sides of the hole

The hole must disappear into nothingness to find the truth of non-reality

I must lose myself, God, and you to find the truth of nothing

Then I may speak, but it would be better to write

To make gaps between letters that signify nothing

that keep the question alive by silencing the answers

Shh, don’t talk, only write about nothing

the paper must not be left blank!

There are thousands of paths to nowhere on the page

You must choose the one which leads to the most impenetrable question

Penetrate the paper to find that you can’t know

Yet the paper is white, not black

We must put the black marks on the white paper to make the spaces of white visible, or else we’ll be lost

But we aren’t really lost, as our writing will prove

I exist, you exist, God exists, it’s just that we can’t know ourselves or each other

So we write to prove that we exist in ignorance

Dancing words our grounding root.