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)