3.2 Eschatology as a Condition of Revelation
3.2.4 Ethics and Freedom
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(parousia) of the Other that comes to its own aid requires a penetration of the totality of the Same, invading the Same’s atheism that had cut it off from participation in being.
Ethical or eschatological language, in contrast to economic language, understands truth as a function of speech. In speech the Other who remains absolutely Other, with no metaphysical point of contact to the Same, becomes proximate (parousia) in its command.56 Truth, then, is “a modality of the relation between the Same and the Other.”57 Truth is the faithfulness of that relation, a relation born both of distance and paradoxical, disruptive presence. If truth were a function of content, then truth would be representational fidelity. It would faithfully represent what is far off or not present. When truth is an ethical function, it is faithfulness to the Other who is present in its demand. Presence is ethical proximity, the proximity of the obligation, which is the call of holiness. And language becomes the formal ground of truth, as the Other comes to its own assistance in discourse through the ethical obligation that is revealed in discourse.58
Therefore, language, and by extension knowledge and truth, originates in the face-to-face relation. They are intersubjective and ethical, in this regard. Their surprising and infinite nature implies their eschatological origins.
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thought that Levinas opposes.59 On the other hand, when the Other calls me to goodness, the Other establishes my freedom in quite a different formal manner. Power corrupts any mode of freedom, rendering it purely as liberty. Liberty places the Same into a dialectically competitive and imperialistic relationship with the Other. It is when the totality of the Same is called into question by the Other that the Same finds the basis of its freedom in its responsibility, or what we might consider its fidelity. For Levinas, freedom, liberty, and truth are constitutionally related.
It is important, then, that the Other not oppose me with another power like my own power, another liberty. The Other can have no point of contact with the Same, including that of power or rights or subjectivity. If it had such a point of contact, it would become another element or institution: “a country, a realm, a church.”60 These are things that demand preservation in Being, just as I do. For the Other to oppose me with a power like my own would be to oppose force with violence, liberty with rights. Instead, the Other opposes the Same with a “weakness that forbids me to continue my project of universal domination.”61 That is to say, the Other opposes my power with the ethical demand, “Do not kill me.” This demand, weak, easily brushed aside in my lust for violence yet formally “puts the spontaneous freedom within us into question.”62 The question and the demand do not come from another subjectivity, but from
59 “The ethical relation, opposed to first philosophy, which identifies freedom and power, is not opposed to truth, it goes towards being in its absolute exteriority and accomplishes the same intention which animates the march to truth.” « Le rapport éthique, oppose a la philosophie première de l’identification de la liberté et du pouvoir, n’est pas contre la vérité, il va vers l’être dans son extériorité absolue et accomplit l’intention même qui anime la marche à la vérité. » Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et Infini : Essai sur l’Extériorité (Paris : Livre de Poche, 1990) : 39.
60 Peperzak, Other, 64.
61 Ibid.
62 Levinas, Totality, 51.
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beyond that Other, from the infinite that encounters me in the face of the Other. The question breaks into my self-contained atheism and calls me to the truth of responsibility.
Truth does not begin with representation, as if Being were the highest justification, but with responsibility. This is why the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of power is unsustainable.
It betrays its responsibility and renders violence where peace should reign. Violence occurs when we use Being as our standard of epistemic justification rather than goodness. Goodness does not come as the empowerment of the Same, but as the demand upon the Same. The Same cannot choose goodness out of its liberty, for doing so would subordinate the Good and the Other to the Same. The Same can but welcome the Other in faithfulness to its obligation. In this sense, the other founds my freedom from Being, from atheism, from the totality of the Same, from my lust for domination – the Other calls me to freedom by calling me to responsibility.
The call to freedom begins with infinity, which judges my liberty as “arbitrary, guilty, and timid.”63 My liberty, established arbitrarily in its quest for persistence rather than called to goodness, had limited the Same to itself. It had trapped the Same in its terrestrial colonialism. It had rendered the Same contingent in its quest for self-justification. The pursuit of self-
justification cannot but end in skepticism and nihilism. But in judging my liberty as guilty, the infinite “introduces me to what was not in me,” to what has come from outside.64 And in providing a non-arbitrary justification in the call to responsibility, Levinas says that a new rationality is born. In the tradition of Levinas, I will call it the rationality of holiness.
The eschatological flavor of Levinas’s words and phrases is bold. The call to
responsibility to the Other comes from beyond the Same or the Other. It breaks into the world,
63 Ibid., 203.
64 Ibid., 204.
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structured economically through language and power, with vulnerability and nakedness. It
opposes power with weakness, willing to die in the hopes that others might find freedom and true life. Prophetic, Pauline, and messianic flavors linger in the passing of these words.
For Augustine, the creation of humanity occurs at the beginning of time with sovereign, all-powerful liberty – God’s free act freely creates the free human being, who is first a libero arbitrio. For John Duns Scotus, only a completely unlimited being can be a perfectly free being.
Scotus rejects Aquinas’s use of exemplars because he sees them as a limitation of the divine freedom.65 Nature, including the intellect, lacks the continency of creative liberty, but humanity possesses it in its free will. In Christian theology, liberty stands at the beginning as the
beginning. Liberty motivates and directs even the divine will. It is the Good even for God.
Prophetically, even messianically, Levinas suggests that the call to responsibility is the call to a freedom that “is not its own beginning. Its redemption lies in its association to others. . . . The word of the Other is the origin of truth.”66 Levinas’s freedom does not stand at the beginning directing the labor of God and pitting humanity against nature from the outset. This ethical, eschatological freedom instead calls the Same out of itself into relation to the Other, into holiness.