124 CHAPTER 3
Towards a Participatory Eschatological Model: Revelation in Emmanuel Levinas
There is no philosophy that is not to some extent also theology.1
…could we not envision something of an ‘ethical’ concept – a concept of the concept which does justice to the incommensurable?2
“Then the Lord spoke to you . . . You heard the sound of words but saw no form; there was only a voice.”3
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arises, here, as the third term “reduces the other to the same” resulting in the promotion of the freedom of the Same.6 That is the pathway from conceptual to political violence.
We should pause here to inquire about the application of Levinas’s critique to Smith’s logic of incarnation. If Smith’s ‘concept’ is only an incomplete sign, pointing beyond itself – iconically – toward what lies beyond, as a Kierkegaardian invitation to relation, then it is hard to identify an ontological comprehension or conceptual reduction. The Same is not set free, but called or invited. However, when we consider der Anknüpfungspunkt, the semiological structure applied to the incarnation, and the reverse participatory ontology, then the freedom of the Same begins to shine through in Smith’s logic of incarnation. The Same is empowered and centered.
Nothing alienates the Same or calls the Same beyond its limited horizons. Instead, we find in Smith, a renunciation of exteriority through Smith’s insistence on the completion of finitude.
Nothing else is needed. No exteriority is required or permitted. Eschatology has been fully realized.
These are the axes on which Levinas’s work in TI revolves: freedom (totality) and eschatology (infinity). TI is a sustained critique of the spontaneous freedom of the Same, which in Levinas’s view structures all of Western philosophy as an egolatry. At the same time, TI clothes eschatology in the garments of metaphysical desire and exteriority. Within these and similar terms, eschatology becomes the possibility and the hope of the true peace that overcomes violence in all of its conceptual, political, and historical modes. Levinas’s eschatology is a time- out-of-time. It does not emerge as a linear, sequential progression into the future, which could be understood as a teleology. It emerges as unexpected surprise, a time that never becomes present.
It is the radical exteriority of eschatology that places it outside of ontology and outside of history
6 Ibid., 42.
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that gives rise to the hope of peace. It is also for these reasons that it also gives rise to the hope of a new metaphysical model beyond hierarchical ontologies and liberal economies. Can we find, in Levinas, the structures of a third model, one that might allow us to move forward beyond
modernity without having to retreat backwards into Hellenism? Is that not the holy grail of so much of twentieth-century thought? Let us pre-emptively call this potential third model a participatory eschatology.7
Tracing the surprising appearance of a third metaphysical model is already an important undertaking for a chapter, but the focus of the current project is revelation. What are the
implications for revelation in such a model? What conditions are required and provided by our model that generate the possibility of revelation within that model? Revelation emerges through the structures of what Levinas calls, discourse, which itself is made possible through the
eschatological relation between the Same and the Other. I suggest that an eschatological participation will displace the liberal economic structure of the modern model, which itself displaced the hierarchical structure of the classical model. Whereas the classical model began with metaphysical questions and the modern model began with epistemological questions, the eschatological model begins with ethical questions. Peperzak states that “the thesis defended by Levinas says that ‘truth’ is not possible unless preceded and supported by ‘justice.’”8 Justice, or
7 Throughout the project, I have tacitly recognized that all models are just that, models. They represent true reality in entirely incomplete ways. Any embrace of a model is, therefore, an embrace of error. Whereas we can evaluate scientific models through empirical observation, there seems to be no way to evaluate models of reality. It is only through these models of reality that any standard or condition of justification or reasonableness would emerge.
Deductive science was reasonable in a hierarchical model of transcendence. Inductive science is reasonable in a model of economic liberty. What will count as reasonable in a model of eschatological participation? I suggest it will be communion – the ability to fully welcome and include not just all human others, but all others. It will be an ecological science. Sustainability will be the criteria of rationality.
8 More fully: “If ‘truth’ stands for a thought that moves within the parameters of the Same, ‘justice’ summarizes here the adequate response to the revelation of the transcendent Other. The thesis defended by Levinas says that
‘truth’ is not possible unless preceded and supported by ‘justice.’ The metaphysical relation is the first ‘condition of the possibility’ of truth”” (Peperzak, Other, 145).
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ethics, becomes the condition for truth, or knowledge. Here we might recall that Socrates taught knowledge connects us with the Good.9 What if, instead, it is the Good that connects us with knowledge? Importantly, to affirm the priority or the primitivity of ethics is not to deny metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, or the other branches of philosophy. Rather, it is to recognize the derivative or qualified nature of these branches. Being becomes relational or intersubjective as ethical being. All of philosophy is qualified ethically. Rationality itself is ethical in nature and essence. Therefore, when Levinas says that ethics if first philosophy, he is arguably trying to establish a new starting point for all of Western thought. It is not wrong to suggest that he is giving us a new (non-ontological) metaphysics. What, then, are the conditions of the possibility of revelation?
In this new metaphysics, whose foundation is ethics, the relation of the Same to the Other becomes the ultimate horizon of meaning. Levinas reintroduces transcendence through this relation. However, transcendence is no longer realizable through a disciplined use of reason as it was for Plato and Aristotle. It is realized through an infinite ethical obligation, which comes to the Same as from ‘on high.’ Through the face of the Other, the Same experiences the relation to the Other as a movement of transcendence.10 It is a transcendence of the totality of the Same, the horizons of the Same, and, perhaps, the economically conditioning structures of history itself.
The conditioning structures of history – Dasein’s thrownness, if you will – cannot become an alibi that excuses us from responsibility. Through the eschatological demand, the demand from the exteriority of history, history becomes the possibility of responsibility.
9 Plato, Protagoras, Stanley Lombardo, trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992): 352c.
10 Levinas, Totality, 132.
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What keeps Levinas’s model from reverting to an economic model of dominating liberty is the asymmetrical height of the Other, which renders the relation to the Other unequal. Because of this asymmetry, the ethical relation becomes irreversible. The Same cannot command the Other, cannot render the Other responsible or guilty. The Same cannot judge the Other. It is only I, the Same, who can be obligated, responsible, and guilty. I find myself always already obligated by the Other. The asymmetrical relation prevents the movement that we found in Locke, who used inalienable human rights in order to strip the inalienable rights of the Other through the Other’s presumed failure to be productive with the resources given to them, thereby generating waste, which alone turned out to be unforgivable.11 Levinas’s model forbids the colonization, oppression, or exploitation of the Other, which is truly made thinkable only in the liberal economic model. However, Levinas’s model does not revert back to the reciprocal obligations and ‘placements’ that we found in the classical models. In Plato’s Republic, justice and harmony arise from fulfilling the obligations of one’s place or location in society and doing so with aretē.
One’s obligations stemmed from one’s place, and those obligations were largely immutable. In Levinas, the obligation comes from beyond, infinity, or, in other words, the eschaton. There are no reciprocal obligations. There is only my obligation. By laying claim to history, it can never be set aside for the purposes of politics or war.