3.3 The Relation as a Condition of Revelation
3.3.5 Knowledge
In Western society, knowledge is a mode of liberty, the liberty to think for oneself and the liberty to hold one’s own set of beliefs, determining what sufficient evidence is required for
114 Bernasconi, “Styles of Eschatology,” 3.
115 Ibid.
116 Levinas, Totality, 21.
171
oneself.117 As a vicious circle, the knowledge of potency upholds liberty by dominating nature or, perhaps, by insisting that God appear in a way that we can understand God. Like atheism, knowledge is thus self-authorized by establishment of individual and tribal liberty. Knowledge is authorized by the power, the “I can-ness,” that it makes available.118 Whereas Levinas was critical of ontology based on its tripartite mediation – its use of a horizon or a third term to comprehend existents119 – I would suggest that since the time of Descartes and Locke, if not going back to medieval voluntarism, that economic structures have ascended over ontological ones. Heidegger’s attempt to retrieve Being can be read as an opposition to the technological forces of productive, calculative thought, which is to say, economic thought. Heidegger must make space for Being to appear amidst the ontic thrownness, some of which is technē.120 In other words, Heidegger retreats from modern economic liberalism to the ancient question of Being.
Smith, who aligns himself with the young Heidegger of pre-Being and Time, leverages
Heidegger to arrive at what Smith calls a reverse ontological participation. Rather than following reason upwards to God, God descends to where we are and appears in a way that we can
understand God. In other words, God empowers our liberty by establishing our knowledge. We are the universal center where divinity unfolds itself against the horizon of our experience –
117 Nathan Hatch provides a detailed account of the relation of authority, knowledge, and liberty in his book, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
118 Anecdotally this is evidenced by the popular acclaim of professional university studies and the skepticism that is levied towards the humanities in neoliberal early twenty-first century American culture. Parents who are paying for their children’s college educations want them to choose ‘practical’ majors, i.e., majors that allow their children to make money through professional skills.
119 See Peperzak, Other, 138.
120 “Heidegger’s thought of Being is a very important version of ontology. Indeed, according to him, Dasein understands phenomena in the light of Being and in the space opened up by it. The horizon of Being has taken over the mediating function of the classical concept or idea” (Peperzak, Other, 138).
172
experience, which always requires mediation.121 We can now have theological interpretations.
We can now indicate God by virtue of analogy; by virtue of our own understanding, which God liberally empowers. It is as if God came from the ego, as if theology were anthropology.
Levinas uses metaphors of vision, light, or illumination to speak of the intelligibility of ontological comprehension.122 Smith does not use these metaphors, despite his frequent reliance on Augustine, but he acknowledges that he stands squarely in Husserlian phenomenology with its Kantian origins in the transcendental unity of apperception.123 It is tempting to speculate on the similarities between a Platonic epistemology of recollection and Kant’s transcendental deduction, in which knowledge becomes possible through the organizing and unifying labors of the self. Levinas’s critique is penetrating:
This primacy of the same was Socrates’s teaching: to receive nothing of the Other but what is in me, as though from all eternity I was in possession of what comes to me from the outside—to receive nothing or to be free. Freedom does not resemble the capricious spontaneity of free will; its ultimate meaning lies in this permanence in the same, which is reason. Cognition is the deployment of this identity; it is freedom. That reason, in the last analysis, would be the manifestation of a freedom, neutralizing the other and
encompassing him, can come as no surprise once it was laid down that sovereign reason knows only itself, that nothing other limits it. The neutralization of the other who becomes a theme or an object—appearing, that is, taking its place in the light—is precisely his reduction to the same.124
121 Smith wants to mediate experience through praxis rather than theoria (Speech, 78). I will argue that praxis no more escapes economic structures than theoria escapes ontological ones. Smith also struggles to avoid a populist anti-intellectualism grounded on individual religious experience (Ibid., 113, fn. 116).
122 For example, “The light that permits encountering something other than the self, makes it encountered as if this thing came from the ego. The light, brightness, is intelligibility itself; making everything come from me . . .”
(Levinas, Time, 68).
123 “This book locates itself within the phenomenological tradition of Husserl, and operates on the basis of this assumption” (Smith, Speech, 13 fn. 8,). See Anastasia Kozyreva, “Synthetic Unity of Consciousness in the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl,” Phenomenological Studies, 2 (2018): 217-247.
124 Levinas, Totality, 43.
173
Knowledge is power, and the epistemological metaphors of vision, light, or illumination, metaphors of what knowledge makes available, these metaphors re-inscribe this epistemic and imperialistic power onto the Same.
Once again, what is at stake is the method of philosophy/theology and its starting point.
Knowledge as violent imperialistic power is inseparable from the prioritization of ontology over ethics. When God must show up in ways that the Same can understand, we have prioritized ontology. The Same is the singular horizon of meaning, the universal horizon of meaning, the permanence of meaning. This seems to be Levinas’s point when he speaks above of sovereign reason knowing only itself. Because it knows only itself, reason comes to dominate the Other.
Consequently, formally indicative concepts cannot convey knowledge. They can only become occasions. But occasions, trapped in the overall system of sovereign reason give way to analogy.
However, when we prioritize ethics over ontology, the epistemic relation with the Other takes on the structure of desire. The Same welcomes the Other in a way that does not lay claim or take possession of the Other. Welcoming the Other means to allow the Other to call me into question.125 In this way “ethics . . . accomplishes the critical essence of knowledge,”126 which is the surpassing of unicity.127 This critical essence of knowledge, surpassing unicity, is discourse, to which we now turn.
125 It would be interesting to investigate how Levinas’s ethical discourse connects with aspects of virtue epistemology.
126 Levinas, Totality, 43.
127 DeRoo claims that Levinas’s eschatology, what DeRoo generalizes as futurity, “is of a different order than knowledge” (DeRoo, Futurity, 74). What DeRoo means by a different order than knowledge is the order of ethics. It remains to be seen whether this can be the case. What would knowledge in the order of ethics entail? Regardless, it does seem that a different semantic order arises in Levinas’s eschatology, and perhaps a different mode or model of knowledge.
174