Agape and Hesed-Ahava. David L. Goicoechea

the divine madness of Plato’s sublimated eros.

      II,1.6 And an Infinity beyond Descartes’ Infinite

      Levinas treats Plato and Descartes together as he shows how

      they each in different ways had a transcendent infinity

      in their metaphysics and this was felt in Plato’s Phaedrus.

      On page 49 Levinas writes:

      Against a thought that proceeds from him

      who “has his own head to himself,”

      he affirms the value of the delirium

      that comes from God, “winged thought.”

      This enthusiasm and divine madness is thought in its highest

      sense and is a kind of ecstatic possession by the divine Other.

      Plato discovered something akin to Levinas’s infinity that calls

      me and teaches me of the other when I behold the face of the other.

      Levinas shows how Plato and Descartes are not thinking of

      an object but are in touch with the transcendent, the other.

      However, the transcendence that is the point of Levinas’s book

      does not empower the I by sublimating the power of vulgar passion

      to become the energy of noble passion and its new creativity.

      Rather, the face of the other, as Levinas writes on page 50,

       lets the desire proper to the gaze

      turn into a generosity incapable

      of approaching the other with empty hands.

      This has to do with the Jewish loves of hesed and ahava

      which are called to care for widows, orphans, and aliens and

      which will even let the Jewish people become a suffering servant.

      As Descartes considered what it was that let him be certain

      when he was able to say, “I think, therefore, I am,” he saw

      that his criterion had to be an idea of perfection within his mind

      that only a perfect being could cause.

      That standard that let him know when an idea was certain

      or not was the idea of the infinite or the perfect beyond limits.

      But again this is not the infinite transcendence of the needy other.

      II,1.7 And a Face beyond Heidegger’s Ontology

      Levinas sees his ethics as totally opposed by Heidegger’s ontology.

      On page 46 Levinas writes:

      A philosophy of power, ontology is,

      as first philosophy which does not

      Call into question the same,

      a philosophy of injustice.

      Aristotle really emphasized an ethics of self-realization and did

      not emphasize my self-sacrifice to love and serve the needy other.

      Heidegger is like that with his ontological ethics of authenticity.

      I can be authentic if my life is a connected whole throughout my time.

      If I see that every decision makes me guilty because in choosing

      for something I must choose against something else then I can go back

      to my first decision and live it in my guilt, just as I can see

      that anxiety is being threatened by the indefinite so that if I

      anticipate my death in anxiety my ecstatic time can be authentic.

      With anticipatory resoluteness as a being-unto-guilt and a

      being-unto-death I can realize myself as an authentic Dasein.

      Levinas sees this ontology as a first ethic as being a philosophy

      of power in which I empower myself by integrating my life.

      But this only builds up the ego and does not call it into question

      as does the look of the other for Levinas. And consequently Levinas

      sees the whole project of Being and Time as a philosophy of injustice.

      Heidegger’s philosophy is still part of modernity in standing alone

      before Being as the powerful, authentic individual looking

      down on the inauthentic.

      In an article by William Richardson in Adriaan Peperzak’s book

      Ethics as First Philosophy (p. 123) we get a good picture of how

      Levinas thought of Heidegger as even working with the Nazis.

      Richardson quotes Levinas:

      In 1943, my parents were in one concentration camp

      and I was in another.

      He implied that Heidegger had something to do with that injustice.

      II,1.8 And a Responsibility Beyond Kierkegaard’s Subjectivity

      Levinas mentions Kierkegaard only twice in Totality and Infinity.

      On page 40 he writes:

       It is not I who resist the system

      as Kierkegaard thought; it is the other.

      On page 305 he writes:

      The I is conserved then in goodness

      without its resistance to system

      manifesting itself as the egoist cry

      of the subjectivity still concerned for

      happiness or salvation, as in Kierkegaard.

      In Proper Names Levinas explains this more fully with two

      articles on Kierkegaard and on page 76 he writes:

       [W]hat disturbs me in Kierkegaard

      may be reduced to two points: . . .

      he bequeathed to the history of philosophy

      an exhibitionist, immodest subjectivity . . .

      The second point. It is Kierkegaard’s violence

      that shocks me . . . That harshness

      of Kierkegaard emerges at the exact moment

      when he “transcends ethics.”

      When Kierkegaard leaps from the ethical stage on life’s way to the

      religious stage of absolutely relating to the absolute Levinas points

      out the violence that is done by paying attention totally to God and

      not being concerned with other human beings in our world here.

      As Kierkegaard leaps into the religious he leaves behind the ethical,

      but then for Kierkegaard there is the second movement of the leap

      by which the knight of faith in Fear and Trembling gets Isaac back

      a second time and returns to the ethical and loves the neighbor.

      Levinas seems to take literally with nothing further in it that

      “unless you hate your father, mother, wife, child and even

      yourself, you cannot be my disciple.” So Kierkegaard is violent.

      II,1.9 And beyond Nietzsche’s Philosophizing with a Hammer

      Levinas